Islamic Perspectives on Social Work Practice

Abstract

Social work practice in most Islamic and developing countries hasfollowed the western model in the belief that professional practice is universal.After fifty years of social work practice in these countries, however,we find that this model has largely failed due to its exclusion of religiousvalues and spiritual aspects. During the last decade, westem professionalsrealized that the inefficacy of social work practice was due toits avoidance of spiritual and religious aspects in theory and methodology.The conceptional scientific method based on scientific materialismhas not provided a comprehensive study of humanity and society, for itsdependence on the senses as the sole source of knowledge meant thatrevelation-derived knowledge was seen as unimportant. Scientific methodologymust be reviewed and reoriented so that it depends on revelationand sense experience as sources of knowledge. As such, the Islamic reorientationof both the social sciences and professions will be necessaryduring the process of establishing models for sciences based on scientificmethodology with regard to revelation as a source of knowledge.The research problem deals with how to reorient social work practicefrom an Islamic viewpoint. To achieve this, the Islamic views on fivemain aspects must be considered: hum& nature; divine laws governingindividual behavior and social organization; causes of individual and socialproblems; social welfare systems; and practice theory.The Islamization of knowledge methodology of Isdil a1 FSrCiqiwas used. It has three main elements: to a) review modem sciences, analyzetheir background, and evaluate their strengths and weaknesses fromthe Islamic view; b) undetstand and study scholarly contributions basedon Muslim scholars’ undemtanding of the Qur’an and Sunnah and c) jointhe Islamic view and modem science outputs into one integrated system.The methodology followed was: a) a verse-by-verse review of theQur’an to identify key elements related to the research questions. Next,the interpretation of selected verses was located in authoritative tafsirtexts; b) al BukhGri’s hadith compilation was reviewed in the same fashion.Explanations of selected hadiths were also sought in Ibn Hajar; c)classical and modem Islamic scholarly writings were reviewed to identifyrelevant contributions to the research d) a review of modem socialscience literabm was made for each research question. This was followedby a critical evaluation of modem theories and concepts from the Islamicview (generated in the previous phase of the study); e) based on theevaluation’s results, an attempt was made to integrate what was worthwhilein modem scholarship with the broader parameters of the Islamic ...