Ethic of Self-reliance
The poor, the deprived and those at the margin of existence have a moral right to society’s compassion, the tradition reminds frequently. But Muslim ethic discourages a culture of dependency since it undermines one’s dignity, preservation of which is emphatically urged in Muslim scripture. “Man shall have only that for which he labours”, says the Quran. That encouragement to self-help is reinforced in Prophetic traditions: “Man cannot exist without constant effort”. “The effort is from me, its fulfilment comes from God”. From the time of the Prophet, therefore, the greater emphasis of the charitable effort has been to help the needy to become self-reliant. It has been narrated, for instance, that the Prophet would rather that a mendicant was helped to equip himself for gathering and selling wood to earn sustenance. During his tenure as the last of the four rightly-guided caliphs, Hazrat Ali helped, for instance, to fund a self-help scheme, voluntarily proposed by a group of residents of an area, to improve its irrigation potential. He preferred that people should prosper, he explained, to their remaining economically weak.
Ismailimail 