Social welfare program of Islamic political party : a case study of Bangladesh Jama'at-e-Islami

Engagement in the provision of support for people in need is often motivated by religious ideology. Doctrinally, helping others is one of the general characteristics of most faith-traditions; major monotheistic religions such as Christianity and Judaism, and non-monotheistic ones such as Buddhism and Hinduism convey principles and teachings that exhort their believers to perform various kinds of social services. Islam, also, has such a history of dealing with humanitarian issues through providing assistance to the underprivileged classes of society; ordaining Zakat (lit. alms giving) as one of the five pillars of Islam or encouraging Waqf (public charity) are major examples of this. Currently, social welfare provision in most developed countries is organized predominantly by their governments, yet the intellectual influence of religion through biblical references in the historical development of this institution is obvious. This religious influence is more prominent and prevailing in underdeveloped countries, where the state is not capable of providing comprehensive social welfare for its citizens. A very interesting perspective in this discourse was introduced when social welfare provision was adopted as an organizational effort, concurrent with the political trend of contemporary Islamic revivalism in the twentieth century. This thesis discusses social welfare organization by an Islamic political party in Bangladesh, namely, Bangladesh Jama’at-e-Islami. The dynamics of the social welfare program are not necessarily identical among the multitude of contemporary Islamic political movements arising in both Muslim and non-Muslim societies. However, the existence of this program, and, more importantly, its recent effectiveness in terms of social achievement and gaining popularity, are an undeniable reality. The effective measures of social welfare provision undertaken by the religion-based political parties are now manifested in some major Muslim countries, such as in the cases of AKP (Justice and Welfare Party; Turkish: Adaletve Kalkinma Partisi) in Turkey, Hamas (Islamic Resistance Movement; Arabic: Ḥarakah al-Muqawamah al-Islamiyyah) in Palestine, Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and the Middle East, and Hizbullah (Arabic: lit. Party of God) in Lebanon. The scholars who have studied these movements generally acknowledge this aspect of their makeup in their analyses