The Limitations of Man as a legislator
Islam is a way of life revealed from Allah (swt). Muslims, as humans, perform human actions. The solving of our problems are based on a divine text. The extraction of solutions from this text is not biased, nor prejudiced in any way. The one who performs this extraction, the mujtahid(scholar), does not pre-assign a problem as being solely ethical, economical or educational. Rather, he views the problem as being a human problem. A problem that is intertwined with all the complexities of human societal existence. In contrast to this is the Western way of life. Problems are not solved from a divine source. Human problems are solved for humans by humans. The human is limited in his knowledge, myopic in outlook and prone to self-preservation in judgements. It therefore follows that the system that he derives is riddled with disparity and contradiction.
Capital - the dominant influence in secular decision-making
When Europeans began to refer to man as the source of legislation, they discarded the shackles of Christianity. Thus secularism was born. Constitutions were framed, laws were passed and systems of ruling emerged. These novel systems placed wealth at their centre. Political edifices were always constructed within the amphitheatre of capital. Appropriately, these systems became known as Capitalist. This constant reference to ownership and wealth drew on a very basic instinct that all humans possess. That is, the desire to secure one's own interests. When left unbridled, this instinct leads to greed, power-lust and exploitation. Rasul-Allah (saw) said, ''If the son of Adam was given a valley full of gold he will always want a second. If he has two valleys full of gold he will always want a third.'' (Bukhari)
The reality was that these systems were merely knee-jerk responses to the whims and desires of a greedy few. In the words of US President Jimmy Carter,
''The reason for the Constitution was to empower people of property over common people. Indeed, our definition of self government and freedom have become linked, if not equated, to the interests of the corporation.''
The British Lord Palmerston stated:
We have no eternal friends or enemies, only our interests are eternal''
The theory of Capitalism is totally impracticable. William Beveridge's ideas on welfare and social security were an attempt to compensate for abundant deficiencies within the Capitalist system. Indeed, welfare was an after-thought, an add-on, in the historical development of the British system. Purists would consider Beveridge to be a heretic. Today, issues are always discussed with an economical slant. This is regardless of whether the essence or implications of these issues are moral, social or ethical. The overcrowding of prisons, the availability of beds in hospitals and the poor state of education are always debated in relation to finance and funding. In Britain, performance related pay was a culture introduced into many realms during the 18 years of Tory government. The green-grocer mentality prompted the government to superimpose the economics of buying and selling to many spheres. Performance related pay scales were introduced into the health and police services. The architects of this policy assumed that the performance of a nurse or a policeman can be quantified in the same way as a green-grocer. Can the number of patients that die under a nurse's care, or criminals that evade a police-man, ever be correlated with the number of melons sold in a week?