Islam and Humanitarianism: The Trajectory of Muhammadiyah on Prophetic Humanitarianism
Muhammad Zahrul Anam
Universitas MuhammadiyahYogyakarta, Indonesia
Abstract
More Islamic movements rising in the former Western-colonialized Muslim countries are mostly political, from which the number of Muslim revivalists such as Abul Ala al-Maududi, Sayyid Qutb, and Hasan al-Banna called for the establishment of an Islamic-based political institution against Western political system, than cultural means. By contrast, other revivalists like Muhammad Abduh and Muhammad Rasyid Ridla had culturally preferred to enhance quality of Muslims to be able to compete with their Western counterparts through knowledge acquisition. In addition to this, Muhammadiyah, to which the founder was inspired by cultural strategy to revive Muslims, believes that knowledge acquisition would be inadequate without addressing freedom from want, which is knownas one of four freedoms insisted by the US President, Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1941.Therefore, Muhammadiyah has focused on not only education by developing schools and universities, but also human rights by providing health services, orphanage houses, and lately humanitarian assistance. This article attempts to explore the reasoning of Muhammadiyah related to humanitarianism and how Muhammadiyah practise it into particular activities.The paper looks at the interpretation of Islamic teaching framed by Muhammadiyah on humanitarianism and the experiences of how the organisation has decided to evolve prophetic humanitarianism.
Keywords: Muhammadiyah, Prophetic Humanitarianism, Islamic-Based Organization
Topic: International Symposium on Social Sciences, Humanities, Education, and Religious Studies