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بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم

 News Right Now: Drowning in Despair

Welcome to this episode, ‘Drowning in Despair’

As the monsoon season sets in, three days of torrential downpours have devastated the city of Karachi, causing widespread flooding and leaving at least 90 dead. The record 58 cm of rainfall submerged streets, damaging thousands of homes and causing storm drains and sewers to overflow. Power outages hit many parts of the overcrowded city and suburbs, and telecommunications were down for hours at a time in places. Decades of mismanagement has left much of Karachi’s infrastructure weak and vulnerable in the face of climatic and humanitarian crises - with years of corruption and waning leadership confounding the city’s problems.

The federal-state structure institutionalizes factions within society, dividing it into smaller politicised communities at provincial and city levels. It then grants these fiercely competitive factions access to an elective government in a three-tiered structure, at federal, provincial and city level. These opposing tiers cause destructive power struggles, and the affairs of the people are woefully neglected. Additionally, in the name of accountability, both the parliamentary and presidential bodies divide power across government and within ministries, institutions and government tiers, resulting in shared ruling.

This division of power causes both chaos in government and a lack of accountability, as is evident in the recent crisis in Karachi, where every state official at the federal, provincial and city-level passed the buck of responsibility onto others, with no-one being held accountable for the mess that Karachi finds itself in today. And now facing mounting public fury, the Imran-Bajwa regime has announced that they are working on the ‘Karachi Transformation Plan’, a pragmatic and reactionary attempt to fast track change, that will most likely yield only superficial progress.

Beyond the heartless neglect of this self-serving system, the day to day difficulties of the people of Karachi continue with no end in sight. Unemployment reached a high of 5.7% last year and the Corona pandemic has hit the informal economy workers, such as cleaners and street vendors even harder. Adequate health care and emergency interventions are not available to millions, and the recent hikes in wheat and sugar prices have left vast swathes of the cities population in food poverty.

In contrast to Democracy, the ruling system of the Khilafah mandates that the Khaleefah himself is directly responsible for the actions of the various governors called ‘walis’ in the provinces and ‘aamils’ in the cities. The Khaleefah has full authority to replace the incompetent wali or aamil with capable ones upon the complaint of the people. The Khilafah views the society as one whole, under a centralized structure led by the Khaleefah and although the ruling authority is centralized in the Khilafah, the executive administration is decentralized to ensure speedy response in any crisis.
The Khilafah allocates state resources to the provinces and cities, not on the basis of their representation in the state, but according to the Shariah rulings and the need of that particular community.

At all levels of governance, the representatives are bound to rule by the Quran and Sunnah and the principles derived from them that underpin Islamic political theory... and neither the Council of the Ummah, nor the councils in the provinces are permitted to make laws - they must account the rulers on the basis of Islam. This just and equitable rule will naturally transform communities by enabling progress at every level of society. Citizens free from the pressure of undue struggle to fulfil their families’ needs will thrive in education, academia and entrepreneurship, uplifting the whole society and fulfilling its collective potential.

Indeed it was the mighty Islamic civilization which established the flourishing cities of Samarkand, Bukhara, Grenada, Baghdad, Cairo, Damascus and Istanbul as the shining beacons of prosperity and tranquil urban life for the world for centuries. And InshaaAllah, it will be the Khilafah (Caliphate) on the Method of Prophethood again that will revive Muslim cities like Karachi, Lahore, Kabul, Tehran, Srinagar, Dhaka, Jakarta and Tunis, so that they become beacons for the world today.

Jazak Allahu Khayran for Joining us

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