Do you think it is the teacher who is to blame if funding in schools is not sufficient to give your child a decent education? Do you think it is the fault of the ambulance service if they don’t get to your house quickly in an emergency? Do you feel that the thousands of people who are homeless and hungry on the streets choose to live the way they do? If the answer to these questions is no, who do you think is to blame?
In the West, you are living in a society which governs your affairs by so-called ‘Parliamentary Democracy’ where laws are made up by members of parliament. Every few years you have the opportunity to select who will represent your interests in the parliament. These people belong to one of several political parties, and the party with the most candidates assumes leadership of the country.
It is these people who decide how to tax your wages, select who is eligible for housing or not, and who are responsible for issues like those mentioned before.
However, this system is fraught with fundamental problems, all of which add difficulty to your functioning in it. Thus whether you are a Muslim or not, the way your affairs are governed is almost entirely independent of your concerns. Effectively, you have no choice in what laws you are subject to, and have little means of doing anything about them when they are enacted.
Some of these problems are :
- 1. The laws are subject to the whims and fancies of a handful of fallible human beings. Human beings are limited in knowledge, prone to error and subject to prejudice. Any system of government devised by them will reflect these problems. After all, if your next-door neighbour started telling you what you can and cannot do, would you listen to him? Even worse, what if he was racist or sexist?
- 2. Once a government is elected, there is no way you can remove it before its term has finished, regardless of how many mistakes it makes or how corrupted it becomes.
- 3. The individual MPs often act according to their own personal interests. Many leading MPs have been caught with their ‘fingers in the till’, or have admitted to adulterous affairs and other sexual malpractices. If their own wives can’t trust them, can you?
Bearing in mind these, do you have confidence that your affairs are being administered well? If you feel dissatisfied do you think that any complaints you have will be acted upon or even acknowledged? Probably not!