Employment-Oriented Activities

Apart from direct aid, representatives of many voluntary associations also underline their efforts to enable their clients to become economically independent. In part, these efforts are motivated by the ethical conviction that self-reliance and the economic empowerment of the needy is preferable to allowing them to remain in a state of dependency. This conviction is often supported by (and rationalized through) Islamic beliefs regarding human dignity. Murad al-Adeileh of the ICCS Social Care Council (the supervisory body of all ICCS centers for orphans and poor in the Kingdom) argues, for instance, that remaining a passive recipient of aid is, in the long run, bad for one's dignity. Those who are able to rely upon themselves to make a living must be encouraged to do so. He considers the hadith in which the Prophet Muhammad states that whoever meets a hungry person asking for help should give him an axe to earn his own bread, rather than a piece of bread to eat, an important religious basis for the idea of economic empowerment and self-reliance. Many members of other Islamic voluntary associations agree. ¹ On another level, working for economic empowerment is also motivated by the associations’ desire to decrease the number of clients dependent on their financial and in kind aid, and thereby to save their own resources. ²