Mounting socio-political challenges in Pakistan and their solutions in the light of Sirah: contextualization and contemporization.

Abstract

Political stability without any doubt plays a significant role for effective governance, economic growth and sustainable development keeping society integrated and maintaining the role of law. The stability of political system has direct effects on social life, the progress of nation and state building. Politics has been unfortunately about “who gets what, when and how”. Perhaps this is why, an ongoing political tug-of-war is pushing Pakistan towards not only economic disaster, with poverty, lawlessness, poor health infrastructure, unemployment, crime rates, and the devaluation of the rupee but almost all state organs related to collective life seemed to be dysfunctional or not working properly. The country is facing sustainability challenges including fragility syndrome in socio-politicoreligious spheres. In Islam, contrarily, the politics is a means to serve the humanity through divine guidelines primarily based on the concept of three foundations: Tawheed, Risalah, and Akhirah. To achieve this goal, the leadership practiced by the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) has always been a prototype of all nations. He successfully established free, dynamic, and assertive society anchoring with sacred foundations of four-dimensional realty; Islam, Iman, Ihsan and time. His leadership was the most comprehensive and dynamic. He was the paragon of virtue and spirituality. This paper aims to tracing the foundational principles, strategies, tools, skills, and techniques of political stability in the Sirah of Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) with focus on contextualizing and contemporizing. The prophetic way of facing the challenges and utilizing right strategic solutions in the best possible way such as assimilative nature of learning, transformative approach, modelling and directing behaviour, and motivating followers to a God-centric worldview, tackling opposition, situational analyses, problem solving and dissemination of awareness at grass root level can help the policy makers, officials and executives to formulate appropriate strategies to nurturing the accountability, good governance, honesty, transparency as well as eradicatiting all forms of corruption in order to come out of the present crisis and moving forward for sustainable development.