The Concept of Prophetic Government in Sunan Abi Dawud

DOI

10.2991/assehr.k.201113.045How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Islamic politics, prophetic leadership, prophetic governance

Abstract

This paper comes from the assumption that Islam is not only a religion, but also a political system that reflects political theories and statehood. This political system was established by the prophet Muhammad, and had become a source of reference among the 7th century Medina society. Using a historical approach, this paper tries to explore traces of statesmanship and political teachings of the prophet from the historical documents compiled by Imam Abu Dawud in his “Sunan Abi Dawud”, one of the six canonical compilations of hadith (prophetic traditions), that are regarded as the major references in hadith studies among Muslims (or called, Kutubussittah). This research finds out that there is a concept of prophetic politics which was formulated by the prophet Muhammad. This refers to an art of how to lead people and manage government’s affairs in a wise and “morally-laden way”, mainly aimed at achieving victory and happiness both in the world and the hereafter. At the practical level, this paper also tries to formulate a concept of prophetic governance, based on the political practices of the prophet Muhammad. This includes government’s authority to appoint ministers (al-wazir) and advisers (bithanah), and to hire employees with decent payment. Government’s employees are bound by an employee’s code of ethics created by government. These ethical codes of work consist of professionalism, dedication to work, commitment to avoid corruption, willingness to resign when incapable of delivering good performance, abstention from consuming state’s money beyond salary, and refusing to accept gratuities (gifts) related to work but return them to the government.

Copyright

© 2020, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Kamran As’ad Irsyady
AU  - Muhammad Nur
AU  - Mufliha Wijayanti
PY  - 2020
DA  - 2020/11/13
TI  - The Concept of Prophetic Government in Sunan Abi Dawud
BT  - Proceedings of the 1st Raden Intan International Conference on Muslim Societies and Social Sciences (RIICMuSSS 2019)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 238
EP  - 243
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/assehr.k.201113.045
DO  - 10.2991/assehr.k.201113.045
ID  - Irsyady2020
ER  -