Verifying the claims of seekers
By: Mohmod Irfan Shah
In this world, everyone is not lucky enough to have privileges and be someone from a financially stable family. We either can work hard and make our living style better or do nothing and continue with what exists. God made us all, with different faces but the same mind. Yes, the intelligence level of no two brains is same and varies from person to person, but the hard and smart work makes a great difference. We can earn in a halaal way to make our lives better instead of begging or stealing. We can work hard today for a better tomorrow.
Those who fall into the category of ‘Have’s’ must not be blindfolded by the worldly affairs and should help the poor in their vicinity or neighborhood. We can help people by donating clothes, money, offering them work, or providing them with food and shelter. We can donate money to poor people so that they can live their life in a better way.
One often thinks that if we have entrepreneurs like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Bill Gates in the world, why don’t they donate a huge portion of their property among people and eradicate poverty?
Yes, definitely such personalities can eradicate poverty, but they don’t do it for several reasons. One reason among them is that if they do so, no one will work, and they will keep waiting for the donations, and this will, in turn, stop development and the competition in this world. But what is more important is the moral foundations and the religiosity that they are brought up with. It is essentially important that most of the contributions are made by people who believe that earthly life isn’t the only life and that there are more shades to life than just successes in business. Progress and prosperity doesn’t necessarily ensure peace of mind.
Begging or Begging scams?
People in our society have gotten used to asking for money, except those who genuinely need it; we see healthy people begging outside religious spots, on roads, around educational institutions, traffic signals, or coming directly to our home. We keep donating in Allah’s way, but we fail to reach people who actually deserve help.
Every next day we find donation requests on social media; not every request is genuine or verified. We blindly keep transferring money into their accounts with our good intentions to help them overcome their problem, and in a couple of days or in most cases within hours, the account gets a donation of lakhs of rupees. The donation requests vary from a person who doesn’t have a roof to live under or someone who has been abandoned by family to someone who doesn’t have enough amount of money to fight a deadly disease. If the said person is in need of 10lakh rupees s/he gets double or triple times more than that within no time.
But, have we ever left our homes to check upon our neighbour? Maybe there are people around in our neighbourhood who can’t even afford meals; we forget people who are differently-abled, we forget widows and orphans, as we keep donating via online platform thinking we are doing it for our akhirah, indeed we are doing it for our own good, but we hardly verify the case on our own, we hardly try to check how much has already been transferred, or is the money even going to the right person.
I am not against donations over an online platform, but can’t we replace this trend with a way through which the needy person gets what they actually need? Filling one account with more than what they actually need and leaving 100’s of others hungry won’t bring justice to people who even after burning the midnight oil are hardly making the ends meet.
The problem that has been presented before you in the previous paragraph might not seem to be of huge scale. But, once we start thinking about it, one will come to realise that if the money keeps getting transferred even after the required amount is donated to the person’s account, it becomes kind of a scam. And this happens due to various reasons. Our social media apps do not sort the feed/ posts on the basis of time, the algorithm of various social media platforms is different; in simpler terms, if a donation request might have been uploaded by a person/ page on a particular day there is a high probability that it will pop up on your feed even after the required amount is donated and because of this, very often, the donation amount exceeds the required amount.
After thinking about possible solutions to this problem, here are a few suggestions from my end:
Firstly, it is the responsibility of people who promote such requests to keep a check on the donations and as soon as the donation request is met, the previous request must be removed from all social media sites and replaced by a post saying “The donation request has been completed.”
Secondly, a number of places already have area wise Bayt al-mal for the people in need, other than that, a number of NGOs are present in our valley. We can constantly promote such organizations and ask people to make donations as per their wish. Therefore, if a need arises, the people in need can verify their details and their case at the Bayt al-mal or NGO and hence the desired amount can be transferred to their account. Also, a GoFundMe like website can be developed in which the donation request automatically closes after the required amount is met.
We must prefer hiring people who are in good health after verifying their background and personal detail which will stopping them from begging. Collecting money for building religious places, asking money from people on road for shrines or spending money ruthlessly for nazroniyaaz in Ziyarats, Masjids, Templesor any religious place won’t fix the emerging evils and increasing poverty of our society.
Unfortunately, a significant amount of begging is carried out by organised criminals. When you contribute to beggars, you have no way of knowing if you are assisting them or just fueling the criminal ring. Therefore, we must unite for the cause of helping people overcome their financial problems while also taking care of the fact that we do not fuel the crime ring.
