Azila Ahmad Sarkawi

Public Facilities and Human Wellbeing in the Context of Maqasid Al-Shari’ah

Public facilities are one of the most important land use categories in town planning. It transcends basic human needs that contribute to the overall liveability and wellbeing in its human welfare sense. The provision of public facilities somehow realizes the Maqasid al-Shariah (the objectives of Islamic law) that is to preserve the maslahah (benefits) for humankind. This study examines seven types of public facilities in Malaysia against the five essentials of Maqasid al-Shari’ah namely faith, self, intellect, posterity, and wealth. Hence it is exploratory in nature adopting the content analysis and interview with several experts from planning and Islamic background to match the public facilities provided in the plans with the Maqasid al-Shari’ah principles. The conclusive findings are that the provision of public facilities is very much conceptually related to the Maqasid al-Shari’ah. This approaches simultaneously provides an insight to the policy makers on the level of importance of the five essentials and the need to fulfill each one of them to ensure balanced provision and enjoyment of the public facilities. This also shows all those objectives of Islamic Law that should take into considerations in planning and this have been highlighted by Malaysian Government through their effort to develop the Maqasid al-Shari’ah Index to measure the “Islamicity” of the country.

Environmental planning policy and development strategies in the context of Maqasid Al-Shari’ah

In general, town and country planning are dominated by policies and strategies. These policies are most likely to vary according to the scale, type and purpose of the planning. Malaysia exercises a three-tier planning system which is attached to physical plans namely, National Physical Plan, State Structure Plan and Local Plan as well as Special Area Plan. The aim of the study is to assimilate policies in the Pahang State Structure Plan and the development strategies in the Kuantan Local Plan, which are related to environmental planning in line with the five essential aspects of Maqasid al-Shari’ah, notably the preservation of faith, self, intellect, lineage and property; Maqasid al-Shari’ah is the objectives of Islamic law. On February 10 2015, the government of Malaysia conducted the Malaysia Shari’ah Index and the result was released a year later. Among the seven sectors, the infrastructure and environment sector scored the lowest. In this regard, using content analysis and an expert interview were used to compare policies and development strategies with the five essentials of maqasid. The study found that there were more policies and strategies on preserving property while faith ranked the lowest. This unbalanced score means that the preservation of property was more emphasised compared to other aspects in the environment planning policies and strategies in the Pahang State Structure Plan and Kuantan Local Plan. Thus, it is desirable to develop more policies and strategies for environmental planning.

West meets Islam in contemporary world - construction project leadership perspective

Project management is a combination of both science and art as the merger of the terms of ‘project’ reflects to the technical knowledge, skills and competencies and ‘management’ refers to the human related components such interpersonal and leadership capabilities. Leadership is identified as central and core to successful business outcomes and prevails as crucial in any group or collective tasks. Project management is a business and an organisation, and the need to have an effective project leadership in place at all project phases is salient to ensure successful project outcomes, that fulfills project objectives as well as adhering to the objectives from the lens of Islam; to seek the pleasure of Allah (Mardhatillah)and His reward and eventually to achieve success in this world and in the Hereafter. With the increasing leadership challenges in leading construction projects nowadays, as complexity, stakeholders’ requirements and project failure grows,as well as continuous ethical issues and malpractices, project management awaits divine guidance that has its sources from and accord to the principles and values as prescribed in the Qur’an and the Sunnah. This paper aims to highlight, compare and discuss the Western modern perspective of project leadership with the one from the proposed Islamic perspective and also attempts to demonstrate some points on the merits of imbuting Islamic principles of leadership into projects.