100 million people in the world are homeless, and the vast majority of these are from the capitalist democracies. Whether large or small, rich or poor, the democracies of the world do not ensure that their own citizens have a house to sleep in.
Three quarters of all the world’s homeless people come from India, which is the world’s largest democracy. Though poverty is considered the major cause of homelessness, India does not lack wealth: its 100 richest people have a net worth of $250 billion and according to Forbes, March 2013, the 22nd richest person in the world, Mukesh Ambani, comes from India. In 2012 he built the most expensive home on the planet at a cost of $1 billion. Calling it ‘Antilia’, it measures 174 metres tall and has a floor space greater than Louis XIV’s palace at Versailles, France. According to the preachers of capitalist free market economics, the generation of wealth will trickle down from the rich to the poor, but while this may be true for the 600 person staff needed to run Mukesh Ambani’s home, it is difficult to imagine how this concentration of wealth will trickle down to the rest of India’s 1.24 billion people.
Turning to the US, which considers itself the leader of the ‘Free World’, we also find the problem of homelessness; in summer and winter, rain and shine, begging for food and sleeping in cardboard boxes they line the streets of America. In any given year, 1% of America’s population experiences homelessness and 10% of these are considered chronically homeless. Latest statistics from a report in 2013 showed that 633,782 Americans were without a home.
Australia’s 2006 census revealed that 105,000 of its 20 million population did not have a home. Canada has 200,000 who experienced homelessness at some point last year according to a recent report: ‘The State of Homelessness in Canada 2013’, with 30,000 homeless on any given night. As for Europe, there are 3 million homeless people. One of them according to La Stampa newspaper, Domenico Codispoti, was even sentenced by an Italian court to ‘house arrest’, but as he has no house, the police come and check on him every night to see that he sleeps on the same piece of pavement in Milan until his sentence ends in April 2014!
The Guardian reported in June 2013 that 6,437 people were sleeping on the streets of London. William Booth described a scene of London’s homeless people two centuries ago in 1890 that will be familiar to any 21st century visitor to London: “There are still a large number of Londoners … who find themselves at nightfall destitute. These now betake themselves to the seats under the plane trees on the Embankment… Here on the stone abutments, which afford a slight protection from the biting wind, are scores of men lying side by side, huddled together for warmth, and of course, without any other covering than their ordinary clothing.”
Western sociologists and economists try and explain the causes of homelessness: poverty, mental illness, disability, unemployment, alcoholism, drug abuse, domestic violence and so on. Western politicians promise to solve the problem with new initiatives aimed at tackling the causes, but after hundreds of years of human misery no one should believe them.
Western civilization failed to guarantee housing for all citizens and follows a flawed ideology, which claims that application of theoretical principles to address ’causes’ of problems might relieve problems such as homelessness, and when ‘action plans’ and ‘new initiatives’ fail it is then assumed that the causes were not properly understood. However, the fundamental problem lies elsewhere. Western civilization separates real people and their problems from the help they need by relying on social or economic policies to come to the rescue. Furthermore, democracy has sanctified intangible freedoms at the expense of the most basic of human material rights. In defence of freedom, the US, for example, can commit hundreds of billions of dollars to military interventions in far away countries, even if freedom brings death and destruction to those that are being made ‘free’. At the same time, the US federal government can sit idly waiting for her starving and homeless citizens to fend for themselves, and what governmental funds are directed to the problems are too few and are directed towards theoretical causes more than material realities.
Islam, on the other hand insists upon actual provision of material solutions to those living under the protection of the Khilafah State that implements Islam. The Prophet Muhammad صلى الله عليه وسلم addressed three basic and undeniable rights of man including the right of shelter:
لَيْسَ لابْنِ آدَمَ حَقٌّ فِيمَا سِوَى هَذِهِ الْخِصَالِ : بَيْتٌ يَسْتُرُهُ ، وَثَوْبٌ يُوَارِي عَوْرَتَهُ ، وَجِلْفُ الْخُبْزِ ، وَالْمَاءِ
“The Son of Adam has no better right than that he would have a house wherein he may live, a piece of clothing whereby he may hide his nakedness and a piece of bread and some water.” [Tirmidhi]
In Islamic jurisprudence this means every man, now, today, must have these rights met! However, the Khilafah state has been absent from the world for 89 years, and the Muslims who had lived under its shade for fourteen centuries have been subjugated to the Western colonial powers and rulers who serve their interests ever since the Khilafah’s destruction. This is the calamity of the Muslim world, and yet, despite fragmentation, occupation of lands and of course poverty, one anomaly remains: homelessness is rare.
One interesting case may highlight the point. If India is the world’s biggest democracy and the US is the world’s leading democracy, then Israel is the Middle East’s first democracy. Built upon the destruction of Palestinian homes, and the massive expropriations of Palestinian lands for Jewish settlements, Israel has a homelessness problem, but walking along Tel Aviv’s streets it is Jews, not Arabs that are sleeping in the cardboard boxes. For Palestinians from the West Bank or Gaza, getting a travel permit to work in Israel will bring them face to face for the first time with the phenomenon of people much richer than themselves leaving their fellow citizens to sleep on the streets at night like in any other Western city.
The calamity of homelessness, it seems, is one of the defining features of Western civilization, and one of the bitter prices paid for the delusion of freedom, wherein the weak must sacrifice their material wellbeing for the benefit of the strong. In the West, freedom means the freedom to be able to fail, and to suffer a life of great hardship, alone and destitute in the streets of the worlds’ richest and busiest cities.