A necessary requirement for Proper & Fast Islamic Research & Spread in today's complex & confusing time.
Concept only, no actual working done so far. (Last edited 10-April-2016)
Suggested Rules & Summary:
1. Highly Skilled Paid Manpower spending about 50 hours/week/person. 1 person = 50 hours/week, 10 persons = 500 hours/week. Doing Unbiased Research. Truth is good enough, just do proper unbiased & thorough research with honesty and dedication, spending as much time as is required for properly exploring a topic and studying as many reference books as required in that area.
2. Sponsors Funding the Payment for Highly Skilled Manpower, in return getting advertisements to their Islamic Site, Islamic Organization, Halaal Business, Islamic Books etc.
3. Organizers, managing everything transparently. How much money is given by which Sponsor to which Full Time Islamic Worker for which project for how many hours work.
4. Volunteers, Providing free Islamic Worker services for 5 to 10 hours per week.
Analysis:
Today’s busy life schedule makes it difficult to spend time on job and Islamic work together. For example, If a person does job of 8 am to 7 pm with travel included for 5 days. It takes out 55 hours from the week. Such a person with family responsibilities if tries very hard can manage about 10 to 14 hours per week for Islamic work. If such a person can be dedicated for Islamic work and spends 50 hours or more per week on Islamic work, that can help him achieve about 5 years work in 1 year. A project can be launched which gathers a team of high potential Islamic workers and good Islamic sponsors :
1. Full Time Islamic Workers - The Work Force :
The Islamic Workers can be selected based on their past volunteer projects, Islamic contributions and skills. These can apply by sharing their skills, examples of their past work, interests etc. Other people who have worked with them in the past on Islamic projects can provide recommendation with brief comments on their performance. Then based on donations or sponsorships available for a project, they can be selected as full time paid workers for a period of 6 months to 1 year on some projects. At least 6 months period is recommended since this person will have to leave his job and become a full time Islamic worker and donations should also be at a suitable level to encourage him to leave his job and join as full time worker. A site can be set up where such potential persons will update monthly a kind of CV or profile and their areas of interest in priority from set of projects decided and listed. These are planned to be the man power or workforce.
2. Donors & Sponsors - The Funding:
The donor Muslims can make donations to support the selected high potential people as full time paid Islamic workers. They can select the projects in which they want to contribute and how much and how regularly. The sponsors are those donors who want advertisement to their halaal business, institute or their own Islamic site in return for sponsoring. These are planned to be the sponsors/financiers of the project.
3. Volunteers :
The volunteers can be those who will provide their free services in limited time i.e. about 5 to 10 hours average per week (average i.e. overall this rate should be maintained, if 1 week he can only manege 6 hours, he can do 12 hours in next 2 weeks to cover this up or 11 hours in next 4 weeks etc. and maintain average of 10 hours per week) . They will be assigned the most in demand task and these can start working immediately. Most in demand potential is classical Arabic to English Translation.
4. Organizers:
Organizers should be trusted Muslims who transparently manage donations and their distribution to paid Islamic workers. This project should be very transparent, how much donation is being given to which person for which task, and that task if possible should also be uploaded as draft version somewhere or atleast shared with donors to that project, so that they can continue seeing the progress of their interest work. Moreover, donations should also be tracked in a separate sheet, where the amount of donation by a donor used for a project should also be marked and this sheet can be regularly shared with the donors.
5. Potential Areas:
Many potential areas are there e.g.
1. Classical Arabic to English Translation e.g. translation of selected roots from Taaj ul Uroos or Lisaan ul Arab for roots used in The Qur’an starting from last 8 Arabic letters. Translation of The Qur'an with a lot of dedicated time, effort, and skills.This is the most in demand skill and potential!
2. Islamic Research and Sharing of that research in unique areas of interest e.g. Research into Qur’anic Studies selected areas, Sunnah issues.
3. Quick Study Tools development, enhancement and launch e.g. comprehensive quick study tool which searches an Arabic root in all major classical Arabic Dictionaries and shows all the relevant content on searching together. A comprehensive Tafsir tool that shows all available useful Tafaaseer on any Ayat together. Qur'an Quick Study tools and other important books quick study tools. Due to shortage of time, make study instant and quick by making quick study tools, so that interested people who want to study some area of Islam, can do so immediately. No matter how much time they have, they can study directly and quickly using quick study tools instead of 1st finding the topic and then studying.
4. Searchable text projects: Conversion of important scanned books to fully searchable books and applications by typing them again in proper formatting.
5. Islamic services: like preparing blogs on an Islamic field e.g. Qur'anic studies, Arabic learning, personal teaching, web designing, and many other areas can be identified.
But the need today is to quicken the Islamic Research and Spread it far and wide.
Youtube Clip from Siraj Wahhaj’s lecture :
We Need Full-time Workers For Islam
Interested people can email me at revivearabic @gmail.com to discuss or give suggestions on how to improve the concept further and once fully refined, a version can be prepared which can be shared with popular sites and scholars and launched.
Example: Lane was identified as having high potential and hired as full time paid worker on preparing an Arabic English Lexicon. He was able to focus his energies and time on this project without having to spend time on doing a job and instead of doing this as a hobby or part time volunteer activity, he worked on it in a focused manner and was able to provide due time to it. We should have potential Islamic translators having skill level equal to or higher than Lane. Once the project is launched from a proper platform, the energies of such high potential Muslims can be focused on important Islamic projects instead of being spent on worldly jobs.
Interested workers and donors can email, so that I can add reference to their services on this post, so that they can be contacted by the person who launches the project, whenever the project is launched. The potential workers to prove their skills and potential will have to do some volunteer work of about 10 hours in the most in demand project matching their skills as indicated by the organizer who launches the project, based on which their quality, skill, speed etc. can be evaluated. The potential donors and sponsors should indicate their way of earning to organizer so that only those donors are selected who don’t have any disallowed money (e.g. ribaa) in the earnings.
Interested volunteers can also email me. Currently most in demand project is Classical Arabic to English Translation. Also volunteers can be assigned various smaller tasks from above 5 potential areas. The high potential volunteers who show excellent performance, are most suitable candidates to be chosen as paid Islamic workers in addition to getting my recommendation. The volunteer activities can start immediately by coordinating with me, but think over it before applying, as sometimes I receive a volunteer mail and when I assign him or her a task, the task is not submitted. In volunteer activities I don't want to make any kind of push as this is volunteer activity by its very definition, I can assign target timelines for paid workers and push them with due respect to meet the targets, but not volunteers. Before posting here your interest to volunteer, also note that it is not certain when the paid project will start, and if you can easily manage without harming your current job, then I will recommend you participate. This project may even be limited to volunteer based project for a considerable time till it gains acceptance among high impact Muslims and ALLAH Knows when that can happen, so volunteers should be prepared and willing to continue this as volunteer based project.