Contemporary Takaful in Thailand: a Community-Empowerment Oriented Analysis

The current main-stream Takaful system has been developed and practiced with a great success worldwide. It is becoming a replacement of conventional assurances for the Muslims although currently its share is only a few percentage of the market. However, Fatwa on Takaful has largely ignored the essential concept of community empowerment as founded in Islamic traditions, focused mainly on head-to-head competition (or as alternative) with conventional assurances, thus may cause long-term, negative effects it intends to mitigate for the communities. This article systematically analyses the compatibility of current Takaful system with Qur an and Sunnah using an Islamic socio-economic and political architectural framework and a state-transition diagram. A serious mode-mismatch was found that would need urgent awareness and remedies. One of the main source of strategic mismatch is the transfer of responsibilities of care-taking activities from the closet (extended families and neighbors within reachable proximity), which is encouraged by Islam, to the outsiders who are indifferent in term of relationship. However, we suggested that the side-effects can be mitigated by proper/partial role-transferring to communities while keeping the strength of commercial providers in place