Community Marketing: An Essential Ingredient for Muslim Community Empowerment

The ultimate goal of Muslim community empowerment is to relieve all community members from all kinds of suffering physically, materially or spiritually. Although Islamic tradition, as modeled by the Prophet himself, implicitly and explicitly declares wars against perennial poverty, encouraging economic struggle individually and collectively, its importance has been underestimated and was left out in the initial phase of most successful community-empowerment establishments. This article attempts to analyze the general failure-modes of community development in the light of a newly-proposed Islamic socio-economic architecture and obtains partial conclusions, forming a basis for developing a holistic conceptual model of Muslim-Community Marketing (MCM). Finally, a “Morally Sustainable Marketing Model for Empowered Muslim Communities” was proposed which blend the modern SME marketing with spiritual values, taking into account Halal/Tayyib awareness trends, newly-created marketing channels, Muslim-community networks, entrepreneurial skill development, Islamic logistics and so forth