Emulating the Prophet's Food Resolution from the Grassroots

This year’s commemoration of the Prophet Muhammad’s birthday arrives amid very real and pressing social concerns. On one hand, the resounding salawat and praises echoing in various mosques and study circles demonstrate the undying love of the faithful for the messenger. On the other hand, this spiritual resonance collides with harsh material realities: the complaints of mothers in the corridors of traditional markets. The increasingly uncontrollable surge in staple food prices, the shrinking purchasing power of the lower-middle class, and the uncertainty of the global food supply chain have placed family economic resilience on the brink of collapse.

In facing this suffocating economic turbulence, society often falls into a passive attitude—looking upwards, waiting for structural intervention from the government, waiting for market operations that often serve merely as political cosmetics, or simply hoping for meagre direct cash assistance. However, the history of early Islamic civilisation in Medina teaches something entirely different.

If we are willing to read the prophetic biography not merely as romance and nostalgia of the past, but as a blueprint for crisis governance and economic management, we will find an enlightening fact: the Prophet Muhammad laid the foundation for food security and economic sovereignty precisely through the solidarity of citizens at the grassroots level.

Let us rewind the hands of history. When thousands of Muhajirin arrived in Medina after migrating from Mecca, an economic crisis and population explosion occurred drastically within a short time. These migrants left behind all their assets, land, and business networks. They arrived without capital, while the trade supply chain and markets in Medina at that time were controlled by certain oligopolistic groups who often manipulated prices. The Prophet’s initial intervention was indeed the Mu’akhat (brotherhood between the Muhajirin and the Anshar) based on empathy and wealth redistribution. However, as a visionary statesman, the Prophet Muhammad was fully aware that temporary philanthropic aid would never be sustainable if not immediately followed by the creation of independent means of production.

It was at that point of crisis that the Prophet issued a highly revolutionary agrarian policy, known in Islamic commercial jurisprudence as the concept of Ihya al-Mawat (reviving dead land). He firmly declared: ‘Whoever revives dead land (unowned and neglected), then that land belongs to him’ (HR. Abu Dawud).

This declaration was not merely an ordinary legal basis for land tenure, but a massive and strategic encouragement for society to move collectively. The Prophet invited his people to stop lamenting their fate and begin cultivating every inch of idle land on the outskirts of the city into new food production centres. Furthermore, the Prophet’s futuristic orientation in maintaining ecological balance and the supply chain is eternally recorded in another of his sayings: ‘No Muslim plants a tree or sows seeds, and then a bird, a person, or an animal eats from it, but that it is counted as charity for him’ (HR. Bukhari).