Development of Spiritual Poverty Measurements of an Urban Population Based on the Concept of Purifying the Self (Tazkiyah Al-Nafs)

This paper aims to develop a measurement of spiritual poverty for an urban residents based on the spiritual concept and practice of purifying of the self (Tazkiyah Al-Nafs). This follows the process of cleansing of the self, where the nature of bad practices are replaced with those of good practices. A quantitative approach was utilised by distributing questionnaires to 528 urban Muslim households in Kuala Lumpur, Selangor and Putrajaya, Malaysia, which was then analysed using descriptive analysis. This was, then, followed by the usability assessments by 14 experts from academia and industry, where the data was analysed using the ‘fuzzy delphi method'. Findings indicated that 27.84% of respondents experienced spiritual poverty relating to the emotional indicator, 17.42% experienced from a perceptual indicator, while 91.86% of respondents experienced poverty from a practices indicator perspective. The study points out that the elements of emotion, perception and practice as indicators holds significance in measuring spiritual poverty with a percentage expert consensus of 78.6% on emotion and perception indicators and 85.7% on practices indicator. The results gives credence to the expansion of the concept of multidimensional poverty, to include measuring psycho-spiritual deprivations as one component of poverty in addition to measuring both monetary and non-monetary factors as currently being advocated. This study calls for further exploration of this important area relating to self development, which has been overlooked in poverty measurements.