Ketika berbicara tentang investasi yang menguntungkan, para pebisnis sering berasosiasi kepada emas, properti atau usaha. Itu adalah cara “kiri”. Jarang sekali pebisnis berpikir investasi yang prospektif dengan cara “kanan”.

Apa itu investasi cara kanan? Itulah bisnis yang disebutkan di dalam al-Quran atau al-Hadits, yang sangat profitable, dijamin marketable dan  feasible di dunia dan di akhirat. Beberapa contoh investasi cara kanan itu adalah zakat, sedekah, menyembelih hewan qurban, haji dan umrah. Tulisan ini adalah testimoni tentang investasi umrah, yaitu ibadah “haji kecil” ke Baitullah di Makkah al-Mukarramah.

Banyak cerita aneh seputar umrah. Ada yang bilang uangnya sudah diganti sebelum berangkat, atau rezekinya serasa dicurahkan dari langit. Ada juga yang berpendapat bahwa umrah  itu bukan biaya, namun investasi. Dan bukan investasi akhirat saja, namun juga investasi dunia. Pengalaman ketika menunaikan ibadah umrah membuatku mempercayai hal itu.

Aku pegawai BUMN sejak tahun 1993. Alhamdulillah, kami mempunyai usaha sampingan dengan hasil yang lumayan. Tahun 2008 kami punya uang enam puluhan juta rupiah. Ada tiga keinginan untuk menggunakannya.

Yang pertama, merenovasi rumah. Kami punya rumah di Yogyakarta yang terkena gempa tahun 2006. Sudah lebih dari dua tahun kami biarkan karena belum punya dana yang cukup.

Kedua, untuk uang muka membeli mobil baru. Kami sudah beberapa kali mempunyai mobil, namun tidak pernah baru. Selalu second  hand, bahkan third hand, fourth hand atau entah hand ke berapa. Terakhir, tahun 2007, kami menjual mobil  kami, dan berjanji untuk tidak membeli mobil lagi kecuali mobil baru.

Dan yang ketiga, umrah dengan istri. Ketika menunaikan ibadah haji tahun 2007, aku sendirian, karena uangnya hanya cukup untukku. Kalau saja uangku banyak, pasti aku mengajak anak, istri dan keluarga. Aku iri melihat kemesraan suami istri jamaah haji yang bisa berangkat bersama. Aku berdoa di depan ka’bah agar bisa ziarah setiap tahun bersama istri.

Istriku memilih merenovasi rumah atau membeli mobil baru, namun aku memilih umrah. Aku merasa doaku agar bisa ziarah bersama istri sudah diijabahi.  Meskipun istriku ikut bekerja mengelola usaha dan menjadi menteri keuangan dalam kabinet  rumah tangga, namun kepala negara dan kepala pemerintahannya tetap aku. Maka dia makmum saja, dan kami berangkat umrah berdua.

Kami berdoa di depan ka’bah memohon kebaikan di dunia dan di akhirat.  Sungguh, Allah itu al-Ghanidan al-Mughni, Mahakaya dan Maha Mencukupi. Sulit dipercaya. Tidak berapa lama, usai umrah, kami bisa merehab rumah dan membeli mobil baru.

Alhamdulillaah. Ada saja rezeki yang datang, dengan berbagai cara, yang kalau saja kami tidak mengalami sendiri sendiri, mungkin kami juga tidak percaya.

Tahun 2011 kejadian serupa berulang lagi. Kami punya uang seratusan juta rupiah. Ada tiga keinginan untuk membelanjakannya.

Yang pertama, membayar hutang.  Ada usaha trading kami yang macet, sehingga aku harus menyelesaikan tanggung jawab sebesar enam ratusan juta rupiah. Kalau uang itu kami bayarkan, kami jadi tidak punya uang lagi. Dan hutang kami juga masih belum bisa lunas.

Kedua, membangun rumah di Ngawi, Jawa Timur. Sejak tahun 2003, ketika bertugas di Ngawi, kami membuka  usaha. Dua tahun kemudian saya pindah tugas ke Bogor, dan mengontrak rumah di Ngawi agar usaha tetap berlanjut. Dengan berjalannya waktu, kami bisa membeli sebidang tanah di dekat rumah kontrakan, dan membuat gudang sederhana. Istriku ingin punya rumah di Ngawi, karena rumah kami yang di Yogyakarta sudah “hilang” lantaran kalah Pemilukada di kampung halaman kami, Rembang Jawa Tengah, tahun 2010.

Dan, anak-anak kami menyebar di UGM Yogyakarta, IPB Bogor dan Pondok Modern Gontor Putri Ngawi. Membangun rumah untuk usaha, dengan anak tiga, pembantu, karyawan dan ibunda mertua, dengan uang hanya cepek, sungguh hal yang amat tidak sederhana.

Dan, keinginan yang ketiga, umrah lagi. Kami sepakat bulat, memilih opsi ketiga, ziarah ke baitullah. Kami berangkat bersama anak sulung kami.

Sebenarnya kami juga mengajak ibunda, namun beliau tidak bersedia. Salah satunya karena tahu jalan cerita sesungguhnya. Istriku terlalu berterung terang, bahwa karena uang kami tidak cukup untuk melunasi hutang atau membangun rumah, maka sekalian saja kami pakai umrah.

Kami berdoa di depan ka’bah memohon kebaikan di dunia dan di akhirat. Sungguh,  Allah itu al-Ghanidan al-Mughni, Mahakaya dan Maha Mencukupi. Sulit dipercaya. Tidak berapa lama,  usai umrah, kami bisa melunasi hutang dan membangun rumah.

Alhamdulillaah. Ada saja rezeki yang datang, dengan berbagai cara, yang kalau saja kami tidak mengalami sendiri sendiri, mungkin kami juga tidak percaya.

Sejak itu kami kian yakin, umrah itu bukan biaya, namun investasi. Bukan investasi akhirat saja, namun juga investasi dunia. Kalau ada orang yang tidak percaya, itu urusannya. Kami juga tidak pernah memusingkan pendapat orang bahwa daripada uang dipakai umrah berkali-kali, lebih baik disedekahkan kepada fakir miskin. Bisa lebih bermanfaat. Kami hanya berdoa usai Thawaf Wada’, selain mohon agar bisa ziarah tiap tahun  dengan penuh iman dan takwa, kami juga mohon agar jika kami umrah, kami juga bisa mengumrahkan saudara, keluarga atau orang lain.

Dan,  kami juga berdoa agar bisa bersedekah senilai investasi umrah. Sekali lagi investasi umrah, bukan biaya umrah. Dan bukan umrah saja yang merupakan investasi akhirat dan dunia, namun juga zakat, sedekah, qurban, haji, dan lain-lain membelanjakan harta di jalan Allah. Allah itu Mahakaya, Maha Mencukupi, Maha Memberi Rezeki, dan Maha Mengabulkan Doa.

Sumber : www.islamedia.web.id

Baca Artikel Lainnya : JAMAAH UMROH DI TAHUN 2014 MENINGKAT

HOBART, Tasmania — Few places seem out of reach for China’s leader, Xi Jinping, who has traveled from European capitals to obscure Pacific and Caribbean islands in pursuit of his nation’s strategic interests.

So perhaps it was not surprising when he turned up last fall in this city on the edge of the Southern Ocean to put down a long-distance marker in another faraway region, Antarctica, 2,000 miles south of this Australian port.

Standing on the deck of an icebreaker that ferries Chinese scientists from this last stop before the frozen continent, Mr. Xi pledged that China would continue to expand in one of the few places on earth that remain unexploited by humans.

He signed a five-year accord with the Australian government that allows Chinese vessels and, in the future, aircraft to resupply for fuel and food before heading south. That will help secure easier access to a region that is believed to have vast oil and mineral resources; huge quantities of high-protein sea life; and for times of possible future dire need, fresh water contained in icebergs.

It was not until 1985, about seven decades after Robert Scott and Roald Amundsen raced to the South Pole, that a team representing Beijing hoisted the Chinese flag over the nation’s first Antarctic research base, the Great Wall Station on King George Island.

But now China seems determined to catch up. As it has bolstered spending on Antarctic research, and as the early explorers, especially the United States and Australia, confront stagnant budgets, there is growing concern about its intentions.

China’s operations on the continent — it opened its fourth research station last year, chose a site for a fifth, and is investing in a second icebreaker and new ice-capable planes and helicopters — are already the fastest growing of the 52 signatories to the Antarctic Treaty. That gentlemen’s agreement reached in 1959 bans military activity on the continent and aims to preserve it as one of the world’s last wildernesses; a related pact prohibits mining.

But Mr. Xi’s visit was another sign that China is positioning itself to take advantage of the continent’s resource potential when the treaty expires in 2048 — or in the event that it is ripped up before, Chinese and Australian experts say.

“So far, our research is natural-science based, but we know there is more and more concern about resource security,” said Yang Huigen, director general of the Polar Research Institute of China, who accompanied Mr. Xi last November on his visit to Hobart and stood with him on the icebreaker, Xue Long, or Snow Dragon.

With that in mind, the polar institute recently opened a new division devoted to the study of resources, law, geopolitics and governance in Antarctica and the Arctic, Mr. Yang said.

Australia, a strategic ally of the United States that has strong economic relations with China, is watching China’s buildup in the Antarctic with a mix of gratitude — China’s presence offers support for Australia’s Antarctic science program, which is short of cash — and wariness.

“We should have no illusions about the deeper agenda — one that has not even been agreed to by Chinese scientists but is driven by Xi, and most likely his successors,” said Peter Jennings, executive director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute and a former senior official in the Australian Department of Defense.

“This is part of a broader pattern of a mercantilist approach all around the world,” Mr. Jennings added. “A big driver of Chinese policy is to secure long-term energy supply and food supply.”

That approach was evident last month when a large Chinese agriculture enterprise announced an expansion of its fishing operations around Antarctica to catch more krill — small, protein-rich crustaceans that are abundant in Antarctic waters.

“The Antarctic is a treasure house for all human beings, and China should go there and share,” Liu Shenli, the chairman of the China National Agricultural Development Group, told China Daily, a state-owned newspaper. China would aim to fish up to two million tons of krill a year, he said, a substantial increase from what it currently harvests.

Because sovereignty over Antarctica is unclear, nations have sought to strengthen their claims over the ice-covered land by building research bases and naming geographic features. China’s fifth station will put it within reach of the six American facilities, and ahead of Australia’s three.

Chinese mappers have also given Chinese names to more than 300 sites, compared with the thousands of locations on the continent with English names.

In the unspoken competition for Antarctica’s future, scientific achievement can also translate into influence. Chinese scientists are driving to be the first to drill and recover an ice core containing tiny air bubbles that provide a record of climate change stretching as far back as 1.5 million years. It is an expensive and delicate effort at which others, including the European Union and Australia, have failed.

In a breakthrough a decade ago, European scientists extracted an ice core nearly two miles long that revealed 800,000 years of climate history. But finding an ice core going back further would allow scientists to examine a change in the earth’s climate cycles believed to have occurred 900,000 to 1.2 million years ago.

China is betting it has found the best location to drill, at an area called Dome A, or Dome Argus, the highest point on the East Antarctic Ice Sheet. Though it is considered one of the coldest places on the planet, with temperatures of 130 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, a Chinese expedition explored the area in 2005 and established a research station in 2009.

“The international community has drilled in lots of places, but no luck so far,” said Xiao Cunde, a member of the first party to reach the site and the deputy director of the Institute for Climate Change at the Chinese Academy of Meteorological Sciences. “We think at Dome A we will have a straight shot at the one-million-year ice core.”

Mr. Xiao said China had already begun drilling and hoped to find what scientists are looking for in four to five years.

To support its Antarctic aspirations, China is building a sophisticated $300 million icebreaker that is expected to be ready in a few years, said Xia Limin, deputy director of the Chinese Arctic and Antarctic Administration in Beijing. It has also bought a high-tech fixed-wing aircraft, outfitted in the United States, for taking sensitive scientific soundings from the ice.

China has chosen the site for its fifth research station at Inexpressible Island, named by a group of British explorers who were stranded at the desolate site in 1912 and survived the winter by excavating a small ice cave.

Mr. Xia said the inhospitable spot was ideal because China did not have a presence in that part of Antarctica, and because the rocky site did not have much snow, making it relatively cheap to build there.

Anne-Marie Brady, a professor of political science at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand and the author of a soon-to-be-released book, “China as a Polar Great Power,” said Chinese scientists also believed they had a good chance of finding mineral and energy resources near the site.

“China is playing a long game in Antarctica and keeping other states guessing about its true intentions and interests are part of its poker hand,” she said. But she noted that China’s interest in finding minerals was presented “loud and clear to domestic audiences” as the main reason it was investing in Antarctica.

Because commercial drilling is banned, estimates of energy and mineral resources in Antarctica rely on remote sensing data and comparisons with similar geological environments elsewhere, said Millard F. Coffin, executive director of the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies in Hobart.

But the difficulty of extraction in such severe conditions and uncertainty about future commodity prices make it unlikely that China or any country would defy the ban on mining anytime soon.

Tourism, however, is already booming. Travelers from China are still a relatively small contingent in the Antarctic compared with the more than 13,000 Americans who visited in 2013, and as yet there are no licensed Chinese tour operators.

But that is about to change, said Anthony Bergin, deputy director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. “I understand very soon there will be Chinese tourists on Chinese vessels with all-Chinese crew in the Antarctic,” he said.