Talk given at Center for Critical Peace Studies (CCPS, UMT) Conference on 22nd Feb 2023. Summary of talk follows the 25m Video.

This is topic on which I have been working for a long time (for a recent summary of my views, see Rebuilding Social Sciences on Islamic Foundations Part 1 and Rebuilding Social Sciences on Islamic Foundations Part 2). Western social sciences were developed on the basis of historical experiences of the West, and cannot be applied to Pakistan. Yet, due to colonized minds, we attempt to fit Pakistani experiences into Western pigeonholes. As one illustration, consider the class struggle between capitalists and laborers in Industrializing England. Pakistani Marxists try to view Pakistan through this distorted lens. They fail to recognize that the class struggle in Pakistan is between the English-speaking class that inherited power after the colonizers left and the vernacular class, which represents the people of Pakistan. This struggle is a result of colonization, a heritage that the West never experienced, and therefore, Western social theory does not address this issue.

Western education is deeply eurocentric, perpetuating the notion that the West is advanced and developed, while the East is backward and underdeveloped. We accept this characterization only because we accept the idea that development is defined by wealth — a concept suitable for colonizers who looted the world. Our policy makers perpetuate policies and colonial institutions designed for extraction of wealth from the people; see Impact of Colonial Heritage on Economic Policy in Pakistan. Islam offers a radical alternative: make human development our focus. Taking morality, excellent in character, and social relationships as measures, would alter the colonizer’s notion of development, and lead to radically different policies and social structures .

The project of replacing Western Social Science by Islamic patterns for organizing society is central to progress, but extremely difficult. The difficulty comes from the fact that our educational systems today perpetuate the mindsets created during colonization, which celebrate the glories of the Western Civilization, and paint our own societies and heritage as primitive and barbaric. Currently we do not have a viable alternative to this educational system, and so we are forced to accept this toxic narrative (see The Deadliest Weapon: Fabricated History). Decolonizing our minds by developing a counter-narrative, and creating an educational system adequate for modern needs, but built on a radically different understanding of history. Eurocentric history teaches us to view the European colonizers as heroes who undertook the rigors of wars around the globe to bring primitive barbarians the benefits of their advanced civilization. We need to reverse this, picturing the Europeans as primitive barbarians who destroyed and looted humane civilizations around the globe to capture their resources and enslave their economies.

Central to project of decolonization of minds is the theory of “knowledge” or epistemology. Due to more than a century of religious wars, Europeans rejected Christianity as a basis for organizing society. Rejection of the Bible as a source of knowledge forced them to develop a theory of knowledge from scratch. A long, complex, and convoluted trajectory of philosophical developments led to a tragically wrong theory of knowledge which currently dominates Western thought. In the early 20th Century, these developments culminated in the The Emergence of Logical Positivism, a philosophy which says the science is the only source of valid knowledge – rejecting our hearts and souls as sources of knowledge. Influenced by this conception of knowledge, Western universities shifted their goals from development of character to teaching of technological skills. See Julie Reuben’s Marginalization of Morality in Modern Education for a detailed study of this change which occured in the 20th Century.

More relevant to our current topic, the social sciences were rebuilt in the early 20th century to conform to this new conception of “knowledge”. Since God, Judgment Day, and Afterlife are beyond the range of the observable, these concepts were rejected as unscientific and irrational. This led to the conception of our universe and origins of life as products of chance, without any meaning. Humans are just another kind of animal, and society is a jungle of ferocious competition, governed only by survival of the fittest. All of the modern social sciences are built on the foundations, dramatically in conflict with Islamic views. In particular, economists build their theory on a shallow caricature of human beings and societies, which leads them to recommend and execute policies extremely harmful to human welfare. Even though the philosophy of logical positivism collapsed in 1970’s, the foundations of social sciences, and Western educational philosophy have not been revisited. As a result, students of modern universities continue to imbibe this false philosophy, which lies at the foundations of a modern education.

In light of this analysis, which shows the urgent necessity of rebuilding the social sciences on Islamic foundations, how should we proceed? In the Central Ideas of the Ghazali Project, I have outlined a three part solution. The first step is to strengthen our faith in the complete and perfect guidance from God. Islamic Knowledge is still Revolutionary, even after 1440 Years! With this confidence, we can re-examine Western prescriptions for development, and note that they are all designed to create wealth, based on the strategies followed by the colonizers using their power to exploit the planet. The goals are wrong, and the strategies non-functional. After rejecting Western prescriptions, we can open our eyes to the prescriptions provided by our own Intellectual heritage. In this direction, I have proposed Uloom-ul-Umran: Islamic Alternative to Western Social Science, based on the patterns of analysis of human history used by Ibn Khaldoun. Separately Dr. Recep Şentürk has provided a deep and sophisticated framework, based on the Islamic intellectual heritage, for Decolonizing the Social Sciences. It has been widely realized that even though political colonization of the Islamic world ended in mid-20th century, intellectual colonization, perpetuated by Western education, has only gotten stronger. Decolonization of thought is essential to achieving intellectual independence.

Let me close with a few brief remarks. More than a century of religious wars led to the rejection of Christianity as a way of organizing society. This led to the creation of the social sciences, which provide us with the patterns along which society should be organized. Because these are founded on rejection of Christianity, these focus on maximization of pleasure, power, and profits on this planet, constrained only by the survival-of-the-fittest. We should think of the Social Sciences as the atheistic religion which replaced Christianity in Europe, instead of the “science” it claims to be. With this understanding, it becomes clear that we cannot use this social science to organize our Islamic societies. Unfortunately, students around the globe study these sciences in their Western education, and are deceived by the word “science” into according it the same respect that is commanded by the hard sciences (see: Origins of Western Social Sciences). The only solution to this problem lies in developing our own social sciences built on our own historical experiences and intellectual heritage.

In previous lectures of my course on A New Approach to Islamic Economics, I have explained how a market society assigns roles to all members as producers, consumers, laborers, and other supplementary roles required for a capitalist economy. Social relationships are subordinated to the market. Capitalist Economic theory teaches us that our goal in life is to maximize the pleasure we get from consumption of goods and services! Producers are taught to maximize profits without any concern for social welfare. To build an Islamic Economy, we must re-imagine our roles and re-construct and re-define our relationships with other members of the society. The upcoming lecture on “Drivers of Social Change” explains the concrete and practical steps that we can take to build communities and networks of social relationships, as alternatives and counters to market society relationships. The one-minute video below summarizes this lecture scheduled for Sunday 2nd April 2023 at 2:00 pm Pakistan Time. For ZOOM links, see the course website at http://bit.ly/IslamicEcon2023

A brief summary of the past lectures is given below, to provide basic background and motivation leading up to this one:

1. The Crisis in Islamic Economics: In the first half of the 20th Century, about 90% of Islamic lands were colonized. First Generation Islamic Economics was part of the struggles for independence after the 2nd World War. It provided a vision of a just and equitable alternative to the dominant Western economic systems of Capitalism and Communism. Ruling classes in the newly liberated Islamic world retained exploitative colonial institutional structures and colonized mindsets, and suppressed all attempts at creating revolutionary Islamic alternatives. As a result, the pragmatic second generation of Islamic Economists abandoned revolutionary ideals, and set about to “Islamize” existing capitalist economies. This effort to merge fire and ice – the inequality and exploitation inherent in capitalism, and equity and justice of Islam – failed, leading to a crisis in the 2nd generation theories of Islamic Economics.
2. Gratitude, Contentment, and Trust: Even though modern Economics claims to be an objective and value-free description of reality, it is actually a set of ideals that describe a perfectly competitive market – never achieved, nor even achievable in reality. Economic theories present an ideal of rational behavior, characterized as homo economicus, which describes a heartless sociopath. We can build new foundations for Islamic Economics by replacing this toxic ideal with humane ideals which Islam teaches us to target. Instead of pursuing the illusion that maximizing the pleasure from consumption can bring us fulfillment, we recognize that our welfare in this world depends on our character and social relationships. Islam teaches us characteristics that lead to welfare and life-satisfaction in this world, and success in the Akhira.
3. Western Social Sciences: The word “science” represents a claim to universality that modern social sciences do not have. They are lessons extracted by European intellectuals from the historical experiences of European societies. The widespread illusion that the West is the most advanced civilization on the planet leads to the false assumption that Western models of society are worthy of emulation by all societies. These attempts to impose Western institutions onto Islamic societies have caused massive damage around the globe. There is an urgent need to decolonize the social sciences, and replace them with the theoretical frameworks and institutional structures used by Islamic societies for more than a thousand years.
4. How Capitalism Conditions Our Minds and Hearts: A capitalist economy requires a market society to function. A market society conditions us to believe in the central importance of markets in our lives. After all, we rely on markets to provide us with all the necessities, comforts, and luxuries, for our daily life. Living in a market society conditions us to believe that there is no alternative: societies must be built on the foundations of greed, competition, individualism, and hedonism. That is why the message of Islam is just as revolutionary today as it was when it first came 1440 years ago. It teaches us how to transform a society built on “ignorance” (Jahiliyya) into a society built on foundations of generosity, cooperation, and social responsibility.
5. Knowledge: East and West: This chapter, under construction, explains the radical differences between Western theories of knowledge and Islamic theories. The rejection of Christianity as a basis for knowledge led to the need for rebuilding knowledge from zero in Europe. Rejecting all unobservables led to exclusion of God, Afterlife, and Judgment Day, which automatically focused attention on the life of this world. Rationality was interpreted as pursuit of the worldly goals of pleasure, power, and profits, since it would be irrational to believe in an afterlife without direct observational evidence. This naturally leads to dramatic differences with Islamic theories of knowledge.
6. Drivers of Social Change: Upcoming lecture on Sunday 2nd April explains that a society is a network of social relationships that assigns roles and responsibilities to each of us. Living in a market society, we focus on our roles as producers and consumers, and on the market relationships which govern our lives. Creating social change requires us to re-imagine these market relationships, and also to build new relationships which are non-market based. Islamic teachings provide us with complete guidance on how to go about doing so.

This is section 4.9, the last segment of Lecture 4: How Capitalism Shapes our Minds and Hearts. This is part of an ongoing online course on A New Approach to Islamic Economics. In previous segments (4.8: ) we have discussed how the survival of a market society requires implanting the “knowledge” of the roles and responsibilities, and conceptual frameworks, to members of the society. Building an Islamic society requires rejecting this “knowledge”, and replacing it by the knowledge given to us  by God, who “gave humanity knowledge which they did not have”. This battle for knowledge is central to building an Islamic Economy.

The Central Battleground is Knowledge

When Islamic society was organized according to the knowledge given by the Quran, the Islamic Civilization were leaders in production of knowledge for more than 1000 years. The Quran teaches us that all human beings have the potential to rise higher than angels, and also to become worse than the beasts. An ideal society encourages all members to strive for excellence in conduct, and creates an environment conduct to human development. Ebb and flow of this knowledge over time led to many variants – the Islamicate – all patterned on the foundations of Islam.

Colonization & Global Conquest

Knowledge of how to build an Islamic Society was wiped out by European conquest and colonization of Islamic lands. The Social Sciences were build on the assumption that European society is the most advanced, by far, among all societies. Europe is “developed” while the rest are undeveloped. These Eurocentric assumptions were absorbed by the ruling classes in the colonized world, and transmitted to the masses through Western education now in global use.  The rich and powerful elites seek to create European societies all over the Islamic world, in order to “develop”. They use Social Science to do so. We need to develop our own Islamic politics and economics.

Solutions: Personal and Collective

Once it is understood that the central battlefield is knowledge, then it becomes clear that we must produce our own knowledge, built on Islamic foundations, to counter the toxic effects of Western knowledge currently being imparted to Muslims youth and intellectuals around the globe, via Western education. The first step must be on a personal level – we must learn to cleanse our own minds, and purify our own hearts. This requires UNLEARNING many myths. We can then make our own individual efforts to reach more people – as this course attempt to do. But the only real solution on a collective level is to produce an alternative to Western education. That is, we need to teach all skills essential for today, but set within an Islamic framework.

This course in Islamic Economics is ONE small piece of the massive effort required to replace the ENTIRE structure of Western Social Science by an understanding of how to shape societies according to Islamic laws. We need to learn to apply our age-old traditions of Fiqh to the modern world. Some more details about what needs to be done are given below.

On a personal level, some of the central lessons are summarized in: Unlearning Jahiliyya and Relearning Islam: http://bit.ly/SSUJRI :

1. Our human lives are infinitely precious.
2. Our success will be determined on Day of Judgment.
3. Life on this Earth is test – we succeed if we struggle for the GOOD, not if we achieve a successful outcome.
4. Wealth and Poverty are not signs of favor or disfavor from Allah.

Our education conditions us to think in certain ways. If we can learn to see the chains which bind our thoughts, then it becomes possible to free ourselves. The crucial first step is to realize that we are human beings, with infinite potential, and not human resources – see: Learning Who You Are: http://bit.ly/AZwya On a larger scale, events of world history has taught us to think in certain ways. See: Three Mega-Events Which Shape Our Thoughts: http://bit.ly/AZ3ME

1. Global Colonization and Conquest: Shock-and-Awe of the West
2. European Transition to Secular Thought: Marginalization of Religion
3. The Great Transformation to Market Society. Wealth as Goal of Life

To build an alternative to Western Social Science, we must start with the building block of all societies, and learn to understand Human Beings. Our methodology focuses on our own intuitive, direct, experiental understanding of our human experience – no mathematics. Also, we have a developed and sophisticated understanding of human behavior, founded on the Quran, and the Sufic spiritual tradition. A recent book which summarized developments in this area is “Developing a Model of Islamic Psychology and Psychotherapy” by Rothman. An article which provides a brief summary is: Toward a Framework for Islamic Psychology and Psychotherapy: An Islamic Model of the Soul, by Abdallah Rothman & Adrian Coyle, in Journal of Religion and Health volume 57, pages 1731–1744 (2018). A cursory examination shows that our four dimensional Islamic model based on Nafs, Soul, Aql, and Qalb is substantially more sophisticated and realistic than the homo economicus of modern Economics. It should be obvious that a realistic model of human behavior will lead to a more realistic  theory of economics.

Very important work in this area by been done by Recep Şentürk in a series of lecture on Decolonizing the Social Sciences: From Uniplexity to Multiplexity. Brief Writeup/Outline: http://bit.ly/AZdss  Video Lecture Series: http://bit.ly/RSDSSU2M

We can conclude by noting that central to capitalism is the pursuit of wealth, as the goal of both individuals and society. The sophisticated Islamic attitude towards wealth is described in the following Hadeeth:

Al-Bukhari reports that the Prophet Muhammad (may the peace and blessings of Allah be upon him) said: Hakim! Wealth has a deceptive appearance. It appears to be very sweet (but it is really not so). It is a blessing when earned with contentment of heart, but there is no satisfaction in it when it is got with greed. (al-Bukhari, 1422H, 2:123, ḥadīth no. 1472)

The antidote is to replace pursuit of wealth by pursuit of spiritual progress. We should recognize that Modern Economics is the economics of the spiritually stunted Nafs-Ammara. Economics advocates the worship of the Nafs: maximization of pleasure as the goal of life. Instead, we must recognize that the soul of human beings is a battle-ground for good and evil. In “Islam’s Gift: An Economy of Spiritual Progress” http://bit.ly/AZgift I have explained that Islamic Economics pursues spiritual progress, from Nafs-e-Ammara to Nafs-e-Lawwama to Nafs-e-Mutma’innah.

Section 4.8 of A New Approach to Islamic Economics. Capitalism is built on a collection of myths which justify the wealth of the capitalists, the exploitation of the working classes, and glorify the system, painting it as the best possible, to which there is no alternative. This segment explores some of the most important of these myths. Previous section 4.7 The Transition to Capitalist Society.

Foundational Narratives Create Societies

Every society is built on some foundational narratives. This because a society is an idea in our minds about our connection to each other – it is grouping which does not exist in external reality. For example, the Ummah – the collection of all the Muslims – is created by our common belief in the Quran. Because the manifestation of this imaginative ideal in concrete reality is at a low level, some have denied the existence of the Ummah. But, let us shift to an imaginative ideal which governs our lives today: the nation-state. This comes into existence by an act of collective imagination: we all agree to be bound by the idea of the nation state. As a thought experiment, suppose we imagine that one day human beings wake up and decide that we are all brothers and sisters, and should not divide ourselves into nations which wage war with each other. By our collective act of refusal to recognize the authority of nations, nations would cease to exist. Of course, chaos is likely to ensue as a result, but the point is to demonstrate that the idea of a nation exists in our collective imagination, not in external reality.

Societies Are Defined By Knowledge

Once we recognize that societies are created by consensus on certain ways of thinking and acting, it becomes easy to understand the French philosopher Michel Foucault who writes that: “Each society has its regime of truth, its ‘general politics’ of truth: that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true.” One of the central functions of society is to produce the “knowledge” which creates the collective identity which defines that society. Failure to create this knowledge within the members would result in the destruction of that society. The aphorism that “History forgets those who forget their history” is literally true – social groups without history cease to exist.

Ideas of Ruling Class Dominate Society

Karl Marx noted that capitalists do not use force to exploit labor; rather, laborers are trained to believe in the necessity of their own exploitation. The masses are educated into believing the perspectives of the ruling classes. The following quote is taken from Volume 1 of Das Kapital:

It is not enough that the conditions of labour are concentrated at one pole of society in the shape of capital, while at the other pole are grouped masses of men who have nothing to sell but their labour-power. Nor is it enough that they are compelled to sell themselves voluntarily. The advance of capitalist production develops a working class which by education, tradition and habit looks upon the requirements of that mode of production as self-evident natural laws. The organization of the capitalist process of production, once it is fully developed, breaks down all resistance.

Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1

The Myth of Progress: Central to Capitalism

Since we have all been educated in a capitalist economy, it would come as a surprise to us to learn that the emergence of capitalism has been a disaster for mankind, and for the planet. A capitalist education paints itself as the greatest success story of human history. This is accomplished by focusing on the strengths of capitalism, the accumulation of wealth, which has shot up dramatically over the past century. But taking into account the side-effects created by the massive exploitation of human and planetary resources leads to the realization that the costs paid for this growth have been much larger than the benefits; see “Hockey Stick or Growth Illusion?”[http://bit.ly/AZstick]

This propaganda is necessary for the survival of capitalism. If the enormous costs were clear to all, the system would collapse. Creating the illusion of miraculous success is achieved by focusing resources on propaganda, and in particular, on the educational system, which is designed to produce human resources, for sale for money. To overcome this illusion, we must replace “increase in wealth” by “human development” as our criterion for measuring progress; see   “Rejecting Eurocentric Concepts of Development” [http://bit.ly/AZrecd]

False Ideologies Created by Capitalism

Some of the central myths required to sustain a capitalist economic system are listed below:

• Human lives can be bought and sold for money.
• The value of my life is the amount of money I can earn.
• Helping the poor is harmful to productivity, and ultimately to everyone. Motivation for work is created by poverty.
• The goal of life is to maximize pleasure, power, and profits – without concern for society.
• Money is central to the acquisition of all the pleasures that life has to offer.

Fundamental Myths of Economic Theories

One of the principal tools used to implant these myths into the minds of the masses is “economic theory”. Since this theory is designed to justify and glorify capitalism, it is necessarily mythical, not factual. This mythology changes over time as myths get exposed, and replaced by new myths. While “money” is central to capitalism, it disappears almost completely in economics textbooks, making it impossible to understand the capitalist economic system. Here are some of the myths perpetuated by economics textbooks in use around the globe:

• Goal of life is to maximize pleasure from consumption of goods and services.
• Money is a means of facilitating exchange of commodities.
• Money is a veil – it does not matter for the real economy, which consists of commodities.

The Antidote: M-C-M’

Galbraith noted that excess production is central to capitalism. Thus, advertising to create demand for unnecessary goods is essential to its survival.  We are conditioned to desire more and more goods not because it is beneficial for our welfare, but because our consumerism creates and wealth and power for capitalists. This idea was succinctly expressed by Marx as follows. A traditional economy uses money as a means for trading goods. Symbolically C => M => C’  expresses the idea that we start with some set of commodities C, trade them for money M, and then use the money to purchase a different set of commodities C’. It is worth noting that labor is commodity in capitalism, and the laborers sell their labor to acquire money, so that they can purchase other commodities they need for survival. However, the capitalists who run the economic system are in the game for money, not for more commodities. Capitalists start out with a stock of money M, and use it to purchase commodities C – these would be labor, and raw materials required to produce finished goods. Sale of these finished goods leads to more money M’ which was the goal of capitalist production. This can be written symbolically as M => C => C’ => M’; the initial stock of money is used to purchase commodity inputs into the production process, which create finished goods C’, which are sold to get more money M’.  

A Monetary Economy

Superficially, it seems that we have two classes of agents, and one of these classes (the laborers) are working to make money only for the sake of consuming goods. Symbolically, C-M-C’ holds for these laborers. But we have seen that most of the goods they desire are superfluous. Both the goods, and the desire for these goods, is manufactured by the capitalists. Excessive consumption creates a rat-race. Pleasure from consumption over and above basic needs, comes from comparisons to average standard of living, which keeps rising. When necessary, laborers can and do reduce their consumption of superfluous goods. This leads to a reduction in Aggregate Demand, a source of great difficulties for the capitalist economy. The production of superfluous goods, upon which a capitalistic economy depends, must be reduced, causing a loss of profits. We will cover these topics in greater detail later. For the moment, our purpose is to note that in addition to pursuing excess consumption, laborers also desire to build up savings, which play a critical role.

Laborers in a capitalist economy suffer from uncertainty regarding their future wage incomes, due to the vagaries of the market. Thus, laborers, like the capitalists, are motivated to pursue wealth, in the form of savings, to protect them in lean periods in the future. Thus, capitalism creates a monetary economy, where everyone – capitalists and laborers alike – are motivated to accumulate wealth. The capitalists seek greater profits, while the laborers seek more savings. The characteristics of a monetary economy, where everyone is motivated to make more money, are dramatically different from those of a real economy, where everyone is motivated by the desire for higher levels of consumption.

Concluding Remarks

Every society is defined by a network of social relationships, which include roles, duties, and responsibilities for the social classes which make up that society. This knowledge of the defining characteristics of a society must be transmitted to the succeeding generations, in order for the society to reproduce itself. Generally speaking, the rulers of the society create the ideologies – narratives, myths – which define society, and educate everyone to be satisfied with their assigned roles within the social structure. However, our religion Islam has the unique feature that the structure of our society has been defined by Quran, and remains constant, and beyond reach of change via social consensus. This has dramatic implications for our topic of Islamic Economics.  

Links

• •             Online Course: A New Approach to Islamic Economics: http://bit.ly/IEalnafi Course Description: http://bit.ly/na2ie  
• •             THIS Section 4.7: Transition to Capitalism http://bit.ly/AZnaie47
• •             Weekly Mailing List on Islamic Economics: http://bit.ly/AZIEML 

{bit.ly/AZnaie47} This is section 4.7 of A New Approach to Islamic Economics. We discuss how the transition to capitalism destroy traditional class structures and replaced them with new ones. These changes created changes in all dimensions of society, some aspects of which are studied in this section. For previous section see How Markets Condition Our Minds and Hearts

In his book entitled The Great Transformation: Political and Economic Origins of Our Times, Karl Polany describes The Great Transformation in European Thought. Some specific aspects of this transformation are discussed in this section.

In a Feudal Society, land was biggest source of wealth. Landlords were the most powerful class. Social responsibility of the rich for the poor was an essential philosophy for this class structure. Markets were peripheral to society, and strictly regulated. Intuitive understanding of the threat posed by markets to social structure.

The transition from Land to Capital is discussed by Eric Hobsbawm in the Age of Capital. He shows how growth of trade and commerce led to rising power of the trading classes, which overtook the traditional landed aristocracy. This led to major changes in society. The landed aristocracy became marginalized and secondary, while the capitalists became the most powerful class. Their power depended on the creation of a labor class. The peasantry was transformed into this labor. This was a complete social transformation.

Creation of a Capitalist Class:

Hobsbawm argues that the rise of industrial capitalism created a new class of capitalists who were distinct from the traditional landed aristocracy. These capitalists were defined by their ownership of productive assets and their control over the means of production, rather than their ownership of land or their position in the feudal hierarchy. This new class was able to accumulate wealth on an unprecedented scale, and its members became some of the most powerful and influential individuals in society.

Creation of A Labor Class

At the same time, the expansion of capitalism also created a new class of industrial workers who were defined by their dependence on wage labor. Hobsbawm argues that this new class was characterized by a distinct culture and consciousness, which was shaped by their experiences of working in factories and mills. This new working class became a powerful force in society, and their struggles for better wages and working conditions played a key role in the development of the labor movement and the formation of socialist and communist political parties.

Karl Marx analyzed these classes created by the Industrial revolution in the following way. Capitalist economic system makes labor a commodity for sale. Because there is a lot of surplus labor, competition for jobs drives wage to subsistence levels (the so-called “iron law” of wages). Capitalists exploit labor, which allows them to accumulate wealth and power.  The dynamics of capitalist competition require increasing exploitation.This will eventually lead laborers to revolt, to create a more just and equitable system. One of the keys to creating justice is the public ownership of capital.

Polanyi’s book on The Great Transformation provides a higher-level perspective. He argues that the birth of economic theory took place in this period, when society was in transition. Marx, Ricardo, Mill, Malthus – they all analyze a society which is caught in conflict between traditional and capitalist social norms.     Economic theory was born in this period, and is saddled with conceptual frameworks which are now obsolete.

Max Weber’s book on The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism raised and answers a critical question: why did the early capitalists accumulate wealth, without benefitting from this wealth in the form of luxurious life styles? He argues that protestants in general believed in predestination, and salvation by grace alone, not by works. In particular, Calvinists believed that worldly prosperity was a signal of favor of God, and a sign of being predestined for eternal salvation (Note that this is explicitly rejected in the Quran – see Surah Al-Fajr).  This led protestants to strive for worldly success, without seeking to benefit from accumulated wealth for worldly pleasures. This led to accumulation of capital, which created the dynamic growth of capitalism. One important idea is the “Iron Cage” of Weber: People were trapped in this way of thinking and acting even after loss of faith in Christianity.

R H Tawney: Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (16th to 18th Century) pursues themes very similar to Weber. He notes that religion as central to all human pursuit in the 16^th century. But, by the 18^th century, it was marginalized to personal belief system. The social norms of a Market Society replaced Christian Religious norms. A central symbol of the change was the replacement of the Biblical maxim: “Love of Wealth is root of all evil”, by GB Shaw’s “Lack of Wealth is root of all evil”

Concluding Remarks

Social Transitions are complex and multidimensional. The parable of the Elephant and the Blind Men, describes how each blind man identified a part of the elephant incorrectly because they lacked the picture of the whole. We can get a holistic picture of social change only if we look at all dimensions together. This is an illustration of “Multiplexity” of Recep Şentürk. He argues that a key problem with Western theories of knowledge and social science is reduction of a Multiplex worldview by a Uniplex view. Decolonization of Social Sciences requires going back to the multiplex view which is central to the Islamic intellectual tradition. There are many video lectures, articles, and books, where he has explained this in greater detail. For our purposes here, we note the multiplexity is an English translation of Maratib ul Uloom, and other similar Arabic terms commonly used in the Islamic intellectual tradition.

Links

• Online Course: A New Approach to Islamic Economics: http://bit.ly/IEalnafi Course Description: http://bit.ly/na2ie 
• THIS Section 4.7: Transition to Capitalism http://bit.ly/AZnaie47
• Weekly Mailing List on Islamic Economics: http://bit.ly/AZIEML 

{bit.ly/AZnaie46} Capitalism, or a market economy, requires a market society. Living in a market society conditions our minds to think in terms of market transactions. Some specific implications are explored in this section 4.6 of A New Approach to Islamic Economics. Previous Section 4.5: Emergence of A Market Economy

Gifts Versus Commodities

Living in a market society, we lose sensitivity to the strong conflict between market mechanisms and social mechanisms. Polanyi says that in a traditional society, markets are embedded within society. In a market society, social relations are embedded within the market. In a recent work on “Gifts and Commodities: Exchange and Western Capitalism Since 1700” Carrier says that in traditional societies, people produced what they needed and traded within social network for other needs. These transactions build social relationships, and connect us to our environment. In contrast, in market economies, vast majority of transactions are impersonal market transactions, that are often adversarial. These transactions detach us from society and environment.

Illustration: Blood Donations

Because we have been de-sensitized to this conflict, it is useful to provide one specific illustration. All over the globe, Blood Drives call for donations on basis of social incentives. What would happen if we offered to PAY money for blood donations? This has been done, and it has been seen that entirely different class of donors emerges. Drug Addicts, and those who are driven by need to sell their blood for money, rather than the usual class of donors. This difference in donors shows the strong conflict between monetary and social incentives. It is important to note that Economists, more deeply conditioned to think in terms of the market, have failed to understand this. Nobel Laureates argued that offering money incentives would INCREASE blood donations, because they thought the two incentives would add to each other. But actual experiments proved that offering money actually reduces the amount and quality of blood donated.

The Battle between Markets and Society

One of the main messages of Polanyi is that a Market Society came into existence after a battle with traditional society. Things considered sacred and out of reach of the market, were reduced to commodities for sale on the market. Capitalist style labor markets – selling lives for money – cannot exist, without cheapening human lives. This REPLACEMENT of social mechanisms by market mechanism causes great harm to society. Polanyi provides a history of how markets won this battle against society.

Polanyi uses the term “Double Movement” to describe the opposing tendencies of markets to expand, and for society to resist and counter such attempts at expansion of markets. Polanyi argues that the history of emergence of capitalism cannot be understood without looking at this double movement. We have already discussed why society resists expansion of markets because of the harm to social institutions caused by the market. There are internal dynamic of an industrial society which make expansion essential to the survival and growth of markets – these will be discussed later in this course.

Three Artificial Commodities.

Polanyi notes that operation of markets requires three artificial Commodities

1. Land
2. Labor
3. Money

These commodities are artificial, in the sense that they are not produced by labor:

• Land is our environment and habitat, in symbiotic relationship with humans.
• Labor is the material of our lives, not for sale at any price.
• Money is a social convention, created by consensus on use of tokens for claims on goods sold in the marketplace.

Treating Land as a commodity cheapens Land – reduces its value as a gift from God, which sustains our lives, and routinely performs miracles of turning seeds into plants. It changes our relationship with the planet from “mother earth”, to commodity for exploitation for maximal profits. This change in spirit is the root cause of the current environmental crisis

Treating Labor as a commodity means that human lives are for purchase and sale. It cheapens human beings to human resources.  At the same time, it massively increases the value of money, since it can buy human lives! Labor markets first became possible because of the desperation created by Enclosures. But gradual change in social norms caused by this led to the incorporation of this market idea into modern social norms.  So, to free ourselves from this illusion, it is important to reflect on how un-natural this idea is: the idea that we are commodities for sale in the labor market, and the worth of our lives can be measured by the price we receive in this market This is among the most important elements of how our minds and hearts are shaped by capitalism.

Money as an Artificial Commodity: Money is a social institution that has been created to facilitate economic exchange, and that it is therefore subject to the same social and political forces as other institutions. The creation of money as a means of exchange was a deliberate act of government and that the value of money is therefore determined by political decisions rather than by natural market forces.

Capitalism Conditions Our Minds and Hearts

Awareness of how we have been conditioned to think leads to the possibility of liberation:

1. Realize that our lives our precious, beyond the possibility of purchase.
2. Realize that we are unique – not interchangeable parts in the capitalist machine for production of goods and services.
3. Realize the enormous and irreplaceable gifts given to us on the planet – flora, fauna, seas, mountains, forests. These cannot be brought or sold for money.
4. Money is the market substitute for trust. Building genuine trust in social relationships leads to deep life satisfaction. In contrast, market exchanges weaken social relationships, and also our connection with our environment and the planet.

LINKS

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• THIS Section 4.6: Market Society http://bit.ly/AZnaie46
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{bit.ly/AZnaie45} Section 4.5 of A New Approach to Islamic Economics discusses the emergence of capitalism, and how it shaped economics, politics, and our society. Previous Section 4.4 Knowledge and Pedagogy

Economic Theory are NOT Scientific Theories: In the conventional “scientific” approach to economics, theories are regarded as universal laws, which operate in all times and places. In our historical and qualitative approach, which gives substantial room to human agency, theories can only be understood within their historical context. Theories represent human efforts to understand the process of social change, principally by finding the causes of change, and how these causes operate. Because historical processes are always complex, and a large number of factors changes at the same time, it is quite difficult to correctly characterize the causal factors. There is always a multiplicity of theories, and different theories represent the interests of different classes.

Mercantilism and Physiocracy

As an illustration of this understanding, we consider two economic theories prior to the industrial revolution: Physiocracy and Mercantilism. The physiocrats believed that agriculture was the sole source of wealth, whereas the mercantilists emphasized the importance of trade and manufacturing as well.

From the “scientific” perspective, we might ask which of the two theories is “true”. This is not very useful for study of human societies, because most social theories are mixtures of normative judgements with positive factual hypotheses. Instead, from the historical perspective we adopt, it gives us far more insight to ask who (which social class) proposed and advocated these theories, and to what end?

The physiocrats represented the interests of the traditional landed aristocracy. They saw agriculture as a productive sector that provided the necessities of life. They measured the wealth of nations in terms of the value and quantity of the produce of land, and not in terms of gold and silver. The mercantilists represented the interests of the commercial classes – traders, merchants, and producers. They saw agriculture as a source of raw materials for manufacturing and a means of generating exports. They advocated measuring the wealth nations of in terms of gold and silver.

Over time, physiocracy lost appeal as increasing commerce brought greater wealth and power to the commercial (bourgeois) classes. An illustration of this shifting configuration of power is given by Corn Laws and the Poor Laws. The repeal of the Corn Laws and the Poor Laws in 19th-century England represented a shift in economic and political power away from the landed aristocracy towards the rising commercial classes.

Rising Power of the Commercial Classes:

The Corn Laws, which were enacted in 1815, placed high tariffs on imported grain in order to protect domestic agriculture and the landed aristocracy, who were heavily invested in the agricultural sector. These laws were seen as detrimental to the commercial and industrial classes, who relied on cheap imported grain to feed their workers and maintain their industries. The wages being paid to labor were closely tied to the price of food grains in that period. The commercial classes, therefore, were strongly in favor of the repeal of the Corn Laws, as it would open up new markets and reduce the cost of living. The repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, for example, was supported by a coalition of manufacturers, free traders, and working-class radicals who saw it as an opportunity to break the power of the landed aristocracy and promote economic growth.

Similarly, the Poor Laws, which were enacted in the 16th century, provided relief for the poor but also reinforced the social and economic hierarchy of the landed aristocracy by requiring recipients to perform work on the estates of wealthy landowners. The commercial classes saw the Poor Laws as an impediment to economic growth and social mobility, as they discouraged the poor from seeking work outside of agriculture and reinforced the power of the landed aristocracy. The repeal of the Poor Laws in 1834 was largely driven by the growing power and influence of the commercial and industrial classes, who were able to use their economic and political clout to push for reform. Taking away support for the poor created a large labor pool which would be available to work for low wages under harsh conditions at that time.

Overall, the repeal of the Corn Laws and the Poor Laws represented a significant shift in economic and political power from the landed aristocracy towards the rising commercial and industrial classes, who were able to use their economic and political influence to promote their own interests and challenge the entrenched power of the landed elite. However, it was the industrial revolution which led to the triumph of the commercial classes over the landed elite, and also led to entirely different configurations of economic, political, and social systems of English society. It started with the process of Enclosures, which led to an Agricultural Revolution, dispossession of peasantry, and creation of a labor class.

The Enclosures:

Since the 16^th Century, landed aristocracy of England had been attempting to create “enclosures” – sealing of large area of land for their personal use, preventing public access to this property. This was strongly resisted by the masses, which derived a living from these natural resources. The monarchy would generally support the masses against the aristocracy because they feared giving too much power to the aristocracy, who could rise up in rebellion with sufficient power. The English Civil War of 1642 led to the execution of King Charles 1, abolishment of the Monarchy, and the establishment of a Republic headed by Oliver Cromwell. After the death of Cromwell, his son was unable to hold together the republic. The royalists restored the monarchy, and placed the son of Charles 1 on the throne. The power of the monarch was substantially weakened, and the landed aristocracy were able to set privatize land and set up enclosures on a huge scale throughout England.   

The enclosures have rightly been called a revolution of the rich against the poor. The lords and gentlemen appropriated the common lands of England, and destroyed the livelihood of thousands of peasants and cottagers, who were left without work and without means of subsistence. The countryside was filled with vagrants, and the towns with unemployed workers. The removal of the cottage industry accelerated the process of proletarianisation and created the industrial working class. The enclosures were a turning point in English social history, for they produced the first industrial workers of England, and created the preconditions for the Industrial Revolution. At the same time, however, they disrupted the traditional social order, and gave rise to social and political tensions that would come to a head in the 19th century.

Some Consequences of Enclosures:

1. Enclosures allow large scale farming, which creates surplus food, wool, and other agricultural products. This was necessary to support a labor force in urban areas which would be unable to produce their own food. It also provided raw materials for use for industrial production.
2. Enclosures also deprived peasants and cottage industries of access to means of livelihood. This led to the creation of a labor force, required by the Industrial Revolution.
3. This also led to the creation of Poverty! Peasants – detached from social and environmental relationships – appeared in the cities in search of livelihoods, and intruded on public consciousness. See for more details

Industrial Revolution in England.

“Industry and Empire: The Birth of the Industrial Revolution” by Eric Hobsbawm that presents a suitable description of the Industrial Revolution:

The Industrial Revolution was the transformation of a society based on agriculture and handicrafts into a community of machines and factories. It was a revolution in the sense of a complete change, but it was not a political revolution, although its impact on politics and society was enormous. It was essentially an economic and technological revolution, involving the extensive use of steam power, the application of science to industry, and the mechanization of production. It began in Britain in the late eighteenth century and spread to Europe and North America in the nineteenth century. The Industrial Revolution had far-reaching consequences for the structure of society, the nature of work, and the environment, and it marked the beginning of the modern world.

Consequences of Industrial Revolution

Our goal in studying the process of social change is not to learn about a sequence of historical events, but to learn about the internal logic which governed the process, so that it evolved in predictable directions. The trigger of social change was the industrial revolution. We have described some of the unique set of pre-conditions which led to the industrial revolution in England. But the consequences were far reaching. The Industrial Revolution led to the capability for the creation of massive amounts of surplus goods – far above and beyond domestic demand or needs. This single fact can be considered as the driver of the other changes which were required to accommodate and enable this possibility of excess production.

We can summarize these changes by saying that the Industrial Revolution led to the replacement of a traditional, social economy by a Market Economy. This change was not a smooth and gradual evolutionary process. Rather, the two types of economy are extremely different from each other, and there was a violent battle which led to the replacement of the traditional economy by the Market Economy. Karl Polanyi’s Great Transformation provides a detailed description of this transition. Here we just note a few key points of contrast, for our current discussion.

In a traditional economy, the masses live close to subsistence level for economic needs, although the wealthy can enjoy enormous amounts of surplus. Basic needs of the masses are met by a network of social relationships, not by the marketplace. Normally the poor operate with very little or nothing in the form of money, while the wealthy can have large amounts of money. Markets take the form of seasonal fairs, where only non-essential goods are sold – people can survive without recourse to the market. Markets are a peripheral adjunct to society. Because survival depends on social networks, placing social needs above individual is natural – and required for survival. A traditional society prizes the natural virtues of generosity, cooperation, and social responsibility. Markets cause harm to traditional social mechanisms by replacing a social transaction of gift-exchange by a market transaction of sale for money. Therefore, traditional societies put strong regulations on markets. All of these traditional values are washed away with the emergence of a market economy, which is a necessary accompaniment of an industrial revolution. We will study this in greater detail later.

LINKS  

• Next Section: How Markets Condition Our Minds and Hearts
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Section 4.4 of A New Approach to Islamic Economics: http://bit.ly/na2ie Free Online Course on Al-Nafi Platform: http://bit.ly/IEalnafi Register for weekly email list: http://bit.ly/AZIEML  Previous Section 4.3 Social Change: From Hunter-Gatherers to Nation-States

Islamic theory of knowledge is radically different from the Western one. According to a Hadeeth, Useful Knowledge Enters the Heart. Islam is a religion founded on the knowledge given by Allah T’aala to humankind – this is a knowledge they could not have acquired on their own. Islamic teachings place central emphasis on acquisition of knowledge. Pre-Islamic Era is known as “Jahiliyya” or period of ignorance. Knowledge given by God to the ignorant Bedouin transformed them into leaders of the world, and launched a civilization which enlightened the world with knowledge for more than a thousand years. Because of the central importance of knowledge in Islam, Islamic scholars have enormous amounts of writings, discussions, debates about the nature of knowledge.

Western Epistemology Built on Radically Different Foundations

The Influx of knowledge from Al-Andalus via reconquest was strongly resisted by Catholic Church. This ultimately leads to Protestant-Catholic split. More than a century of religious wars between the two factions led to rejection of religion as a basis on which to build society. Rejection of Bible, Theology, and the Scholastic approach to social organization, led to a search for new principles on which to found knowledge. Knowledge was defined to be based on observations and logic. This excludes (deliberately) the heart and intuition as sources of knowledge.

A deeper discussion of the contrasting views of knowledge is deferred for later. For now, some central points are sketched briefly here:

• Islamic Knowledge is built on Heart and Intuition, on the foundation of certainties provided by Quran.
• Human knowledge is ALWAYS prone to error. These errors multiply when our hearts are blinded by worldly desires.
• Tazkiya – purification of heart – is a first step to knowledge.

In contrast,

• Western Knowledge excludes heart and intuition as sources for knowledge.
• It uses reason and observations (of external reality, not of our internal world) as sole sources for knowledge.
• It strives for a certainty, which cannot be obtained for significant truths.

This discussion of of central importance to how we do Economics. Modern Economics excludes our internal subjective human experience as a source for knowledge about human beings. Instead, it uses a “rational” analysis – depending only on logic and scientific knowledge – excluding emotions and spirituality. This leads to the homo economicus model: a picture of humans who are cold, calculating, callous, and cruel. The superstructure of modern economics is built on these toxic foundations.

Instead, in Islamic Economics, we replace this model by an understanding of human behavior based on our direct intuitive and experiential understanding of humans. An immediate consequence is the understanding that mathematics cannot be used to describe our behavior. Many other deep insights, not accessible to Western economists, about human behavior follow.

Because knowledge is defined differently by Islam and the West, the approach to learning must also be different. We have discussed some differences in earlier lectures, and will provide some more later. Here we focus on just one point, which might seem to be in direct conflict with what we have said a bit earlier. Since knowledge is based on accumulated human experience, a student must learn from the experience of others. To learn points-of-view of others, we must first abandon all personal views and emotions – our personal feelings will block our understanding of the experience of others. We must seek to see things from the point-of-view of those committed to it. We must attempt to understand arguments and counter-arguments while SUSPENDING judgment on right and wrong and attachments to certain views we favor. When the Prophet SAW asked questions, the Companions would often respond: “Allah and His Prophet SAW know best”. That is, they lay aside all prior knowledge and judgments to try to listen and understand.

In other places, I have taken and advocated what appears to be the opposite view. This relates to stages of growth in understanding. Initially, one must start with the student’s perspective – no UNINFORMED judgments. After mastering multiple perspectives and understanding strengths and weaknesses of different positions, one can venture on to evaluation.

A Larger Lesson which emerges from the brief sketch of social change discusses earlier is that increasing levels of unity lead to increasing strength. The Nation-State, which is currently the most powerful level of unity, has been enormously harmful to human welfare, leading to continuous warfare. Islamic ideals require unity at the level of the Ummah, and ALSO at the level of humankind – we are all brothers and sisters, sons and daughters of Adam and Hawwa. This unity comes from the hearts, not from rationality. It is only by opening our hearts to the message of God that we can strive for this unity at the level of the Ummah, which is more precious than all the wealth of the planet:

8:63 (Allah T’aala) united the hearts (of the believers). Had you spent all that is on earth, you could not have united their hearts. But Allah did unite their hearts. Surely, He is All-Mighty, All-Wise. 

Concluding Remarks: This segment on contrasting theories of knowledge and pedagogy is a side-note for our current lecture on How Capitalism Shapes Our Minds and Hearts. There is one important reason for including it. We do not plan to study the impact of capitalism by doing mathematics and by reasoning about it. RATHER, look at our hearts  to see how they have been infected by the desire for wealth, and the worldly goals of pursuit of pleasure, power, fame, glory, etc. – these are essential to capitalism and anti-thetical to Islam.

LINKS: Next Section 4.5 Emergence of A Market Economy Online Course: A New Approach to Islamic Economics: http://bit.ly/IEalnafi Course Description: http://bit.ly/na2ie http://bit.ly/AZnaie43 Weekly Mailing List on Islamic Economics: http://bit.ly/AZIEML

{bit.ly/AZnaie43} Section 4.3 of A New Approach to Islamic Economics (http://bit.ly/na2ie) applies the methodologies developed in earlier sections to the study of social change across time. In particular, we study how hunter-gatherer societies changed to agrarian feudals, and then to city-states and nation-states. These changes were driven by natural dynamics that can be understood qualitatively, not mathematically. Previous Section 4.2 Methodologies for Studying Social Change

Pedagogical Principle

We have described some key methodological differences between the Uloom-ul-Umran approach, based on Islamic epistemological principles, and the conventional Western Social Sciences. Now we will provide an illustration of these differences within the context of some specific social changes which have occurred historically. Before going on to do this, we would like to highlight an epistemological principle which is not made clear in Western pedagogy. We have laid out some methodological principles but we can understand these only within the context of an application to a particular historical example. This illustrates some general aspects of knowledge, sketched briefly below:

• Every particular is an instance of a universal.
• Every universal is comprehensible only via its manifestation in particular instances.
• How we grasp a universal from a particular depends on our intuitions – which can often be wrong.
• How we assimilate a particular to a universal is generally easier, and less subject to error. But, errors can also be made in this direction.
• This process of acquisition of knowledge is different from the standard Western categories – induction, deduction, transduction.

Hunter-Gatherer Societies

A hunter-gatherer is a human living in a society in which most or all food is obtained by foraging (collecting wild plants and pursuing wild animals), in contrast to agricultural societies, which rely mainly on domesticated species.

Anthropologists tells us the early human societies were all hunter-gatherers. As per Marxist Analysis, this economic mode of production would lead to certain characteristics in the society, listed below:

1. Environment: Exhaustion of local supplies => Nomadic Society.
2. Philosophy: Mother Earth: We take care of environment, as it takes care of us. (Urban life leads to detachment from nature.)
3. Politics: Egalitarian Societies – easy exit for discontented subgroups. No slaves; not enough surplus food to keep one for service.
4. Property: No private property. Illustrative Attitude: Cherokee Constitution of 1839: “The lands of the Cherokee Nation shall remain common property.”

We can see how characteristics of the society, and ways of thinking, would be strongly influenced by the economic systems designed to provide for the people. It is worth emphasizing that these are trends, and not deterministic. People have agency and reshape and counteract these natural tendencies by developing different philosophies and ways of acting.

Social Change Process

Feudalism: The transition from a hunter-gatherer society to a feudal society was triggered by the cultivation of land. The nomadic lifestyle that characterized hunter-gatherer societies had to be abandoned in favor of settled agriculture. As people started to cultivate land, private property emerged naturally – when we invest time and effort in planting seeds and watering the plants, we need to create the right to harvest the fruits of our efforts. It would be natural for the gatherers to become the farmers within this society. This shift also led to a change in the role of hunters, who became soldiers. With the emergence of private property, robbing farmers became easier than hunting. To protect themselves, farmers needed the protection of soldiers, which led to the emergence of feudal lords who provided protection in exchange for food tributes. This feudal system created a class structure with the feudal lord at the top, followed by knights, peasants, and serfs.

City States: The transition from feudalism to city-states was driven by the need for alliances among feudal lords. Stable local alliances were created in order to ensure mutual protection and prosperity, which led to the emergence of cities. The growing economic power of these cities allowed them to maintain armies and created the need for governance. The history of Europe is marked by continuous wars between city-states, which were fought to protect their economic interests and territorial boundaries. Machiavelli’s The Prince provides insight into the political and military strategies used by city-states during this time.

Nation-States: The transition from city-states to nation-states was driven by the formation of alliances between multiple cities, which eventually led to the emergence of a unified nation-state. This process also involved the creation of national identities, which were facilitated by the spread of print media, as Benedict Anderson famously argued in “Imagined Communities.” Cheap and widely distributed newspapers created a common perspective and helped to forge a sense of shared identity among diverse populations. Development of a national identity also required explicit efforts, such as the promotion of national symbols and the cultivation of a sense of pride in the nation’s history and culture. The national identity had to be strong enough to live for, and to die for, in order to motivate soldiers to fight battles for the nation. In this way, the transition from city-states to nation-states involved not only political and economic changes, but also a cultural transformation that was driven by the development of a shared national identity.

Iqbal-Madani Debate on Nation: The idea of the nation-state has been of central importance in contemporary Islamic political thought. Allama Iqbal expressed his strong antipathy to the nation in the couplet:

Among these newly minted gods, the biggest is the Nation. The clothing it wears is the coffin of religion.

He argued that allegiance to humanity must supercede allegiance to Nations. National Identity has been a source of constant warfare and violence in human history, by dividing man against man – against teachings of the Quran.

Shaykh Hussein Ahmad Madani was on the opposite side of this debate, and favored using the creation of a national identity in the Indo-Pak subcontinent, as a tool and a pragmatic strategy to oust the British and achieve liberty. Detailed discussions between them showed them to be in ultimate agreement about the conflict between the Western concept of Nation-State, and Islamic ideals of unity of mankind.  

This debate continues to be extraordinarily divisive in Muslim thought. The vast majority of Muslim political efforts take the nation-state for granted as the highest source of power in the modern world, and seek to capture political power for the revival of the Islamic Civilization. However, Wael Hallaq in “The Impossible State” has taken the line of Allama Iqbal. He argues that the concept of the nation-state is fundamentally un-Islamic. Nations of Middle East created as part of a divide-and-rule strategy – see Fromkin: A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire, and the creation of the Middle East. This strategy has been very successfully in keeping Muslims engaged in internal political power struggles, preventing them from emerging as a global power. We cannot use un-Islamic means to pursue Islamic goals.

The take-away conclusions from Section 4.3 are the following. Economic, Political, and Social Institutions are entangled with each other in all societies. Changes in technology, environment, or political alliances, can become drivers of large scale social change and transformation of society. What is most important from our Islamic perspective is that the economic and political aspects create tendencies towards certain types of philosophies, but human agency can counter these trends. Specific historical case studies do not show a uniform progression and evolution. Rather, within the overall trend there is substantial diversity created by different choices made by different societies in response to the pressure to change.

Prediction Versus Explanation and Understanding: Whereas Western Social Science seeks to predict the movements of society, when we take into account human agency, prediction becomes a secondary goal. Our primary objective is to understand the social change process, and to be able to explain why changes occurred, without necessarily being able to predict them.  

LINKS:

• Next Section 4.4 Knowledge and Pedagogy
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{bit.ly/AZnaie42} This is section 4.2 of A New Approach to Islamic Economics. Register for free online course at http://bit.ly/IEalnafi. Join a weekly email list for Islamic Economics at http://bit.ly/AZIEML. For previous section 4.1, see Uloom-ul-Umran vs Eurocentric Social Science

The process of social change involves all dimensions: political, economic, social, educational, environmental. These must be studied together. No one dimension can be isolated. This differs radically from current Eurocentric social sciences which assume it is possible to separate them, and study economics in isolation from politics, society, history, and environment. To signal the difference, and to indicate the intellectual heritage, we propose a new name: “Uloom Ul Umran”. Briefly, this is a historical and qualitative approach to the study of social change.

Modern Social Sciences were created in early 20th Century on the basis of a triple mistake:

1. Science is the only valid source of knowledge
2. Scientific methodology, as understood by Logical Positivists, involves study of observables, and does not go beyond them, to the unobservables.
3. Scientific methodology CAN be used to study human societies.

All three statements are false. This leads to a need to rebuild the social sciences on sound epistemological foundations. Some Key Differences between Uloom ul Umran and Social Science are:

1. A “scientific approach” assumes that there are universal laws which apply to all societies across time and space.
2. Our historical and qualitative approach assumes human freedom to chose goals and to strive for goals.
3. Social change is driven by collective human responses to change – giving agency to human beings is generally not allowed in social science, and especially so in economics.
4. Human struggles to create change are shaped by theories about causal factors responsible for the change.
5. Causal Factors are never observable; different groups can always create different theories. Theories which come to dominate depend on Power, rather than Truth.

The dominant view which led to the Western social sciences is Material Determinism. This is the theory that human thought is shaped by material forces, primarily the economic system. External material forces determine our thoughts, feelings, and spirituality. Taking this point of view reduces human beings to passive actors within a deterministic world, and creates the possibility of a “scientific” approach – the study of laws of motion for a society.   

This is an enormous methodological blunder. European intellectuals made this mistake due to the trauma of loss of faith, caused by a century of religious wars between nearly identical religious factions. With the loss of the certainties of religion, they turned to science as the new source of certain truth. Newton’s Laws of Motion made a tremendous impact on European intellectuals. Colin Turbayne: The Myth of Metaphor explains how the metaphor of the world as an organism abandoned and replaced by the metaphor of the world as a dead machine, under the influence of Newton’s Laws. According to Newton, initial conditions determine trajectories of ALL particles: we live in a deterministic world. The philosophy of materialism said that there is nothing other than matter in the universe, exorcising all non-material and unobservable substances, extending their rejection of Christianity. Philosophers set themselves the problem of “explaining away” our internal subjective experience of free will. In accordance with this “scientific” worldview, two materialist methodologies for study of social change emerged:

1. Modern Economics: Human Beings and Historical Events are all subject to universal laws of motion, just like physical objects – “SCIENCE”.
2. Marxist: Human lives are bound within the economic relations of production and distribution. These relations are subject to laws of motion.

Whereas modern methodology treats human beings as robots, Marxists have a more sophisticated approach. They acknowledge the inner world of human experience, and even allow a certain amount of personal freedom. But large scale social change is shaped by material forces.

Our third alternative, Uloom ul Umran, assumes entanglement of Man and Matter, just like the entanglement of our souls and bodies. Material forces shape our thoughts, feelings, and spirituality. But also, our thoughts, feelings, and spirituality shape the material world. A primary illustration is furnished by the rise of Islam. The knowledge given by God to man, accompanied by the spiritual training given by the Prophet SAW to the companions, dramatically changed the course of history. This unprecedented change was not created by any change in the material conditions; rather it was the change in the hearts of men which changed the world. See: What the World Lost Due to the Decline of the Islamic Civilization. http://bit.ly/azrdm 

To summarize and conclude, we will analyze the process of social change using the following template:

1. Exogenous Events, outside human control, create social change.
2. Humans respond – collectively, in groups – to the change.
3. Responses are mediated by theories about causal factors which created the change.
4. Responses are also mediated by class interests and relative power of different classes which are affected by the change.
5. Collective human responses to change shape the course of history

This is actual a natural methodology, but it was abandoned by European intellectuals for complex reasons due to specific historical events which shaped their thoughts. Prior to secular modernity, the Scholastics studied Society based on the Bible & Theology. However, A Century of extremely destructive Wars between Protestants and Catholics led to the  Abandonment of Scholastic Approach. This created the necessity of rebuilding a theory of society on secular – non-religious foundations.

The entire theory of knowledge had to be rebuilt from scratch. After abandoning the Bible, all traditional sources for knowledge became suspect. Reconstruction of knowledge was to be carried out on basis of observations and reason alone.  This led to the deification of science as the only route to certain knowledge. It also led to the abandonment of heart and soul as basis for knowledge; these had led us astray by pointing to the truth of God. Europeans removed the heart as a basis for knowledge. This explains why it is essential for us to develop an alternative to Western knowledge: The Quran says that it is not the eyes that are blind but the hearts.  

LINKS:

• Next Section 4.3 Social Change: From Hunter-Gatherers to Nation-States
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