activity in a real-life Muslim society. At the practical level, making a choice of specific policies is going to be even more challenging. The answer to this challenge does not lie in merely reverting to a set of policies that are labelled Sharī’ah-compatible in the traditional sense.5 The problem is that, because of an informational gap of several centuries, those parts of Islamic Law which deal with social and economic issues have become frigid legal structures which do not vibrate with a sense of reality; nor do they reflect the basic objectives of Islamic Law (maqāṣid al-Sharī’ah), which are the repositories of Islamic ethics.6 But the problem is even more complicated; it is that these traditional maqāṣid too have become totally obsolete and out of touch with the tremendous advances made in the knowledge of ethical principles – especially those relating to the meaning and scope of the ideas of justice. These principles, therefore, must be recast to fill the informational gap noted above. This is especially true of the Islamic position on such vital issues as growth, human freedom, gender equality, etc., where Muslim societies have done exceptionally badly, both in relation to their own lofty ideals and relative to what non-Muslim countries have been able to achieve following their ethical ideals. The task of updating the Islamic Sharī’ah and the maqāṣid al-Sharī’ah and bringing them together into a virtuous circle of evolution is truly monumental; but it must now be taken up systematically.7
The central questions which the present study aims to answer, then are: how to create knowledge about the ends of an operational Islamic economic system and the means to achieve these ends, while keeping in view the modern advancements in economics and ethics; and weaving these diverse elements together in a manner which is logically sound, empirically verifiable, and operationally feasible – and yet religiously authentic? A systematic answer to these questions will help devise a set of rules that can serve as reference points for the creation of knowledge in the realm of Islamic economics, and not just for finding new arguments to prove the ‘unimprovability’ of traditional knowledge about Islamic law, ethics, and economics.
iii) Rules of Knowledge Creation
There are two basic rules to create knowledge about Islamic economics: (a) identify an irreducible and logically coherent system of ethical axioms which is an authentic representation of Islam’s consequentialist moral philosophy, and which adequately addresses the essential plurality of Islamic concerns about the individual’s life and society, and predicts new facts and possibilities for an Islamic economy. (b) Focus on understanding the nature of real-life Muslim societies, rather than of some utopian Islamic society, that may have existed in the distant past. This is because the existing Muslim societies, though no more than a pale shadow of their ideals (and which societies are exact replicas of their ideals?), are the only places where the Islamic principles can be implemented, even though some of these may have universal relevance as well.
On the basis of these rules we identify four fundamental axioms which are authentic representations of Islam’s moral vision, giving it concrete form, and providing an overarching analytical framework for deducing empirically falsifiable statements about Islamic economics: tawḥīd (unity); al-‘adl wa al-iḥsān (equilibrium); ikhtiyār (free will); and farḍ (responsibility).8 The unity axiom acts as a ‘unifier’ of all the constitutive elements of human life into a mutually consistent and supportive totality, in which economic and ethical aspects of life are inextricably linked with each other. The equilibrium axiom denotes an all-permeating social balance. It fixes the direction of change in the basic socio-economic structure of a society by setting up a just system of rewards and incentives, promotes peace and harmony that decides conflicting claims on economic resources on the basis of fairness and justice. The free will axiom defines (substantive) freedoms to make the choices that people have reason to value (e.g., to be literate, to be healthy, to be well-fed, to be politically free, etc.); and it also helps secure freedom from self-love, avarice and greed. These freedoms leave maximum space to engage in morally edifying social and economic activities. The responsibility axiom denotes a person’s moral commitment to improve the quality of social life, especially of the least-privileged in society, who have a prior right in the nation’s wealth to ensure that social harmony, rather than discord, flows from freedom. These axioms, in their fullness, generate new knowledge about the moral and economic aspects of human life and about the many ways in which the mundane and the spiritual dimensions and human well-being leaven each other to let individual genius flower and enhance social good. The claim is that these axioms illustrate the essentially pluralistic nature of Islamic ethics, and provide an adequate evaluative criteria to judge the working of an Islamic economic system in real-life Muslim societies. Above all, they define the Islamic moral vision of a good life, and spell out the basic organising principles of a distinct paradigm to organise human experiences and initiatives. There is nothing preordained or deterministic about this moral vision and its consequences. Indeed, it is meliorist in intent: that humankind can change the world for the better by observing the Right Path.
A few assertions can be made about the relevance of some of the (secular) economic and ethical principles briefly discussed in Section II above. Thus, for instance, Benthamite Utilitarianism (which emphasises the maximisation of total utility but does not worry about its distribution) and the Pareto-optimality principle (which rules out the possibility of improving upon competitive market solutions which are efficient, though not necessarily equitable) are not relevant in conceptualising the workings of the Islamic economic system. The reason being that these principles are totally insensitive to distributional problems and leave little room for a reformative public policy to redress distributive inequities, poverty and human deprivation. In particular, the selfinterest principle, which neo-classical economics regards as the hallmark of rational behaviour (one that worries only about efficient solutions) will find no more than a faint echo in the Islamic system because the latter defines economic rationality more broadly. In particular, the former’s contention that ethical behaviour is a sign of irrationality will be flatly denied in the Islamic system – indeed, it would be denied in any real life system that does not regard sanity as a moral crime. In the same vein, the libertarian moral-rights philosophy (which only recognises the individual’s unlimited moral right to private property and rules out any reformist redistribution of income and wealth, and which rejects the moral right of the poor to aid) is also contrary to the Islamic ethos. In sharp contrast, Islam insists on the prior moral (and legal) right of the poor on the wealth of the rich and recommends radical changes in the basic structure of property rights to meet these rights. However, broadly consistent with the Islamic ethical vision are the more reformist moral theories – e.g., the Rawlsian Justice-as-Fairness and the Difference principles and Sen’s Capability Calculus – which insist on social justice, recognise the prior claim of the poor in the wealth of the rich, and recommend a purposive social policy that is impartial with respect to its underlying principles and seeks the voluntary support of the people for its implementation.
Notes
1. It may be instructive to quote from Smith (1962): “In the European historical experience, which itself varied widely, the secularization process coexisted with an intensification of religiosity on the personal and popular levels…Religious beliefs and practice, as faith, intensified rather than declined during the secularization of the state...” (p. 272).
2. Hayek (1960) takes the same position: it is wrong “to suggest that those who are poor, merely in the sense that there are those in the same society who are richer, are entitled to a share in the wealth of the latter….” (p. 101; emphasis added).
