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Preface

Questions and Acknowledgements

Every nation has a direction [or vision] towards which it turns; you, therefore, try to excel in all that is good.

(al-Qur’ān, 2: 148)¹

We wish to bestow Our favours on those who have been oppressed on earth; to make them leaders and heirs and to establish them firmly on earth.

(al-Qur’ān, 28: 5–6)

If Islam can be shown to be capable of providing fruitful vision to illuminate the modern conscience, then all mankind, and not only Muslims, have a stake in the outcome.

(Marshall Hodgson)²

Does economics have a role to play in the realization of a society’s vision? This is a crucial question the answer to which depends on the direction economics may take in the future. However, once we talk of the vision, then there arise related questions of whether different societies may have different visions, and whether these differences are reflected in the approach to Social Sciences in those societies. Muslims have always felt that Islam has a vision of its own and, accordingly, several centuries ago, during the upsurge of the Islamic civilization, began to elaborate the contours of a social, political and economic system that would be conducive to the realization of this vision. However, when the Muslims became subject to a process of decline, followed by foreign occupation, it was no longer possible to even think of realizing that vision. In this respect, the development of the Social Sciences with an Islamic perspective suffered a severe setback. The vision has, however, risen to the surface once again following the independence gained by Muslim countries, and the development of Social Sciences, including economics, in conformity with this paradigm.

A number of questions are, therefore, being raised. The first and foremost concerns the vision itself – what is it, and how does it differ from conventional economics and its offshoots of welfare, grants, social, humanistic, and institutional economics, all of which developed in the West during the period of Muslim decline? A vision essentially indicates a perception of what a society ‘ought to be’ about. Life would be very pleasant indeed if the prevailing conditions were in harmony with this vision. Unfortunately, this is rarely the case. There is usually a significant gap between ‘what is’ and ‘what ought to be’. The question that, therefore, arises is how to bridge the gap? Can this be done by merely analyzing ‘what is’, or is it also necessary to figure out why the ‘is’ is not as close to what ‘ought to be’? Should the nature and mechanics of social, economic and political change that are necessary to bridge the gap also be demonstrated? Since the Islamic vision is basically moral and egalitarian and the paradigm on which it is based religious, there arises the question of whether it is possible to build science on a religious paradigm. If the answer is in the affirmative, then we get into the perplexing question of why the Muslim world slid backward in science and technology after making valuable contributions for more than 400 years? Was this reversal due to Islam or to other factors? These and other questions are addressed in the Introduction and the first four Chapters of this book.

However, no society operates in an historical vacuum. It is affected by a number of interrelated historical developments. It may not be possible to discuss a meaningful strategy for the future development of Muslim countries and the realization of the Islamic vision without tracing the historical roots of their decline and present problems. It is generally expected that efficient institutions will survive over time and that inefficient institutions be weeded out. So why did the reverse scenario take place in the Muslim world, where institutions which promoted advancement for centuries were gradually replaced by inefficient ones that promoted decline? What prevented the Muslim world from reversing this trend?

It may not be possible to provide a satisfactory answer to all these questions by resorting merely to economic variables. Accordingly, Ibn Khaldūn (d. 808/1406) adopted a multidisciplinary approach based on socio-economic and political dynamics and circular causation to explain the Muslim decline and to suggest ways of arresting it. He made a point of taking into account a number of relevant factors including moral, political, social, institutional, demographic and historical ones. His model is discussed in Chapter 5, where an attempt is also made to briefly review some of the contributions made after him. His model is then applied to Muslim history in Chapter 6 to determine the causes of Muslim decline. This leads us to Chapter 7 which reviews the contributions made during the last few decades to economics within an Islamic perspective, now referred to as Islamic Economics. The stage is thereby set to suggest in the last Chapter a framework for the future development of this nascent discipline, so that it may help Muslim countries solve their current problems and also actualize the Islamic vision. Some repetition is inevitable in such a discussion because different aspects of the same questions come up for discussion in more than one context, and to either leave them out or treat them in an unrelated chapter is not necessarily desirable. Some of the chapters were published as journal articles prior to publication of this volume.

This book is a more detailed elaboration of some preliminary ideas expressed by me in a lecture delivered on 29 October 1990 at the premises of the Islamic Development Bank in Jeddah, after receiving the Bank’s Award for Islamic Economics. This has since been published by the Bank as a monograph under the title, What is Islamic Economics? Although I have made an effort to keep this current work simple so as to make it accessible to the non-economist, I have nonetheless not found it possible to totally avoid the well-known technical terms commonly used in economics.

As in my previous writings, my debt to my wife, Khairunnisa, is immense and immeasurable. A substantial part of the credit for this book goes to her for her constant help and encouragement and for taking over a number of my household responsibilities so as to give me the freedom to complete this task.

A number of scholars read a preliminary draft of the manuscript and made valuable comments, all of which have helped considerably in improving the final version. Especial thanks in this respect go to Dr. Murad Hofmann, former German Ambassador to Algeria and Morocco; Prof. Samuel Hayes III, of the Graduate School of Business Administration, Harvard University; Prof. Rodney Wilson of the University of Durham (UK); Prof. Alejandro V. Lorca Corrons of the Universidad Autonoma, Madrid; Professors M. Nejatullah Siddiqi, Anas Zarqa and Rafiq al-Misri of the Centre for Research in Islamic Economics, King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah; Dr. Maʿbid al-Jarhi, Director, IRTI, Islamic Development Bank, Jeddah; Dr. Iraj Toutounchian, Department of Economics, al-Zahra University, Tehran; and Dr. Humayun Dar, Research Fellow, Loughborough University, UK. Consequently, the final version reflects in many places their valuable insights. I am particularly grateful to Dr. Hofmann and Professors Alejandro Corrons, Nejatullah Siddiqi and Rafiq al-Misri for their detailed and penetrating comments on some of the crucial questions raised in this book. I am, however, myself responsible for any errors that may still remain.

I have benefited significantly from the translation of the Qur’ān by Abdullah Yusuf Ali, and Muhammad Asad, and of Ibn Khaldūn’s Muqaddimah by Rosenthal (1967) and Issawi (1950), even though I have not reproduced their translations. Translations of aḥādīth and other Arabic literature are my own. However, my daughter Sumayyah, now a surgeon by profession, has helped me generously in solving some of the difficult problems of translation. Prof. Mustafa al-ʿAzami and his son, ʿAqil, have helped me trace, with the help of their computerized ḥadīth database, the sources of some aḥādīth which have been quoted in this book. My brother Abdul Rahman Chapra and his son, Muhammad Salim, Dr. Zafar Ishaq Ansari (Director General, Institute of Islamic Research, Islamabad), Dr. Manazir Ahsan and Mr. Azmatullah Khan (Director General and Librarian respectively of the Islamic Foundation, Leicester, UK) have provided me with photocopies of a number of old and out-of-print publications which I could not find in Riyadh. My colleague, Dr. Ibrahim al-Ghelaiqah, has helped me retrieve data from the IFS CD-ROM, and Mr. Abdul Rahman al-Muhanna, Librarian of the Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency (SAMA), and Mr. M. Hayyan al-Hafiz of the King Faysal Centre for Research and Islamic Studies, have helped me derive optimum benefit from these two libraries. I extend my grateful thanks to all of them for the valuable help that they have given. I cannot fail to express my gratitude also to Mrs. Susanne Thackray and Mr. E.R. Fox for their excellent editorial input and to Mr. Mobin Ahmad for the valuable secretarial assistance he has provided in the preparation of this book from beginning to end.

Wherever two years are shown separated by an oblique sign after a classical Muslim personality or dynasty, the first year refers to the Hijrī calendar and the second to the Gregorian. A Hijrī year usually overlaps two Gregorian years. Nevertheless, I have shown only one Hijrī year for ease of writing. Moreover, there are differences of opinion about the year of death. However, since my objective is only to give an approximate idea of when the person lived, I have not concerned myself with these differences.

My intention initially was to provide a relatively comprehensive bibliography. However, the interdisciplinary nature of Islamic Economics along with a discussion of conventional economics and its sister disciplines tended to make such a bibliography too long. Hence a large number of entries, primarily those that had not been referred to in the text, were dropped. Consequently, the reader may not find in it the names of several scholars which perhaps should otherwise have been there. This does not in any way mitigate the value of their contributions.

Riyadh	M. Umer Chapra
12 Rabīʿ al-Awwal 1420
26 June 1999

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1. This translation is based on the explanation of the verse in the commentary (Tafsīr al-Kabīr) of Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (d. 606/1209), Vol. 4, pp. 131–3. See also footnote 123 in Asad’s translation of the Qur’ān.

2. Hodgson, 1977, Vol. 3, p. 441.