Polar Visions of the Economy

In the last five decades, a paradigm has emerged dominating thinking about how Islam proposes humans, individually and collectively, are to manage resources that their Creator has gifted them. Adopting narrow views of the works surrounding a concept developed in the 1980s called “Islamization of Knowledge,” the paradigm proposed to “Islamize” the dominant paradigm of Economics by adding to it “Islamic values and ethics” to form “Islamic economics.” This development is reminiscent of Christianity's compromise with capitalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The former abandoned the essential values of grace, selflessness, humility, compassion, sacrifice, and benevolence to accommodate capitalism with its principles of possessive individualism, self-interest, self-promotion, greed, and cutthroat competition. There is genuine risk that adoption of the “Islamic economics” paradigm will lose all sense of authenticity, a crucially important concept that relates to the degree that ideas, behaviour, or phenomena have direct, root connections to Al-Qur'ān. This authenticity is the basis of legitimacy of whatever concepts, ideas, or thoughts that bear “Islam” as prefix.