An introduction to a paper I never wrote

Timur Kuran has written extensively on so-called Islamic economies and political Islam. Just as the “five pillars of Islam” are meant to be followed by every practicing Muslim, the “three pillars of Islamic economy” are meant to be followed by every practicing Muslim system of production, distribution and consumption. The first, behaviour norms with regard to economic decision making, are derived from the holy texts. The second, zakat, the traditional sub-governmental religious tax, is also mandated by the holy texts and is considered by some to be the basis of Islamic fiscal policy. Finally, the traditional-religious prohibition of the charging of interest, Islamic economists would argue, is the centerpiece of Islamic monetary policy.

This trio has been recognized and defended not only by theologians and other non-economists, by also by scholars from a range of social scientific disciplines. This three-pronged blueprint for Islamic economies has “always been there” — what I am concerned with is the extent to which changing economic conditions in the Middle East since the Second World War caused a revival in the literature on Islamic economic theory.

By examining the contextual base of Islamic economic theory, in other words, by focusing on the material wealth and social standing of the literature’s intended audience, I hope to come away with a better understanding of the popularity of this discourse. I hope to see why it has become so common to apply Islamic religious principles to social, political, and economic institutional models. I also hope to gauge the degree that deteriorating economic conditions in parts of the Middle East, coupled with the mass production of economic theory “couched in the language of Islam,” contributed to the attractiveness of political Islam, whether secularist, populist, or militant.

One problem of Islamic economics is determining what exactly constitutes just and correct behaviour. Are this year’s wages Islamically fair given last year’s inflation? Does Islamic economic theory account for the fluid realities of a globally interconnected marketplace? Kuran writes,

The ambiguity inherent in the Islamic norms suggests that the actions one takes may subject one to charges of opportunism by other equally pious individuals who happen to interpret the relevant norms differently.

The obscurity of the norms also suggests that they are susceptible to modification over time.

The problem of ambiguity spans all Islamic social disciplines. It seems that merely attaching the word “Islam” to any institution, whether politics, economics, history, or, indeed, religion, opens it up to innumerable interpretations, each potentially as logical as the next.

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