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Islam And Capitalism

Casey O'Rourke
History of Arabs
9-28-06
Capitalism and Islamic Economics
Sitting at a train station one evening while biding my time until I could bide some more time on the slow train back west, two Muslim men kneeled down near me to pray. These two men of the Qur'an wore beards and their traditional clothing, a site I had grown accustomed to during my brief stay in Istanbul, but during the middle of their prayers one man stopped to answer and talk on his cell phone for several minutes. I did not mean to pass judgment on the man but I could not help but see the clash of two worlds represented in this man. The differences of nations have become more and more apparent as the many countries of the world grow more and more interdependent on each other. Pushing this globalization forward at the rapid pace we see today are the efforts of capitalism and its insatiable appetite for larger markets. This effort being aggressively pursued has not only brought Coca-Cola and McDonalds to almost every corner of the world, but also the very idea of capitalism and the values inherent in it. Due to this, the confrontations of ideas and values have sharply revealed themselves and one of the most visible of these clashes has occurred in the Middle East. Islam, the dominant religion of the Middle East, prescribes a much more different way of life. Nations already struggling to create an economy that is in harmony with Islamic tenets are now being faced with the external pressure of globalization. All too often this meeting of different cultures has been characterized as a battle, with our respective ways of life hanging in the balance, capitalism versus "Islamo-fascism" or some other misleading titles that limit debate on the real issues. Yet while the two may seem to differ at a fundamental economic level, they also share much in common that is all too often ignored. In examining this clash of cultures we should also search to see where they blend together if we are to take any...