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The Structure Of Islamic Economics

The Structure of Islamic Economics:
A Comparative Perspective on Markets, Ethics and Economics

THE STRUCTURE OF ISLAMIC SYSTEMS ORIENTED
REASONING: ENDOGENIZING ETHICS

With the limitations posed by ethically-neutral perspectives of economic theory premised on the axioms of economic rationality anal philosophical rationalism and on the inherent plurality of knowledge in these, unity of knowledge across systems can neither be defined nor attained. This debility has stood in the way of treating ethics endogenously within socio-scientific comprehension. In Islamic socio-scientific worldview the fundamental root of knowledge is the Unity of God. This Precept of Oneness is both of the essence of the unity of Being as well as the unity of Divine Laws. The Divine Laws are seen as the spring of absolute and complete knowledge. While the ontology of Divine Oneness is not manifest, yet the epistemology of the world-system premised on Divine Oneness is manifested in terms of the unity of knowledge. Such an externalizing of the Divine Laws reveals the fundamental unity of Being, of the Divine Laws and of the world-systems constructed on these. The Qur'an is profuse with verses invoking and exhorting human beings to search out the signs of divine unity in the order of things by contemplation and observation.

Islamic reality is thus an expression of the Signs of God in terms of His Oneness as expressed in the fundamentally unified essence of the universe and of everything in it. The structure of Islamic economics, taken to mean the epistemology of Islamic economics, is premised on the unity of knowledge in its ontological and empirical sense. But although God is One and complete and absolute in knowledge, He has bestowed only a little of this knowledge to world-systems including individuals, societies and scientific universes embedded in world-systems. Yet within this limited scope of knowledge He has created stages of advance that are attained by a progressive and...