Name of the
Book: Pakistan, Islam and Economics—Failure of Modernity
Author: Izzud-Din Pal
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Karachi
Pages: 195; Year: 1999
The 1970s onwards saw the emergence of a new trend
in social science research and writings on Islam and Muslim societies.
Numerous Muslim scholars in different parts of the world began attempting
to explore the possibility of developing Islamic perspectives on a range
of social issues, from law and politics to anthropology and the natural
sciences. Numerous economists now turned to fashioning what is today the
well-established discipline of Islamic Economics. What started of as
simply a collection of quotations from the Qur’an and the Hadith
literature on economic affairs has now blossomed into a specialized
academic discipline, taught at several universities in various parts of
the world.
Islamic Economics is not a mere academic affair, however. Numerous
governments have sought to introduce legislation ostensibly seeking to
bring sectors of their own economies in line with the injunctions of
Islam. Pakistan has proved to be one of the major experimental grounds for
this new venture. This book provides an excellent overview of the attempts
at translating the vision of Islamic economists into practical reality in
Pakistan.
The author’s basic contention is that efforts at ‘Islamising’ the
economy in Pakistan cannot be seen apart from the wider attempt of regimes
and political elites with low levels of legitimacy and popularity to win
public support using religion as a convenient tool. He points out that
rather than focussing on the Islamic imperatives of equality and social
justice, which are so central to the Qur’anic text, successive regimes
in Pakistan have sought to focus on particular economic injunctions of the
Qur’an abstracted from wider issues of justice and equality. Thus, the
debate on ‘Islamising’ Pakistan’s economy, he writes, has been
sought to be reduced simply to issues related to interest-free banking,
the abolition of riba (interest), the laws of inheritance and the levy of
the zakat. These are sought to be presented as providing magical solutions
to the problems of a complex modern economy.
Critically examining the actual working of the laws related to the
‘Islamising’ of the economy of Pakistan, Pal argues that these have
hardly worked at all. Despite doses of radical Islamic rhetoric,
Pakistan’s economy remains straddled with numerous seemingly
insurmountable hurdles—glaring inequalities, widespread poverty and a
feudal structure of landholding. The piecemeal efforts at ‘Islamising’
the country’s economy, he writes, have been deliberately crafted in such
a way that the interests of the country’s dominant classes have remained
untouched. The zakat has hardly helped ameliorate the conditions of the
country’s poor millions. The Qur’anic laws laying down a proper share
in family inheritance for women is still observed more in the breach. And
as for the banking system, rather than doing away with interest, a
parallel system of interest-free banks has emerged, while conventional
banks still occupy center-stage. These banks tend to favour large
borrowers and thus have been of little benefit to small investors.
Pal calls for a contextual understanding of the Islamic injunctions on
economic affairs, appealing that an understanding of Islamic economics
must be grounded in a framework of a mandate of social justice and
equality. In other words, a pharisaical concern with the letter of the law
must give way to a commitment to the basic spirit of the Qur'anic
revelation. What is needed, he says, is a new ijtihad to develop new
economic institutions and methods that, while grounded in a commitment to
equality and justice, are relevant to the vastly different conditions of
out times, which the classical Islamic jurisprudents or fuqaha could
hardly envisage. Yet, he is skeptical of any elite- or
government-sponsored efforts at ‘Islamising’ Pakistan’s economy.
Going by past precedent, he argues, there is no evidence to suggest that
the country’s dominant classes would let Islam’s concerns with issues
of social justice interfere with their own vested interests.
This book is essential reading for all concerned with the subject of
Islamic economics and the Islamisation of Knowledge. Its numerous
typographical errors should not detract from its merit of being a
pioneering study of a field that desperately calls for more critical
research and analysis. q
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