Tariq Mahmood’s Reviews > Islam and the Moral Economy: The Challenge of Capitalism > Status Update

the prevalence of zakat in the Islamic societies of today proves that Muslims have not accepted the norms of Western culture completely, why do we have to pay zakat when complying with our taxes in a social state like Britain for instance?

Think the Mulsim leadership overlooked the fact that the copying specific Western developments like their economy and defense technology would come at a cost of the moral decay of traditional Islamic societal values. They, therefore, should have invested in educating humanities, instead of only sciences. This gap was filled (and is still the case) by morality movements like Wahabism and Salafism.

Turkey, for example, found out soon enough that merely adopting western armaments was not enough to stop the western encroachments, there had to be a cultural shift towards the west as well.

interesting choice of words was used to define foreign words into Arabic in the wake of the East-West cultural clash. So instead of using Ummah, mutjimah was used instead, therefore divorcing Islam from Western society.

The challenge for Islamic thinkers is how best to capture this energy and how to reproduce the visible strengths of European societies through the transformation of their own.

In the Ottoman Empire in the eighteenth century, for instance, it was initially thought that adopting European military technologies would be enough to guard the realm from further encroachment. This proved to be illusory.

Muslim intellectuals have tried to induce a shift in the way people value social transactions, alerting people to the price they are paying for uncritical engagement with a system that takes no account of their identity, or of the sublime nature of the moral code they must follow as Muslims.

The fear is that money, detached from the objects which give it value, has a free-floating, amoral power, representing a serious threat to the social order and the ethical community. It is thus not surprising that in Islamic thought, as in a number of other great ethical traditions, restrictions have been devised to control monetary exchange, attempting to keep it tied to actually existing objects.

This is directly relevant to Muslim responses since rulings on the fair exchange are central to all the major juristic schools of Islam.

Exchange practices themselves capture much that is distinctive about capitalism. Ideas of exchange form part of a complex web of imagining the world and evaluating it, producing particular business enterprises, legal systems and states to enforce the rules.