When
we say that the market should be restrained by ethical norms we don’t by
default mean that the state should carry that responsibility. Critics typically
take as axiomatic that the market is the root of all evil that any instance of irregularity,
deficiency or oppressive practices that occur in commercial contexts is taken
to warrant immediate outside intervention; and by that is often meant the
state. Such an assumption about the market seriously underestimates the possibility
of the market itself in restraining its own excesses. The misplaced emphasis on
developing measures external to the market to rectify the latter’s shortcomings
has only the result of treating the symptom rather than the real disease.
Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas’s definition of ‘Islamic civilization’: “I define Islamic civilization as a civilization that emerges among the diversity of cultures of Muslim peoples of the world as a result of the permeation of the basic elements of the religion of Islam which those peoples have caused to emerge from within themselves. The process by which such emergence comes about is called Islamization, which is the liberation first from magical, mythical, animistic and ethnic cultural tradition incompatible with Islam, and then from secular control over one’s reason and one’s language. Whatever basic and praiseworthy elements of the pre-Islamic civilization that bind people together and are accepted as compatible with Islam become part of Islamic civilization. It is a living civilization whose pulse describes a process of Islamization, not in the dialectical sense of an evolutionary ‘development’, but in the sense of a progress involving every generation of Muslim towards r...
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