SOAS Research Online

Abstract

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book offers an example of the most enthusiastic and vigorous espousal of western ideas of civilization and development. It aims to develop an Islamic economics that traces the way in which the foreign discourse infiltrates and subverts sophisticated attempts to evade it, since the very acceptance of a separate sphere of economics is the acceptance of a fundamental western cultural ‘item’. The book is concerned with the attempts of one Islamic intellectual to preserve an Islamic identity in the face of western intrusions of a capitalist kind. It provides quite a different account of the source and appeal of an identity politics nourished by consumerism and productive of the ‘post-bourgeois’ subject. The book looks at a politics of difference which is simultaneously coherent and fundamentally different from that which difference politics wishes to eliminate i.e. rights-based liberal democracy.