SOAS Research Online

Abstract

This chapter attempts to provide an ‘Islamic economics’ as a means of developing a strategy which would transform and strengthen the power of Islamic societies whilst preserving a distinctively Islamic character for the principal forms of economic activity. It is concerned the understanding of economics as a distinctive discursive realm and the categories of thought, as well as the principles which it imposes on those who would enter into it. The chapter examines one of the particular consequences of the endeavour. It deals with the ways in which Baqir al-Sadr came to examine the individuals who constituted the society which he had imagined, bound together by ties of economic interest and linked through their economic transactions. The problem as he formulated it, as well as the problems which he encountered in trying to think through his chosen, distinctively Islamic solution, find echoes elsewhere in the writings of other consciously Islamic writers.