Historical Context of Development

Today’s all economic text books lessons accumulation of wealth is meaning of the development. Marx and Smith also said the same thing. It’s wide spread idea today that meaning of development is just the pilling-up of wealth and human lives are subordinate to production of wealth. There is famous calculation that value of human life is the amount of life time earnings. These ideas currently rule policies in whole world. As oppose to this Islam offers an alternative vision says human is most important and all other things on planet are for use of and ease of humans but not the other way around. Quran says that if you take one human life it’s as if you’ve killed whole humankind in the world.

So if we can give every person life of dignity, respect and provide them with needs then it would be actual development. In contrast to this human beings are means to production to wealth. In Islam the wealth is means to the empowering and enabling human beings to operate and live good life. To improve human lives it must first learn that human lives are deeply embedded in societies. Creating communities, improvement of social interaction, protection of habitat and preservation of environment will lead to improvements in human lives. All of these things have been disregarded and ignored in West and it’s why planet is heading towards environmental catastrophe. Environmental scientists are saying now that unless we take actions urgently the human kind will not be able to live on this planet. It’s because in the production of wealth everything is being killed, destroyed and destructed in pursuit of profits by multinational corporations. Thousands of animal species gone extinct, forests, lakes, rivers, oceans and atmosphere is polluted in industrial processes and only thing that counts is production of wealth for against immense damage.

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