Relevant Research and Topics

New Website to organize my Urdu Materials: AZ4URDU

New Course in Islamic Economics (Feb 2019) at IIIE, IIUI

Written a long time ago

My main collection of writings and talks on Islamic Economics has been shifted to my personal website: asadzaman.net. For a short motivational newspaper article, explaining why Islamic Economics is necessary for today's world, especially in finance, see "On Islamic Economics." For a guide to this collection addressed to a Muslim Audience, see Islamic GUIDE. For a small collection of featured articles, which is changed monthly, click on the FEATURED image. A comprehensive overview of the field is given in: Islamic Economics A Survey of the Literature. See also, online course on Islamic Economics

The basic idea which is explored in different dimensions throughout my writings is radical and revolutionary:

Western Social Science is FUNDAMENTALLY FLAWED from the roots up -- this is because the west has cast spirituality out of its knowledge base and developed a fundamentally wrong understanding of what human beings are -- social science is based on this complete lack of understanding of the nature of human beings and the purpose of our lives. As a simple, illustration, the economists idea that human beings are selfish and greedy is simply wrong -- their is now massive amounts of evidence against the fundamental economic axioms.

The project of Islamization of Knowledge was based on the idea that we have to assimilate and integrate the stock of newly acquired Western knowledge into the folds of Islam. I have argued this project has been a failure because what is considered knowledge by the west is actually error and ignorance. We can do much better by simply rejecting Western social scientific theories and starting afresh from purely Islamic roots of the Quran and Sunnah. As an illustration of this basic idea, my paper on Re-Defining Islamic Economics shows that existing definitions are flawed attempt to mix Quran and Sunnah with Western definitions. The alternative of taking a definition PURELY from Islamic sources creates an entirely new and radically different approach to the subject. A recent lecture in 17th DL IRTI course on Islamic Economics develops A New Methodology for Islamic Economics -- in this new methodology, the normative element plays a central role. This is in direct contrast to Western methodologies, where the normative is not considered part of science, or even part of human knowledge.

Most recently, I have shown that taking Islamic view impacts everything. I am in process of developing lectures on an Islamic Approach to Statistics. Entirely unexpectedly, even an apparently value free subject like statistics is dramatically changed when Islamic ideas are applied to its study.

A thematically arranged collection of my writings on Islamic Economics is available HERE.

Education at MIT and Stanford brainwashed me into believing neoclassical economics. An autobiographical sketch of experiences which gradually led to the understanding that these theories are completely wrong and extremely harmful is given below.