Islamic approach to Poverty is substantially different from conventional one. Changing attitudes towards poverty in the West have been discussed in following two books:

1.The Idea of Poverty

2. Poverty and Compassion: The Moral Imagination of the Late Victorians

by Gertrude Himmelfarb

3.

The Globalization of Poverty and the New World Order [Paperback]

Michel Chossudovsky (Author

Himmelfarb is the reigning authority on Victorian social thought. This worthy sequel to her widely acclaimed The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age (LJ 12/1/83) studies the late Victorian effort to attack poverty by harnessing scientific methods to achieve social reform. She examines Charles Booth and Beatrice Webb, the Salvation Army and the Fabians, the development of concepts such as unemployment and the poverty line. But she also considers both historians' attitudes toward Victorian thought and its relevance to our present dilemmas. A masterful and incisive study and highly readable; essential for Victorian specialists, those interested in the history of social thought, and collections serving either.

Deeper work is that of Polanyi: The Great Transformation, which shows how the concept of poverty and attitudes towards it changed as a result of the emergence of a market society in England.

Some resources on poverty are available from SOAS:

CDPR’s other thought-provoking, diversified Development Viewpoints are available onhttp://www.soas.ac.uk/cdpr/publications/dv/.

The Centre for Development Policy and Research draws on the broad range of development expertise at the School of Oriental and African Studies to engage in innovative policy-oriented research and training on crucial development issues.

Islamic attitude towards poverty is quite complex -- people often oversimplify and fall into one side or the other. For some poverty is desirable, while for others it is not. In either case, Islam does stress feeding the poor, so elimination of HUNGER is a high priority iterm in Islam. An article on Hunger is attached below.

“The Ethics of Hunger: Development Institutions and the World of Religion”

Paper prepared for workshop on “Ethics, Globalization, and Hunger: In Search of Appropriate Policies”, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, November 2004

Katherine Marshall[1]

The World Bank

[1] Marisa van Saanen and Olivia Donnelly provided substantial assistance in preparing this paper and their support is gratefully acknowledged. Helpful comments were received from Per Pinstrup-Andersen and colleagues who participated in the November Cornell workshop.