Biography

This article is an account of how I came to realize that the neoclassical economic theories I had been taught were wrong, and how Islam offers a better approach to understanding and doing economics.

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Allah is the Protecting Friend of those who believe. He bringeth them out of darkness into light. As for those who disbelieve, their patrons are false deities. They bring them out of light into darkness. Such are rightful owners of the Fire. They will abide therein.

Biographical Sketch:

How I came to reject neoclassical theories, and recognize that Islam offers us the best solutions for our economic problems.

Asad Zaman

Initial Steps: It has been a long journey of mind and heart since I first began to suspect that all that I had been taught, in the finest universities in the USA with many Nobel Prize winners among my teachers and colleagues, was false. The first step was when I read Paul Bairoch Economics and World History: Myths and Paradoxes, which provided empirical evidence on several historical episodes that growth had occurred as a consequence of restrictions on trade, and depressions resulted as a consequence of free trade policies. This was so totally out of line with what I had been taught that I asked some of the professors I trusted and believed about it. Their answers were even more distressing – they did not know, and were not interested in historical evidence or empirical support for the free trade theory. One said that free trade was axiomatically true, and the theory is immune to empirical evidence: we can never prove that trade restrictions are beneficial because how do we know if removing them would not cause even further growth. I had not known until then that economic theory was a matter of blind faith. Initially, I was very excited by my discoveries – I could show that many of the fundamental principles I had been taught by the best minds in the west were wrong. I thought that my research on these issues would be greeted with excitement as path-breaking and seminal. I found that my articles were summarily rejected. As just one example, I wrote a paper showing that one can make rational choices without having utilities of the type required by economic theory. One referees report from Econometrica said two things at the same time: this result is well known, and it is also false ! even though both things could not be true. I stepped back to look deeper into the body of knowledge that I had been trained into believing and teaching and preaching. At the same time, my time spent in the movement of Tableegh was creating the experiential basis for a radically different type of knowledge, and entirely unexpectedly, it provided me with deep insights into the nature of western knowledge.

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