CHAPTER 28

DYNAMICS OF SHARI'AH IN A NEW GLOBAL ORDER

(a panel paper to be presented at the Third International Conference on Islamic Political Economy and Interactive Systems: "Dynamics of Shari'ah in a New Global Order", International Institute of Islamic Political Economy and Interactive Systems, Islamic University Chittagong,

December 9-11, 1997)

Dr. Masudul Alam Choudhury

Professor of Economics

The University College of Cape Breton

Sydney, Nova Scotia, Canada

DYNAMICS OF SHARI'AH IN A NEW GLOBAL ORDER

(a panel paper presented at the Third International Conference on Islamic Political Economy and Interactive Systems: "Dynamics of Shari'ah in a New Global Order", International Institute of Islamic Political Economy and Interactive Systems, Islamic University Chittagong,

December 9-11, 1997)

Dr. Masudul Alam Choudhury

Professor of Economics

The University College of Cape Breton

Sydney, Nova Scotia, Canada

The theme to be addressed is Shari'ah (Islamic Law), globalization and the concept of a New Global Order. The importance of this theme is because of the different dynamics that these world views bestow on the issue of sustainable human future.

The Nature of Capitalist Globalization

Globalization in today's context is reflected by a control and transformation of economic relations, where markets and institutions are seen to reinforce each other in the midst of the social contract enforced by global capitalism. Evidences around the world -- South-East Asia, Central Asia, Eastern Europe, Middle East and the industrialized world itself -- point out that human future has become uncertain, unpredictable and unpurposive. Globalization causes this uncertainty by a marriage among unsocial ends: greedy desires of producers, consumers and governments; ineffective economic policies; world governance and its institutions of enforcement of the rules of global capitalism.

The strengthening of markets by large corporations, institutions and policies of the industrial countries, is a necessary condition for both global capitalism and Western hegemony over the rich and prosperous developing hinterland. The preferences of the agents involved in such a global transformation complement each other toward deepening the global uncertainty. Thus socio-economic policies and institutions coordinate the market transformation process in the midst of power, egoism and uncertainty. Consequently, socio-economic equilibrium has been replaced by a hedonic state -- what we refer to here as capitalistic transformational flux. The transformational flux is indicated in terms of critical socio-economic issues -- irresponsible consumption and production, inequitable distribution, and the destruction of ecology.

In this milieu of transformational flux, the rules of individualism, powerful governance and the attenuating market transformation rule supreme. Uncertainty is bred by open-ended financial transactions and non-controllability of resource allocations in the midst of the capitalist hegemony. Sustainability in the sense of human well-being is put at stake by the capitalist menus of production, ownership and distribution of wealth. But paradoxically as it may appear, the volume of money has greatly increased! Yet output arising from real economic activities remains low in the face of financial speculation, the resulting uncertainty that together limit real sectoral activities. The recent case of South-East Asian growth `miracle' that suddenly burst in the face of the stock market turmoils, testifies to the permanence of global entropy caused by the power of transformational flux premised on global capitalism.

The principal causes of global uncertainty have once again emerged as a hedonic perception on the acquisition and ownership of wealth, economic rentiership based on capitalistic greed, absence of goodwill, and a capitalist world-system that looks at exploitation of physical and human resources for its growth. Global resources are seen as endowments for fuelling the hedonic passions of preferred consumers and oligopolistic producers.

The spirit of community that can arise among small scale consumers and producers, has been marginalized by the large and the powerful. For microenterprises, world trade and national production programs have proved to be confounded by a host of complicated legislation, encumbrances and policies (e.g. taxes, fees, collaterals and non-tariff barriers). Such levies increase financial costs for the small scale traders.

Recent compositions of national capital-accounts balances and the structure of world financial resources, show a deepening role of speculation (currency swaps), holding of speculative foreign savings, and interest rate-based monetary policy. These together have caused intense uncertainties in global capital markets and in the development process. The privileges of the Most Favoured Nations Clause combined with Trade Related Investment Property Rights, Trade Related Investment Measures, and IMF's call for world-wide capital accounts liberalization, have unleashed free and unbridled movements of speculative transactions in and out of nation states. This has resulted in an oligopolistic rentiership in world capital markets.

Volatile short-run and long-run interest rates are made the instruments of monetary policy in the presence of random fluctuations in exchange rates and for attaining long-run price stabilization, respectively. Such financial instruments are further enforced by the world institutional governance over exchange-rate devaluation. This is not independent of the sinister plan of the West to control over the assets of developing countries for the benefit of large corporations and their parent governments. The focus on monetary policies for market transformation (privatization) with global governance in it, has increased outside interference in domestic economic arrangements. This has caused adverse interest rate and exchange rate regimes to appear in developing countries.

Interest rate and exchange rate volatility coupled with the speculative greed of large investors and the resultant substitution of speculative activities for real economic activities, have together caused ineffectiveness of monetary policy in controlling financial volatility. In the face of volatility and the restrictive monetary policies that ensue, small scale businesses have suffered immensely. Thus, the ethical values of a global redistribution of profits and the attainment of social well-being, have disappeared in the midst of the capitalistic transformational flux. Doubt and uncertainty have been instilled permanently in all kinds of economic transactions and among their agents. Charity, abundance and social trust have ended.

The Nature of the New Global Order

The New Global Order we want to address here is formed in the midst of objective globalization. Objectivity here is gained from a social contract that is based on a whole new gamut of social, economic, and institutional arrangements. In this milieu, the nature of human relations, science and technology need to be re-examined. We know that post-modernity has opened up these big foundational questions. The reaction has arisen from an intellectual discontent even within the Western world.

In the Islamic world view however, the essence for questioning and renewal (taqlid and tajdid) toward a good society has always remained foremost in the conduct of life. In the New Global Order, such attributes gain fresh fervour all the time by their logical and ineluctable force of acceptance by the many. As the world moves increasingly into uncertainty and social entropy increases under the capitalistic transformational flux, the questions of human future are opened up more vigorously. The Islamic answer thus deepens during times of such serious questioning.

The Nature of Shari'ah in the New Global Order

Shari'ah (literally meaning the straight path, and equated with Islamic Law) presents both the social contract and the scientific groundwork for the new global order that is premised on the episteme of Divine Unity. The result of this world view is unity of knowledge. It is reflected in the socio-scientific complementarity among diversities of admissible possibilities. The concept of social well-being (maslaha) is entrenched in such a principle of universal complementarity.

The most important ingredients of Shari'ah is its purpose -- the maqasid -- of justice, security and guarantee of basic needs for human well-being (al-maslaha-wal-istihsan). These attributes of Shari'ah are entrenched in the normative and positivistic domains taken interactively. Thus, Shari'ah being both a normative as well as a positivistic interpretation of the Divine Laws, is governed by its well-founded roots of knowledge. Knowledge here is derived by the rules of Shari'ah (ahkam as-Shari'ah) and by institutionalizing these in society for impact and enforcement.

At the epistemological level, the normative character of Shari'ah is formalized by the immutable Axiom of Divine Unity. This bestows the social and the scientific world view uniquely to all systems of knowledge. Thus we use the term socio-scientific order.

At the formative level of legal texts, Shari'ah methods take the form of social discourse at all levels and in all issues. Such a milieu of knowledge-based interactions span across all parts of society, interlinking the micro-level to the higher echelons. Search and discovery in the knowledge plane sets in the phase of ijtihad (deriving rules from the epistemological roots), followed by ijma (agreement or consensus). Also, sometime Islamic jurists rely upon the binding rulings of the Islamic learned, mujtahid. This latter method is called qiyas. It is a special case rather than a general rule. It exists when there is an Islamic State with a mujtahid who can be commonly accepted by the general world body of Muslims.

The collectivity of ijtihad and ijma followed by a ceaseless evolution of the same creative process of unity of knowledge forms the medium called the shura. The enforcement of Shari'ah as the Divine Law in various acts of life is realized by the normative-positivistic nature of discourse in the midst of the process generated by shura. The shuratic process is thoroughly interactive, integrative and evolutionary across the fullest extant of the socio-scientific domain where human beings discourse issues.

The New Global Order as the objective globalization of human relations at the levels of science, society, economy and institutions, is charted by the dynamics of Shari'ah. Shari'ah now integrates its attributes with specific worldly issues through the creatively evolutionary power of the shuratic process. Being a creatively evolutionary process of unravelling the Divine Laws as embalmed in the Qur'an and the authentic Sunnah (baiyanah), the shuratic process necessarily legitimates questioning, revisions and affirmation of past human actions through rule-making (ahkam). Such a process helps the understanding and application of Shari'ah rules to specific issues. But in all such matters the episteme of Divine Unity remains the axiomatic premise of further discourse. Search and discovery of the ever-evolving springs of human knowledge premised on the episteme of Divine Unity pertaining to diverse issues of life, are thus central to Shari'ah.

Such a dynamic understanding of Shari'ah, and hence, of all the diverse ingredients of the creatively evolutionary knowledge-induced shuratic process underlying Shari'ah, is authenticated both by the Qur'an and Sunnah. The Qur'an encourages human discourse toward establishing the immutability of the Divine episteme in life. This can be understood from the following Qur'anic verse (Sura iv, verse 59): "O ye who believe! Obey God, and obey the Apostle, and those charged with authority among you. If ye differ in anything among yourselves, refer it to God and His Apostle, if ye do believe in God and the Lasr Day: That is best, and most suitable for final determinatio.." A prophetic hadith says that "constructive disagreement among Muslims is a sign of blessing". Thus there is no finality in the dynamics of the shuratic process. The dynamics of Shari'ah remain permanent in the unending new issues and problems of the New Global Order.

The maqasid-as-Shari'ah leading to the evaluation of given rules (ahkam) in conjunction with cognitive reality, takes the form of a new social contract premised on Divine Unity. In the real world this is manifested by the unity of knowledge. Such a valuation function expresses the Islamic social well-being (al-maslaha-wal-istihsan). Within this valuation function, the maqasid-al-Shari'ah addresses the well-being of the community, of the small scale, the micro-level marginal groups, as well as their linkages with the higher echelons. The essence of complementarity in the emerging unity of knowledge, links up the small with the large through extensively cooperative and participatory mechanisms. Market-institutional interrelationships now become transformational learning processes in the midst of evolving social contracts.

Today, as science, technology, economy, society and institutions are entering the new millennium of experience, humanity finds itself confronted with some great unanswered questions of human well-being. We find that capitalist globalization has become an increasingly entropic and a costly process. The impact of Western Eurocentric idea of the transformational flux has not engendered freedom and happiness for the generality of mankind, except at large private and social costs. Among such costs are the burden of financial interest, expensive and destructive technologies, ecological degradation, unemployment, social discontent, the burden of taxes and uncertainty of the socio-economic worth.

Conclusion: Challenge to Muslims in the New Global Order

The dawning of the New Global Order thus gives challenge to Muslin movements around the world to undertake a number of tasks at once:

First, there is the pressing need for well-coordinated organization of Islamic movements internationally as intellectual, economic, institutional and social genes that can interact and establish a viable Islamic future for the generality of Muslims.

Second, the blue-print of the ummah (the world-nation of Islam) must remain the focus of goals by the collective of international Islamic movements.

Third, increasing dialogues must be launched among all social echelons in Muslim countries to understand the ummatic world view.

Fourth, chaotic behaviour in Islamic resurgence must be avoided and the civil order of the shuratic process must be installed in all matters.

Fifth, the question of self-defence for Islamic movements against antagonistic external forces must be tackled jointly by a forum of the international comity of Islamic movements in a medium of civility.

Sixth, the world view of ummatic transformation must be brought to the forefront of the global scene in order to broaden up the universal perspectives of Islamic transformation among all, to mitigate the misunderstanding against Islam, and to facilitate Islamic learning in the world as much as possible.

Today's signs of Islamic intellectual maturity, awareness, and institution building are the rife initial conditions for the rise of the continuing Islamic assertion for the New Global Order. This is where a highly serious discourse around the "Dynamics of Shari'ah in a New Global Order", must commence.

The International Conference on Islamic Political Economy and Interactive Systems at the International Institute of Islamic Political Economy and Interactive Systems, Islamic University Chittagong, aims at establishing this continuing discourse towards ummah building. We are fortunate that such a program of intellectual and practical worth has arisen in Bangladesh, the nation blessed by the precious gift of human resource. We are blessed by the compassion shown by the Islamic University Chittagong in establishing IIIPEIS as a seat of advanced learning and research. This has surely opened up prospects for all who aspire for the fullness of human future in a New Global Order.