This is a shortened version of a paper now appearing in the Proceedings of the Pakistan Academy of Sciences, Vol.34, 1996.

The preference field of Islamic political economic order is premised in agent-agent interactions and integrations that are pervasive across agents, systems and thought. Contrary to this, mainstream economic theory and its prototype in institutionalism, are premised on preference formation based on methodological individualism. This major difference between the two systems of life and thought is deeply and inextricably an epistemological one. Each derives its source of knowledge and conduct of life and thought based on these distinctive epistemologies and the principal sources they individually adhere to. In Islam these sources are the Qur'an, Sunnah and Ijtehad. In the occident the source is sheer reason and rationalism of the vagrant human praxis.

It is precisely because of the individuated nature of the human praxis in spite of the consensual political institutions that may be devised, that such individualistic preferences are copied across individuals, households and institutions to the entire social complex. Thus, interactions are marginalized despite how dearly they may be sought. In Islam, the very presence of the Unity and Unification Epistemology in the centre of experience and thought, embeds the principal of interaction, integration and evolution in a strong way. Thus preference fields in either of these two systems are to be studied in light of the nature of interactions, integration and evolution that emanate directly from the polar epistemological roots.

Inferences Derived from Occidental Epistemology in the Social Sciences.

A discourse in social and economic thought will unravel that epistemological questions have played key role in the rise of revolutionary paradigms at every juncture of economic history. In this context, it can inferred that epistemology will continue to play the distinct originary role in the rise of revolutionary doctrines and worldview in the future as well. The new generation of social scientists confronted by a new generation of global issues that are embedded in a wide mix of ethical, institutional, political, social and economic forces impinging upon market transformation, must therefore be searching for a new epistemology in social and economic reasoning.

In occidental thought, ethical, social and institutional factors remain exogenous to the economic and social universe. Hence, no interactions can be generated among these systems. This dichotomy between economic and socio-ethical factors have caused embedded or structural duality in the entire socioeconomic arrangement of occidental order. The dualism is structural because by its perceptions on normative and positive laws, it is indelibly and intrinsically entrenched in the system by methodological, behavioural and institutional factors. The result of such structural dualism is that it remains persistent without exception in the whole terrain of occidental social and economic history, in spite of the good intentions that many exponents had to the humanistic alternative.

In this dualistic milieu, if we are to view market transformation as a general ethico-economic equilibrium process, then many essential requirements remain deficient in occidental approaches to ethico-economics. First, the epistemological premise is incomplete as individualistic reason defines the randomness and uncertainty of change. In terms of Kantian terminology, the domain of practical reason is made distinct and dualized from that of pure reason. Although the latter is assumed to be existent, yet it becomes dysfunctional, leaving thus practical reason alone to act upon socio-scientific reality.

The structural dualism of occidental social and economic epistemology also means that the tripartite relationship among freedom, natural liberty and moral laws vouched in the classical economic theory of Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments, remains endogenous in this order. However, within this circularly established structure of embedded tripartite relationship, there is structural exogeneity of ethics. In other words, ethical endogensity is impossible in all of occidental order. The principle of ethical endogeneity means the systemic treatment of ethics by cause and effect between moral and material entities in the socio- scientific universe.

Comparative Perspective: Attributes of Islamic Worldview in the Social Sciences

Derivation of the Islamic worldview in the social sciences commences from the outer interactive relationship. It is subsequently interacted by the inner core. Now the differentiation between the inner and the global parts disappears, and is replaced by the kind of flows that takes place between the primordial knowledge-centered totality and its induction and regeneration by causality, flowing in and out of the inner core. Such interactions define the essence of socio-scientific processes.

The interactive and integrative action of knowledge flows across the entirety means that there is global complementarity in the knowledge plane defining the endogenous nature of this process. This worldview does recognize the fact that there are humanly created perceptual orders of the occidental type that establish their own endogeneity of processes in their states of ethical exogeneity. Thus, out of the globally complementary process-based worldview arises two comprehensions. One constitutes essential reality -- the global process; the other is one of error -- the ethically exogenous process.

The key attribute of Islamic social sciences are therefore, its primordiality of the knowledge-centered premise from which its uniquely Unification Epistemology is derived. This Unification Epistemology is the Divine Essence of Creation. Oneness of God is treated in this originary state of total creation as the completeness of Unity. It accepts no dualism in any state of comprehension. From the Oneness of God emanates the Divine Laws that present the functional relations to comprehend creation as wholistically unified. Thus, the normative and positive aspects of Divine Laws are integrated together in the premise of Divine Unity to explain reality. These Divine Laws carry content and context in terms of the injunctions of the fundamental epistemological texts, Qur'an and its explication, i.e. interpretation and practice by the authentic Sunnah of the Prophet Muhammad. Between Qur'an (normative) and Sunnah (normative and positive), the normative and positive aspects of the Divine Laws are unified together to yield knowledge.

While the perfection of the unified limit of creation is primordially axiomatic in the Islamic knowledge-centered worldview, its functional nature in the real world is derived and reinforced by flows of knowledge premised in that Unified Epistemology. This acquires both the moral and material comprehension of creation. Thus, interactions between the inner and outer parts of Figure 1 denote the processes whereby knowledge is primordially endowed and then functionally derived for application to understand reality. This stage shows the continuous process of interactions that goes on in the universe most minutely, to establish complementarity between material entities by means of the knowledge input and its creative regeneration. In this way moral-material complementarity is established. The result is the end of dualism in every form. This is affirmed by the Oneness of God as Being and by the Divine Laws as premised in global complementarity, enabled by Unification Epistemology and applied to the real world in the scale of similar attributes.

The moral laws enabling such moral-material global complementarity and the end to dualism constitute Shari'ah, Islamic Laws. Yet because flows are incessantly interacting between the primordial completeness and human enactments of the laws in the real world situations, therefore, Shari'ah evolves continuously along the paths of knowledge flows. This process of attaining flows of knowledge from the primordial text and applying it to real world situation is called Ijtehad -- authoritative research into the fundamental texts of the Islamic epistemology. Ijtehad denotes the essence of interactions taking place through the Islamic institution of universal consultation called the Shura. Indeed, the process interrelationships of global interactions (consultation) and thus complementarity, constitute the Shuratic Process.

The interactions that emerge from the Shuratic Process are simulated to lead into a consensus or agreement followed by ever more of the type, as knowledge continuously evolves, affecting higher levels of evolution of Shari'ah. The consensual stage is said to be Ijma. In special cases, but not as a rule, the presence of an internationally accepted Islamic learned called the Mujtahid, can enforce a particular rule called Fatwa. Such an enforcement is called Qiyas. Qiyas may be understood as authoritative ruling in a state of extreme necessity. It remains strictly conditional to the presence of the Islamic knowledgeable personality publicly accalimed by the Islamic world, Ummah.

The attributes of an Islamic methodology in the social sciences has now been explained in comparative perspectives. The question now redressed in the Islamic social science framework is: Are society and markets ultimately driven by Hobessian type selfishness, Smithian type individualism, Kantian type structural dualism, and institutionally dysfunctional preferences in all cases, or is it essentially unified between the moral and material order?

In answering this question from the perspective of Islamic knowledge-centered worldview, we see that this approach is based on a system of social, economic, political and institutional interrelationships, that being premised in the primordial text of Unification Epistemology, is inculcated from the whole gamut of change. This comprises knowledge induction, behavioural development, identification of consumption, investment and production menus, institutional change, laws and legal system and socio-political interactions, that all go together to set in motion the Islamic worldview. On the methodological side, models of markets now become process models of inter-systemic realities. The process is understood scientifically, that is, it is derived from the scientific orientations provided by Unification Epistemology. At the end, the possibilities of social consensus and evolution makes the process universal in appeal. The same through the interactive essence, conveys the contextual universality of the Islamic worldview. By this realization of the structural and instrumental unity of the Islamic worldview, market transformation becomes a reality in moral-material complementarity.

Contrasting Perspectives Between Occidental and Islamic Epistemologies: Interactions-Integration Central to Islamic Preference Formation.

The historical process of creation and affirmation in the socio-scientific universe is a persistent struggle between the forces of methodological individualism governed by its Eurocentric hegemony on the one hand, and the unified worldview of reality. The occidental order is historically proven to be a continuity and intensified convergence into an individuated world. The Islamic order presents a wholistic world attained through the process worldview of interactions and integration emanating from and reinforcing the fundamental knowledge-centricity of the universe. This conflict between process and independence, between consensus and individualism, between marginalism and global complementarity -- in fact, between truth and falsehood, will always represent the dialectics of change.

Market transformation will have to be taken up in the midst of these realities, keeping in mind the richness of the process, its principle of globally complementarity, interactive-integrative worldview offered by Islam, as opposed to the reductionist and mechanistic socio-scientific models of occidental construct.

Worldview against perception, this is the ultimate search for reality. Perception defines rationalistic inquiry roaming randomly across diversity that is empowered either by individualistic or institutional hegemony. Perception is cognitive and hence always differentiated. Bergson calls perception as the lowest level of mind, mind without memory. When perceptual epistemologies, theories and consequential behaviours and institutions are activated to delineate reality, we have a perpetuation of random diversities, the rise of global uncertainties. Markets as a system of exchange and exhangeables as Boulding called it, becomes a powerful instrument to perpetuate the perceptual orientations so construed.

Worldview means the unified comprehension of the universe and all its sub-systems. But apart from being an empty cosmic concept, it assumes meaning in the creative order of evolutionary knowledge interacting with the material order. Such continuous and creative flows of knowledge establish cause-effect inter- relationships with the primordial text of Divine Unity -- the most unified reality that can be. Markets in this unified order become a system of exchange and exchangeables that are cognitive creations of knowledge flows. Thus the market transacts not goods but knowledge in the first place. Thereby, social contracts become the exchangeables rather than fetish goods in this system of knowledge transactions.