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Shah Waliullah (RA) [1702-1763]

This brings us to a brief treatment of Shah Waliullah as a more recent Islamic


religious scholar (mutakallimun) of lofty stature. Shah Waliullah carried the
traditions of Al-Ghazzali and Imam Shatibi in combining the essential of Shari'ah,
its understanding, development and interpretation to the issues and problems of
life. He like Al-Ghazzali took deep stock of Akhira as the explaining point of the
relationship between worldly existence and the Hereafter in a meaningful way.
Shari'ah to Waliullah is seen as a natural urge of humanity that had to occur in
history out of Divine Will as Allah is to protect his creatures, human and others,
both in this life and from the limitless punishment of Hell. Through Shari'ah, Allah
is likewise to reward the worldly actions of individuals with limitless rewards in
the Hereafter and thus the developmental process of the Islamic society was to
take its explanation from the Reality of Hereafter. This in itself was a natural
consequence of great utility for responsible life in this world.
In his socioeconomic thought, Shah Waliullah attached great importance to the
reign of Ijtehad, without which he found new knowledge of understanding the
Qur'an, Sunnah and thriving on Shari'ah, to be impossible. Thus, Waliullah
introduced a dynamically new way of understanding the Qur'an. That was to make
interpretive investigation of the verses in a fashion that must be independent of all
commentaries and should naturally invoke the reason to Allah's Greatness
manifested in the Ayaths of the Qur'an under study. The sciences of the Qur'an,
namely, the science of injunction (Ahkam), the science of disputation (of the
polytheists), the science of Divine favours, the science of particular events that
Allah had decreed, and the science of Hereafter, were to be studied in an wholistic
way to understand the totality of Qur'an for its significance to life.(Al-Fauz alKabir Fi Usul al-Tafsir) Thus, like Imam Ghazzali, Waliullah was a sufi who
believed on the individual capacity for self-annihilation for the achievement of the
greatest feat in life as ordained by Shari'ah. Waliullah also believed that since
human knowledge must remain imperfect in life, it was impossible to attain
perfect equilibrium in the socioeconomic systems. Hence, he advocated the pursuit
of excellence with the conscious knowledge of improvement in perpetuity. He thus
believed that many of the Signs of Allah can be humanly comprehended through
deeply pious efforts.
Unlike Al-Ghazzali, Ibn Taimiyyah and Ibn Khaldun, Waliullah believed in
revolution against the corrupt rulers for the sake of attaining peave and justice and
the ultimate reign of Shari'ah in the coming international order of Islam. Thus
many of his writings not only invoked Jihad in the Muslims to establish such an
order, but they also pointed vehemently at the corrupt Muslim rulers, sects and
groups in society. His philosophy was polar to the other Islamic scholars who had
imitated the Greeks in their understanding of Qur'anic science.

Waliullah's concept of historicism was based on a movement of society towards an


incomplete equilibrium in this life, but nonetheless a sure movement, this being
better than inaction, and it being the design of the Divine Laws for human
betterment. Thereby, as long as the Shari'ah was instilled in the hearts and minds
of individuals and society, no higher organic growth of society was capable of
destroying the inner strength of this order. Such an equilibrating concept of
historical movement and the possibility for moral permanence found in it on the
basis of Shari'ah, was a perspective that was polar to the empirical historicism of
Ibn Khaldun. Shari'ah in its living and actional form became the Idea of Qur'anic
historicism to Shah Waliullah as was the Spirit of Freedom the Idea to Hegel in his
Germanic understanding of Occidentalism. In this sense, Shah Waliullah can be
said to have added a vision to the study of history from a dynamic politicoeconomic perspective that was left out by Ibn Khaldun. Besides Waliullah's Hujjat
Allah Baligah, by transcending the limits of the self to the society as a whole and
making the five Qur'anic sciences as the universal in this historical order, had a
relevance beyond Ghazzali's Ihya and the limited function of Ibn Taimiyyah's
Hisba to market regulation alone.
In conclusion we note that the process of Islamic political thought has experienced
a diversity of development between the ways that the religious scholars
(mutakallimun) looked at it and the ways that the rationalists looked at it. Between
these the dividing and discerning line of explanation was the Shari'ah. When
Shari'ah was looked at, developed, applied and extended as a total way of life
interconnecting the religious, philosophical, scientific phenomena with economy,
science and institution, Islamic political thought became enriched by its inherent
interactive, integrative and dynamic model of Divine Unity. This was seen to be
the case of the models presented by Imam Ghazzali in respect to the relationship
of this world with Hereafter; by Ibn Taimiyyah in respect to market, institution
and social justice; by Shah Waliullah in terms of extending the Imam Ghazzali
legacy to the social sphere of human action very much like Ibn Taimiyyah but
more as a sociologist and historiographer than as an economist. In all of these
thoughts the essence of Divine Laws, knowledge and the relationship of the world
to the essentially moral and knowledge foundation of Akhira and Tawhid were
invoked. Shari'ah was then treated as the natural result of this epistemology of
Unity carried through the life of the Prophet (Risalah), interpreted, applied and
extended to varied issues and problems of life through authentic human
discursions (Ijtehad).
In the field of historicism and epistemology which play singularly important roles
in the development of the theory of Islamic political economy, the viewpoint was
different between the mutakallimun and the rationalists. The mutakallimun
configured a continuously equilibrating model -- incompletely equilibrating for
Shah Waliullah and attained equilibrium state for Ghazzali -- of historical

evolution under the guidance of the Divine Laws (Shari'ah) irrespective of the
state of human advancement, from the primitive levels to the highest material
levels. This was so possible as the model of socioeconomic development presented
and possible under the Shari'ah-driven model was based on the assumptions and
characteristics of a dynamic basic needs model. Markets, institutions, technology,
production, factor markets, pricing, resource utilization and distribution were then
all determined under this perspective of socioeconomic development. The tacit
implication in the Shari'ah model of socioeconomic development was that by a
visible and conducive interrelationship between markets and institutions including
governments, it was always possible to grear the Ummah along the trajectories of
the dynamic basic needs regime of transformation. Knowledge would play the
fundamental role in all these and epistemological invocation to derive fundamental
human laws to manage, regulate and instill change in this order was possible
because of their Shari'ah leaning in the discursive Ijtehadi frame. The Ummah
could grow to its highest level of material advancement along the dynamic basic
needs path of socioeconomic development. This was the argument presented by
Shah Waliullah in his visionary expectation of the future Ummah as an
internationalizing force.
The rationalists gave a different interpretation to historicism, change, reality and
methods. They were basically a mix of Hellenic dialecticians and Islamic scholars.
The blending between them was neither possible nor feasible. Greek philosophy of
history and change was based in the open-ended domain of rationalist inquiry, in
which God became a numinous reality. This is particularly to be found in Aristotle
thought that God was not an active force but an attractive force. God is seen not to
cause movement of the world of itself but to present Himself passively as the
cause of the matter's acting. Matter was essential for action in Greek cosmology.
History, socio-economic and socio-political change, science and institutionalism
were all premised on the essence of materiality, while the concept of morality
became relative to the same extent that matter and human perceptions according to
matter were rationalistic creations. Evolutionary phenomena was then the cause
and effect within the material world, given the changing dimensions of morality
and ethics, while God remained teleological and thus numinous from the world.
The Muslim rationalist approach to historicism working within the cosmological
orientation of Greek thought, did not focus on Shari'ah. Their connection with the
Qur'an and Sunnah as the epistemological premise of Islamic thought, was
peripheral. Their materialistic limitations to historical and scientific
interpretations, left their findings to be empirical in nature, or otherwise
metaphysical in substance. Here we find the empiricist historiography of Ibn
Khaldun, the teleological ideas relating to metaphysics, cosmology and society of
Farabi (The Perfect State), Ibn Rushd (Tahafat ul Tahafat), and the pantheistic
epistemology of Ibn Sina (active and passive reason).

With the severance of historiography from Shari'ah centricity, it was also


impossible methodologically for the rationalists to provide the interactiveintegrative-evolutionary core to the process of knowledge-induced worlds. This is
the natural consequence of the axiom to hold materiality as the agent of change
and God to be existential in the Divine domain. In such a perspective borrowed
from the Greeks and brought to a height by the Mutazzilites only to be rejected by
Islamic scholasticism, mater and spirit (i.e. ethics and economy) become
competing ends. Hence an early kind of neoclassical marginalist substitution
results, inspite of the fact that the concept of unity in systems prevailed for all
times among all scholars since the Greeks, but not so methodologically.
In the framework of historiography, Islamic political economy as a
methodological discipline of unifying systems, deriving its epistemology from the
Divine Premise of Unity of God as the primal epistemology and externalizing this
to the Process of Unification in the world through knowledge flows, can hardly be
said to be substantively derivable from the rationalist doctrines. The development
of Islamic political economy comes close to the ideas of the mutakallimun but
taken up in an essentially crearive evolutionary frame that need not assume the
existence of Fana or self-annihilation as substantive requirements of the Islamic
process of change to a better state. Besides, the relationship between Tawhid,
World and Akhira is a two-way relationbship, which has profound mathematical
and methodological, hence institutional consequences for the socio-scientific
order. These are substantive developments and conceptualizations in Islamic
political economy beyond what was given by the mutakallimun. Islamic history
and its philosophy at the end becomes differentiated from Qur'anic historicism. In
the former, empirical grounds and human frailities have marked the process of
change and narrations, but not universalities. History in this sense is cyclical and
evolutionary with certain degree of predictions as inferred from past human
behaviour and societal changes. In the Qur'anic concept of history, change is
neither linear nor repetitive with regularities, although cycles remain. But the
amplitudes of such cycles and their frequencies of occurrence depends upon the
determinism of the Divine Core and how it is utilized by the human order to
externalize to the socio-scientific world. Material events of historical narrations
are then the result of the primordial Divine dialectics of determinism.
Qur'an has thus inscribed in Universal History and Process the indelible IDEA of
Reality, that applies to all contexts of life in the Muslim and the Other sense,
without exception and void. Such an IDEA of the most irreducible Reality was
termed as the Universal Soul in unity of being with Allah as the uncreated essence
of Oneness, by Shah Waliullah, Ibn al-Arabi and Mujadid al-Fatahani. Hence,
whether the Muslims after the Prophet and the Pious Caliphs have or have not
lived up to the ideals of the Qur'an is a relative matter in the eyes of the Qur'anic
Judgement of Reality. That Reality is evanescent and everlasting as the IDEA, the

determinism. It invokes creation every moment through the Divine action in the
material order, thus causing the knowledge-based universe to arise in the
interactive-integrative-evolutionary sense. Whereas, the empirical interpretation of
history and the materialistic determinism of historicism by the rationalists are
simply narration of recorded events with a rationalistic and hence conditional
inference.
Islamic political economy premised as it deeply is on the epistemology of Unity
and Unification of Knowledge through the interactive-integrative-evolutionary
model of unified reality takes stock of the Qur'anic world view and not of the
empirical viewpoint left by the historians. It thus configures a normative and
positivistic world of socio-scientific action and response that is substantively
different from Ibn Khaldun's, Al-Tabari's, Hegel's, Marx's, Schumpeter's and
others.

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