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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).
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.