al-Muslim fi Alam al-Iqtisad
- Author died
- 1393 AH
- Editions
- Dar al-Fikr
al-Muslim fi ‘Alam al-Iqtisad (The Muslim in the World of Economics) is a treatise on political economy and civilizational development by the Algerian thinker Malik Bennabi (1323–1393 AH / 1905–1973 CE) , published within his series Mushkilat al-HadDailyarah (Problems of Civilization) .
Composition and Context
Bennabi signed the book's introduction in Beirut on March 7, 1972 . It was published as part of Bennabi's intellectual project addressing the crises confronting the post-colonial Muslim world and developing countries along the "Tangier–Jakarta axis" . Editions of the work have been issued by Dar al-Fikr in Damascus and Dar al-Fikr al-Mu'asir in Beirut under the supervision of Nadwat Malik Bennabi, overseen by Omar Meskawi pursuant to Bennabi's legal testament drawn up in Tripoli, Lebanon in 1971 .
Content and Core Themes
The work analyzes economic underdevelopment not merely as a shortfall in financial capital or technical machinery, but as a psychosocial and civilizational crisis rooted in the colonial experience and the loss of civilizational orientation . Bennabi argues that colonialism reduced colonized Muslims to instruments of labor producing raw commodities—such as rubber in Indochina, peanuts in equatorial Africa, rice in Burma, cocoa in Java, and wine in North Africa—depriving them of authentic economic awareness, rights as recognized producers, or consideration as consumers . Following nominal independence, societies succumbed to importing and imitating Western consumer desires without mastering the means to manufacture them .
Bennabi criticizes contemporary Muslim intellectuals for confining their economic inquiry to choosing between Adam Smith's liberalism and Karl Marx's materialism . He also critiques Islamic economists who reduce the economic problem to financial mechanisms, specifically seeking to strip capitalism of usury (riba) through interest-free banking while leaving its liberal premises unchallenged . Drawing on historical examples, he points out that post-World War II Germany achieved economic recovery without gold reserves, whereas the economic blueprint drafted by the German economist Hjalmar Schacht failed in Indonesia because it assumed a German "social equation" that did not correspond to Indonesian social realities .
Additionally, Bennabi clarifies the roles of Islamic jurisprudence and economic specialization: he defends Islamic jurists (fuqaha) against charges of stagnation, asserting that formulating operational economic plans is the domain of technical specialists, while the role of jurists is to evaluate whether proposed solutions conform to Islamic law .
Structure
The book is arranged into an introduction and three primary parts:
- Introduction (al-Muqaddimah): Examines the colonial distortion of the Muslim's economic relationship, the pitfalls of ideological imitation, and the distinction between technical economic planning and juristic verification .
- Part One: Generalities of the Research (‘Umumiyyat al-Bahth): Covers current global economic relations, the distinction between economy and economism (economisme), time valuation and Frederick Winslow Taylor's system, and the limits of Islamic alignment with existing capitalist and Marxist systems .
- Part Two: The Landscape of Problems (Surat al-Mushkilat): Examines the global distribution of economic resources, the inadequacy of purely economic explanations for disparities, and the civilizational roots governing economic development .
- Part Three: Conditions for Takeoff (Shurut al-Intilaq): Treats the function of money as stored labor, financial versus social investment, the ethical foundations of production and distribution, the biological and social equations of the individual, and the transition toward regional economic self-sufficiency .
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