A Qur'anic Model for a Universal Economic Theory

A Qur’anic Model for a Universal Economic Theory 9
V(l) also reveals that the fundamental factor that makes the test that underlies the
MPC powerful is to be sought in the psychology of man. God has endowed the human
self with a powerful desire for the pleasures derivable from the economic and social
inputs of wealth and children, v(2) and v(3), on the other hand, show another dimension
to the test that man has to go through, namely, the covert and incessant presence of
Satan with the sole purpose of seducing man as to be unthankful in the very inputs of
wealth and children. The outstanding weapons of Satan are none but those attributes of
the human self that enable it to do wrong. Thus it becomes clear that the nature of the
test that man has to go through on earth is essentially the same as that to which his
forefather and mother were exposed to in the Garden. It is a test that requires the
struggle for dominance between the two domains of the human self, the domain of
reason and piety on the one hand, and the domain of whims and wrongdoing on the
other. The former requires the exercise of reason and willpower to promote those
motives and attributes in the human self that generate economic actions that result in
thankfulness. The latter requires man to succumb to those motives and attributes that
generate economic actions which result in unthankfulness.
Thus, the close investigation of the nature of the human self from an Islamic
perspective becomes paramount for our analysis at this stage before we probe further
into the economic aspect of the MPC. From the stages of the MPC discussed so far, the
most important fact revealed about the nature of man is his duality. This duality is in
terms of body and self, and the duality of the self in terms of potential for doing wrong
and potential for doing right. However, it is relevant to briefly introduce the state of the
duality of man in Western literature before proceeding to the Islamic standing. This is
because the Western modern conception of man and hence all the modern sciences that
deal with him are largely based on the conclusions summarized below from that
literature.
Duality of Man in Western Literature
In this section I rely mainly on the accounts of duality given by Pratt, V. (1978).
The development of the social sciences in the West has been riddled with problems
emanating from the complexity of the social phenomena and from growing in the
shadow of the natural sciences. The nature of the human being and his role in this life
has particularly been a thorny issue for Western social sciences. One school of thought
conceives of man as a machine; a robot controlled by a computer, the brain. This
conception has many facets, one of which considers man as a machine in the sense that
his behavior is completely determined by physical laws like any machine. Another
conception has been to view man as a highly organized lump of ordinary matter and
nothing more. There is no need to postulate a "soul" nor "spirit" to account for what we
know of human beings - Man is not made up of the sort of matter with which physics
deals plus a different kind of "matter" - a spiritual substance, for example.
Another school of thought holds an opposite conception of man from that of the
"mechanist" school. This conception holds that: there takes place in the human being
"processes" other than physical ones - the thoughts, feelings, sensations, and so on,
which make up the person's conscious experience. Since we cannot have a process
without a substance that undergoes the process, it follows that for the non-physical