Is Development Accumulation of Wealth? Islamic Views

Abstract

The idea that development is mainly about the accumulation of wealth commands widespread support. Dissenters have introduced other dimensions of development, but nonetheless agree on the centrality and importance of wealth. However, Islam is primarily concerned with spiritual and moral development. Teachings of Islam created an inner revolution within the companions of the prophet, which led to the creation of a new form of society with distinctive institutions and ideology. Eclipse of Islamic civilization, and the rise to global dominance of capitalist societies has led to widespread acceptance, even among Muslims, of ideas antithetical to Islam. In this article, we expose and refute one dozen widely believed myths created to support Western hegemony, and provide alternative points of view

References

1. Anderson, K. (n.d.) “Violence in Society,” Probe Ministries, [accessed August 13th, 2013.]
2. Lord Acton. (n.d.). BrainyQuote.com. Retrieved August 14, 2013, from BrainyQuote. com Web site: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/l/lordacton165710. html
3. Aristotle., 1999. Nicomachean Ethics, tr. Irwin, T. Hackett Publishing Co.
4. Armagan, M. 2006. The Myth of Ottoman Despotism , The Fountain: Issue 55 / July - September 2006
5. Asad, M. 2008. The Message of the Quran, Book Foundation
6. Ayer. A. J., 1936, reprinted 1971. Language, Truth and Logic. Penguin Books: Harmondsworth.
7. Bari, Faisal 2011. From Economic Growth to Human Development: The Journey with Mahbub-ul-Haq. Lahore Journal of Policy Studies, 4 (1), pp. 79-97.
8. V. Balahnova: “The Oriental Despotism: A Scholarly Myth and Reality” Stratum plus Anthropological Research in Moldova 2005-2006

9. Bauman, Z., 1989. Modernity and the Holocaust. Cornell University Press.
10. Blaut, J. M., 2000. Eight Eurocentric Historians. The Guilford Press.
11. Brown, D. A., 1991. Bury my heart at Wounded Knee: an Indian history of the American West. Random House.
12. Campbell, K., 2013. Guantanamo Bay prison guard converts to Islam because of the living faith of Muslim detainees, All Alabama, AL.com
13. Carmichael, M.,2012. Harvard Accuses 125 Students of Cheating. The Boston Globe.
14. Centre for Social Justice, 2006. ‘Fractured Families,’ The State of the Nation Report, 14 December, London: The Centre for Social Justice.
15. Cohn, M., 2013. Iraq: A War of Aggression. No WMDs, No Connection to Al Qaeda, Global Research.
16. Dabashi, H., 2011. Brown Skins, White Masks: The Islamic Mediterranean, Pluto Press
17. D’Ambrosio, A., 2011. A Heartbeat and a Guitar: Johnny Cash and the Making of Bitter Tears. Nation Books.
18. Diamond, J., 2005. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed: revised edition. Penguin.
19. Douthwaite, R., 1993. The Growth Illusion: How Economic Growth Has Enriched the Few, Impoverished the Many, and Endangered the Planet. Council Oak Books, 1350 East 15th Street, Tulsa, OK 74120.
20. Easterly, W. R., 2001. The Elusive Quest For Growth: Economists’ Adventures And Misadventures In The Tropics. MIT press.
21. Edmondson, B.,2010. All the Lonely People. AARP the Magazine,Nov/Dec.
22. Easterlin, R. A.; McVey, L. A.; Switek, M.; Sawangfa, O.; Smith-Zweig, J., 2010 The Happiness-Income Paradox Revisited. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107 (52), pp. 22463-22468
23. Eisenstadt, S. N., 2003.  Comparative civilizations and multiple modernities.(1).Brill Academic Pub.
24. Elkins, C., 2005. Britain’s Gulag : The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya, Pimlico Publishers
25. Elmarsafy, Z.,2009. The Enlightenment Qur’an: The Politics of Translation and the Construction of Islam. Oneworld Publications Limited.
26. Eribon, D., 1992. Michel Foucault. Translated by Betsy Wind, Harvard University Press.
27. Fanon, F.,2008. Black Skins, White Masks, Translated by Richard Philcox, Grove Press.
28. Figueria, D. M.,1995. Oriental Despotism and Despotic Orientalisms. Chapter in Anthropology and the German Enlightenment: Perspectives on Humanity, ed. K. M. Faull, Bucknell University Press.
29. Ghosh, G. K. and Ghosh S.,2011. Indian Textiles: Past and Present, APH Publishing
30. Goody, J.,2012.The Theft of History. Cambridge University Press.
31. Glover, J.,2012. Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century. Yale University Press.
32. Graham., 2006. How Islam Created the Modern World, Amana Publications.
33. Gray, J., 2007. Enlightenment’s Wake: Politics and Culture at the Close of the Modern Age, Routledge Classics.
34. Griffin, J., 2010. The Lonely Society?, Mental Health Foundation, UK
35. Hart, M.,2000. The 100: A Ranking Of The Most Influential Persons In History, Citadel
36. Herrnstein, R. J., & Murray, C.,2010. Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. Simon and Schuster.
37. Huntington, S. P.,2011. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. Simon- Schuster.
38. Hughes, R., 2010. The Fatal Shore. Random House.
39. Herder, J. G. and Barnard, F.M.,2010. J. G. Herder on Social and Political Culture, Cambridge University Press.
40. Hodgson, M.,1977. The Venture of Islam, Volume 1: The Classical Age of Islam, University of Chicago Press.
41. Hoffman, P. T., 2012. Why Was It Europeans Who Conquered the World?. Journal of Economic History, 72(3), pp.601.
42. Gatto, John Taylor ( June 1998) “A Short Angry History of American Forced Schooling” speech delivered at Vermont Homeschooling Conference.
43. Gilson, D. and Perot, C., 2011.It’s the Inequality, Stupid, Mother Jones Special Report: Plutocracy Now, March-April 2011 issue. Data for chart taken from
44. Glover, J.2001. Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century, Yale University Press.
45. Halberstam, D. 1993. The Best and the Brightest, Ballantine Books
46. Ibn Khaldun.2004. The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History, translated by Franz Rosenthal, Princeton University Press.
47. Josephson Institute, 2008.The Ethics of American Youth: 2008. Report Card on the Ethics of American Youth.
48. Kennedy, P.,1989. The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, Vintage.
49. Keynes, John Maynard., 1936. The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, London: Macmillan (reprinted 2007)
50. Krugman, P.,2009.How Did Economists Get It So Wrong? New York Times Magazine, Sep 2.
51. Landes, D. S.,1999. The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor, W. W. Norton & Co.
52. Liptak, A.,2008.US Prison Population Dwarfs that of Other Nations. The New York Times, 23 April.
53. Ludlow, Lawrence M.2005.Machiavelli and US Politics,online at http://fff.org/author/ lawrence-m-ludlow/
54. Macaulay, T. B.,1958. Minute on education. Sources of Indian tradition, 2, 49. ed. Embree, A. E, Columbia University Press.
55. McCoy, A.,2007. A question of torture: CIA interrogation, from the cold war to the war on terror. Macmillan.
56. Morgan, M. H.,2008. Lost History: The Enduring Legacy of Muslim Scientists, Thinkers, and Artists. National Geographic Books.
57. Monbiot, G.,2012. Deny the British empire’s crimes? No, we ignore them. The Guardian, 23 April 2012.
58. Parker, G.,1996. The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500-1800. Cambridge University Press.
59. Phillips, A. A. B.,1998. Dawah work among US Troops Won 3000 converts to Islam. Islamic Voice, July 1998, 12(07), No. 139.
60. Piketty, T., & Saez, E.,2003. Income inequality in the United States, 1913–1998. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 118(1),pp. 1-41.
61. Polanyi, K.,2001. The Great Transformation: The Political And Economic Origins Of Our Times, Beacon Press.
62. Rashid, S.,2009. Underdetermination, Multiplicity, and Mathematical Logic, draft, available from: PhilSci-Archive website< http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/ archive/00004905/> [Accessed 15 August 2013]
63. Reuben, Julie A.,1996. The Making of the Modern University: Intellectual Transformation and the Marginalization of Morality, Chicago: University of Chicago Press
64. Rhodes, Cecil J.,1902.Confession of Faith. essay included in The Last Will and Testament of Cecil John Rhodes, ed. WT Stead (Review of Reviews Office: London).
65. Russell, B.1903. A Free Man’s Worship. reproduced in The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell, 1903-1959: By Bertrand Russell, Robert Edward Egner, Lester Eugene Denonn, John Slater, NY:Routledge, 1992. Downloadable from: http://www. positiveatheism.org/hist/russell1.htm
66. Sachs, J., 2006. The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for our Time. Penguin.
67. Said, E.,1978. Orientalism New York: Vintage Press.
68. Shah, A.,2005.The Scale of The Debt Crisis. Global Issues; available through:Global Issues website [Accessed 12 August 2013]
69. Sandel, M.,2013. Harvard University’s Open Online Course: Justice, Episode 01.
70. Schumacher, E. F.,2010. Small is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered, Harper Perennial.
71. Skidelsky, R.,2001.Keynes and the Ethics of Capitalism. Paper presented at Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA (Cites from ‘The future’, Essays in Persuasion (1931) Ch. 5, John Maynard Keynes, CW, IX, pp. 329 - 331, from Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren (1930).
72. Skinner, B. F.,1972. Beyond freedom and dignity. New York: Bantam Books.
73. Solnit, R., 2013. A Rape a Minute, A Thousand Corpses a Year,The Nation Institute. [online]. Available at [Accessed 14 August 2013]
74. Soto, Hernando de,2003. The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else, Basic Books.
75. Stanford Magazine: “A Case of Competing Loyalties” (Fall 1983), pp. 38–43
76. Stavrianos, L. S.,1981. Global Rift: The Third World Comes of Age, William Morrow & Co
77. Stiglitz, J. E., Sen, A., & Fitoussi, J. P., 2009. Report by the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress.
78. Sayyed Abul Hasan ‘Ali Nadwi,2005. Islam and the World : The Rise and Decline of Muslims and Its Effect on Mankind, UK Islamic Academy.
79. Tawney, Richard H.,1926. Religion and the Rise of Capitalism. Mentor Publishers, London.
80. Toynbee, A. J., & Somervell, D. C.,1960. Civilization on Trial: the World and the West. Meridian Books.
81. Valiunas, A., 2006. The Agony of Atomic Genius, The New Atlantis, [online] Available at [Accessed 12 August 2013]
82. Vigo, J., 2013.Beyond the Travesty of Damani, On Rape and Neocolonialism, CounterPunch, [online] Available at >[Accessed 10 August 2013]
83. Weber, Max,1930. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Transl. Parsons, Talcott, London: Allen and Unwin.
84. Weissman, R.2007.Greenspan, Kissinger: Oil Drives U.S. in Iraq, Iran. Huffington Post. 17 September.
85. Wilson, C and Moulton B.,2010. Loneliness Among Older Adults: A National Survey of Adults 45+, prepared by Knowledge Networks and Insight Policy Research, AARP.
86. Zakariyya, M. M.,1993, The Teachings of Islam [Fazail-e-Amal], Kitab Bhavan,
87. Zaman, A., 2013. Islam Versus Economics. Chapter 3 in Oxford University Handbook on Islam and the Economy, edited by Kabir Hassan and Mervyn Lewis, Oxford University Press, (Forthcoming).
88. Zaman, A., 2013. Re-Defining Islamic Economics. Chapter in Islamic Economics: Basic Concepts, New Thinking and Future Directions, Cambridge Scholars Publishing (Forthcoming)
89. Zuboff, S., 2009. The Old Solutions have become the New Problem, Businessweek, July 2, [online] Available at < http://www.businessweek.com/managing/content/jul2009/ ca2009072_489 734.htm>