Faith and Capitalism
This chapter considers the theological foundations of Islamic finance. There is also an analysis as to how arguments against religion helped revitalise the debate surrounding Islamic economics. There is a comparative analysis as to how Muslim and Christia
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Faith and Capitalism
The Role of Faith in Economic Thought The fictional detective, Sherlock Holmes astounded the flat-footed policemen of New Scotland Yard with his brilliance when he caught the cunning criminals and outsmarted his arch nemesis, Moriarty. The secret of Holmes’ success was, apparently, his ignorance for when told by his faithful assistant, Dr Watson, that the Earth orbits the Sun, Holmes declared: Now that I do know it I shall do my best to forget it. You see … I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skilful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge, you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones. “But the Solar System!” I protested. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 J. S. Watkins, Islamic Finance and Global Capitalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59840-2_6
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“What the deuce is it to me?” he interrupted impatiently: “you say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work.”1
This fictional conversation can be viewed as a parody of the growing nineteenth-century secularism within Europe and North America. The very idea that understanding the place of humanity in the universe could be considered as unimportant was a mirror to the changing social mores. Though the United Kingdom was, then, a devoutly Christian country, opinions were being transformed from the old accepted ways of thinking. According to a survey carried out in England and Wales in March 1851, out of a total population of 17,927,609, only 7,261,032 had attended church on any Sunday that month.2 During the nineteenth century, Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill spoke of utilitarianism where the utility of any policy is whether it is useful in bringing about the greatest happiness of the greatest number of people. The focus was shifting away from doing good works to claim spiritual salvation in the afterlife to enhancing life chances for the living as a good in and of itself. Later in the century Nietzche had declared that “God is dead” whilst Lenin was on the verge of leading the world’s first Communist secular state. Even that arch nineteenth-century capitalist, the American financier, Andrew Carnegie had his doubts abou
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