Adam Smith and Islam

Reconsidering the Moral Foundations of Economics

This book examines the ideas of Adam Smith for stimulating foundational reimaginations of economics that are intellectually rooted in Islam. As a moral philosopher with a broad range of ideas, Adam Smith is demonstrated here to be the culminating figure of the sentimentalist school of Scottish ethics, the progenitor of a new English rhetoric, a key figure in the conjectural method of stadial history, as well as a keen theorist of modern scientific methods.

The first part of the book lays out the coherence of a system that Smith’s oeuvre provides when read together, whereby his famous Wealth of Nations emerge as part of a larger intellectual project of building a ‘science of man’ that incorporates various aspects of human and social life. A chief concern of this project was the development of novel scientific methods which would provide an empirical basis for morality rooted in human nature, and inform politics by delineating the route to personal liberty.

The second part of the book is an intensive examination of these foundational aspects like language, ethics, politics and history in Smith’s writings. This penetrating and contextualized reading of Smith become a means for linking sophisticated ideas rooted in Islamic traditions to the discipline of economics. These include rhetorical theories of balaghah, kalam notions of causality, the notion of ‘riqqa’ (empathy) in Ash’ari ethics, and the political implications of ‘mithaq’ (covenant). Engagements with Islamic traditions are thus primarily to disclose the immense possibilities latent within these traditions and thereby stimulate further research.