Two other factors played key roles in the emergence of Islamic economics. MawdudI and most of his associates had received a traditional education. As such, they expected to be at a disadvantage in a society dominated by the Western educated 'partial Muslims’ who were spearheading the movement for Pakistan. They and their constituents had a vested interest in preserving traditional patterns of authority. Efforts to give economics a religious cast stemmed also, then, from a protectionist impulse.
The other complementary factor was rooted in the perception, shared widely both within and outside India, that Indian Muslims, especially those exposed directly to the West, were suffering from a clash of cultures. The emerging Western lifestyle, spreading among Indians of all faiths, required believers to pursue a compartmentalised existence. One had to relegate religion to the weekend and a few holidays, separate religion from science and cultivate social relations without reference to religion, among sundry other forms of self denying accommodation. Yet Islam claimed authority over the totality of life.
There had already been responses to this perceived clash. One response, secular modernism, was to accept the advantages of Western civilisation and privatise Islam in the image of unobtrusive Protestant Christianity. This response became the official policy of Turkey under its first president, Ataturk (i88i 1938). Turkey’s modernisation drive aimed to push Islam to the periphery of social life and to shift the primary loyalty of Turks from religion to nation. In Iran, Reza Shah Pahlavi (1878 1944) had pursued a milder version of the same modernisation strategy.22 A second response was the
22 Bernard Lewis, The emergence of modern Turkey, 2nd edn (London, 1968), chs. 10 12;
Amin Banani, The modernization of Iran, 1921 1941 (Stanford, 1961), chs. 2 3.
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Muslim modernism of India’s Muslim League, led by people MawdUid’i characterised as 'partial Muslims’. The Muslim League paid lip service to the comprehensiveness of Islamic wisdom, making it seem that it draws authority from Islam. In essence, however, it pursued secularism, assigning at best a symbolic role to religion. Banking law would be Western banking law; society’s safety net would resemble a Western social security system; and taxation would be based on economic and political expediency, with no inspiration drawn from religion.
Mawdtidl’s favoured response was in spirit closer to secular modernism than to Muslim modernism. Like Ataturk and Reza Shah, he sensed that many Muslims felt torn between tradition and adaptation. He believed, moreover, that a choice had to be made between Islam and the West, and that this had to be done openly and without apology. If the West’s cultural influences were controlled, he reasoned, Muslims would feel better adjusted and less resentful. The desired control required providing distinctly Islamic alternatives to behaviours generally associated with Westernisation. Banking was a pillar of modern life, so it had to be Islamicised by defining distinctly Islamic ways of borrowing, lending, saving and investing. A rising share of consumption depended on market transactions, so buying and selling had to be given an Islamic veneer. There was a growing demand for poverty alleviation, so identifiably Islamic redistribution instruments had to be found.
At the time that Mawdtidl took to proposing economic remedies for culture clash, the concept had not entered popular discourse, as it would after Samuel Huntington published a much celebrated and vilified article on the 'clash of civilizations’.23 Huntington underestimates the homogenising efiects of eco nomic development, the diversity of civilisations, the fuzziness of their boun daries, people’s receptivity to cross cultural influences and the flexibility of religions. But whatever the validity of Huntington’s general argument, his reasoning matches the thinking prevalent in the 1940s among Indian propo nents of deliberate and self conscious Islamisation. As far as Mawdtid’i and his companions were concerned, Islam and the West could not co exist, and they were in a fierce struggle for the identity and allegiance of Muslims. These claims shared all the limitations of Huntington’s argument today. Mawdtid’i wrote, for example, as though Islamic civilisation is a well defined entity and as though it specifies exactly what Islam requires in every sphere of life. Despite these exaggerations, however, his writings set the tone for Islamism and indeed for Islamic economics, down to the present.
23 Samuel P. Huntington, 'The clash of civilizations’, Foreign Affairs, 72 (1993), pp. 22 49.
World History
