Secularization of Economics: Disconnection from Religion and Meaning

 Professor Dr. Issa Abdo

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 Heritage

Trustworthy researchers in this field, especially writers from the advanced industrial West, agree that the year 1789 marks the early beginning of economic studies using a scientific methodology. They have specific reasons for this choice, which will be mentioned in due course.

They also agree on a few points that are worth focusing on and understanding as much as possible:

• The Origins of Economics

They say that the ancient origins of the study of wealth and its problems are undoubtedly rooted in ancient human heritage. They mention a group of famous Greek philosophers and legislators, such as Plato, Aristotle, Xenophon, and Solon, who were well-known among scholars. They then distinguish between this ancient period and the era that began with both the Industrial and French revolutions. They briefly touch on the period in between, mentioning only a few studies on the eras of successive heavenly messages and the Middle Ages. They stop at the past two hundred years and state that this is when the initial stages of economics began.

• The Nature of Economics

The second point on which reliable scholars agree is that economics is a branch of a larger body of integrated studies, including ethics, logic, philosophy, sociology, psychology, politics, and systems of governance. Despite the increasing use of analytical methods and mathematics in the study of economic phenomena, a number of globally respected researchers are critical of this trend and deny its usefulness. Some even call it a "scientific decline" and strongly argue that economics is fundamentally a humanistic study. They believe that the introduction of mathematics into this field of knowledge has not justified the effort spent over decades, unlike in the sciences of solids and energy where fixed physical elements are dominant or the only ones in the field.

• The Convergence of Economic and Social Phenomena

It is also agreed upon that a number of scientific facts and social phenomena that have influenced the behavior of individuals and groups over the past two hundred years have progressed together. Since the fall of the Bastille, and with the beginning of recent and contemporary revolutions, new developments have emerged in the areas of energy, natural resources, and how people have benefited from unprecedented and continuous technological progress.

Thus, you see phenomena influencing one another. The gaps between them may narrow or widen slightly, but the progress of society and industry is inseparable.

For example, they mention increased use of natural resources with lower costs, expanding markets, and advances in transportation. They mention all of this alongside the rise in individual and collective consciousness and people gaining political rights, including the formation of groups, unions, then parties and governments. They also note the acquisition of what is described as new rights for women, such as combining household duties with earning a living. They also mention the new ties that have emerged between individuals and groups, unlike what was known before these revolutions. There is also the debate surrounding private property, the new scale and forms of businesses, and the intellectual constraints placed upon them.

These are just a few of the issues that writers agree are interconnected, forcing scholars to recognize the link between the value added to materials through labor and the workers' demands for a voice in public affairs, then seats in representative councils and governments. When legislative and executive powers have come together under a specific economic ideology or philosophy, things that once seemed absurd have been swept away by the winds of change—such as the freedom to choose one's work, the sanctity of private property, and the right of inheritance. Researchers also mention the direct links between market competition on the one hand, and the evolution of international diplomacy and forms of cooperation on the other—or consolidation, conflict, and armed struggle, which redirects resources and energies (originally intended for human well-being) toward technological advancements in the production of destructive weapons.

• Disconnect from Religion

Researchers also widely agree that economic studies are disconnected from religion. This is a point that particularly concerns us here in the Arab East and the Islamic world in general, and we must attribute it to those who claim it. They also agree that economic reality is not precisely definable; it is a beloved fantasy for every researcher, yet they are unable to make it accessible to students.

This is what researchers claim about economics when it's isolated from religion. But we say: words were not too heavy to bear the livelihood, but rather it is the souls that are too narrow for the truth and cannot bear it. This happens when the human mind, without the Lord of people—God forbid—takes it upon itself to establish rules for humanity. But this is how it began with the French Revolution and its aftermath, with the winds of change spreading over a wider area.

Economic reality is not from a metaphysical world. It is from this world we live in. We must be aware that it flees from human society every time it tries to get closer to it, whereas mathematical equations, natural laws, and the properties of things become more precise and accessible to the human mind and skillful hands. This is why people in our time have imagined that they have mastered the Earth and are close to mastering space. As for the economic reality for which lives have been spent over the past few generations, its description still falters on the lips.

We say that it is the realization of well-being for the majority of people with the fewest sacrifices. We say that it is the human balance that does not adhere to a commercial, financial, or balance of payments scale. We say that it is the fair price and the wage that preserves the worker's dignity as a human being. It is the provision of job opportunities for everyone who is able and willing to work. It is society's care for a family if its provider dies, because during their life they contributed to building the structure, paving the way, or increasing prosperity with the service or product they produced. It is providing security for wealth, honor, children, and all the freedoms in which all people are equal.

But can people be fair to others?

This is the question that researchers have taken on, or, let's say, it is the experience that humanity has gone through for two hundred years, with libraries overflowing with millions of pages in various forms of articles, lectures, statistics collected by amateurs, programs by reformers, politicians, and advocates of conquest and plundering the resources of others, election speeches, party platforms, state policies, and finally, academic references and research methods in universities!

All of this mass of information is called "the science of economics" to the extent that some thinkers have become severely frustrated with it. This led to the East's revolution against Western theories and the West's denial of its emerging thought. Then we come from this environment, so rich in its heritage, and ask the same questions they do: Where does this science begin, where does it end, and when will it stabilize?

To answer these three points that combine into a single question, we say that the matter will stabilize when we separate science from thought and opinion. Science has characteristics that ensure its stability and richness by adding new knowledge to pre-existing principles. However, thought can follow whims, authority, and transgression, and then it disappears, leaving a void (as they say), which is then filled with new whims and opinions. That is why we said that these are studies that address the famous schools and their ideas and opinions. What is known as the doctrines, philosophies, and policies of the past two hundred years are the origin of what humanity is suffering from to this day. As for economic reality, it has become more distant and obscure due to these efforts because it has drowned in the crowds—the crowds of people who wanted to set their own rules for human affairs and wanted to deny the message of the heavens.

Published in Al-Tawhid Magazine, Muharram 1393 AH