 Okay, well, good afternoon. I know it's hard to be the fourth speaker in the afternoon, and I'll try my best It's a pleasure to be again with this beautiful audience and thanks for Hanzi, Yurchin for having me again and Well, Islam and capitalism that's my topic and I have just written a book about this It will be published in six months, so be warned in advance. It will come out in ten months And this is a controversial topic and actually if you go and Ask many Muslims, I'm a Muslim But like ask most of them what do you think about capitalism? You will generally get a negative answer Because when they hear the term capitalism, they will think off You know greed and materialism and selfishness moral corruption moral lack city sex and the city and all that So that's kind of a pejorative I think description of capitalism. I mean there are some things in capital societies Maybe a very conservative pies Muslim might might dislike but where does the product of capitalism? Or rather that is capitalism itself is I think an issue to be discussed Of course also Muslims have a concern with secularization and when I say secularization I don't mean the secular state state is good if it is secular. It is good It is good the smaller it is the better and it's as fine with the secular but secularization of the society and individuals of course every Pious will just must have a concern about that But whether capitalism really secularizes or is it the welfare state in the modern age? Secularizes that's I think it's an important topic to be discussed and rediscovered We thought maybe some of the Muslims who think capitalism is the roof of all evil in the modern world So if you just get away with that pejorative description of capital capitalism and come back and describe it as The economic system in which individuals have private property and the right to have economic activity entrepreneurial Like effort and all that this capitalism in that sense is compatible with Islam and my answer is yes and I think it's also an important answer because Actually when you look at the economic history of the Islamic civilization and when you compare with the History of Islamic thought you see that the rise of Islamic capitalism and there is one Corresponds to the more liberal and rationalistic era in the Muslim world and the decline of Islamic capitalism corresponds to the stagnation of minds and the rise of who's bigotry As professor stone, you know wisely noted in the Ottoman Empire You know there were some people who said you know God doesn't like you know Astronomy board so you should close it down But there was an age in Islam an earlier age where actually Astronomy and other sciences were done in the name of Islam and within inspiration from Islam So bigotry comes out of religion, but also sometimes creativity comes out of religion and why was the case in Islam? This is way or that way that's a very important topic Okay, let's go back to the beginnings and in the beginning, of course, there was there was prophet Muhammad There are many founders of religion. Well, at least several in the world and None of them was a businessman But prophet Muhammad was before he became a prophet at the age of 40. He was a successful merchant in Mecca Mecca was the center of after the trade in the Arabian And of course he resorted started receiving revelations according to this long faith at the age of 40 And those revelations formed the community a very strong emphasis on monotheism In the face of idolatry rejection of idolatry and that community became the Muslim community and you know It's flourished and it became an empire in a century. That's that's what everybody knows in history What was significant that the fact that prophet Muhammad himself was a merchant and most of his close aides and the first Muslim to join him were actually merchants Can be traced in the very positive attitude towards trade in early Islam There are sayings of Prophet Muhammad Like ten nine out of God's ten bounty comes from trade Or a tradesman is as honorable as the marchers and they're the prophets They're the friends of the prophets. There's even a hadith who says who makes money, please as God Hadith is a same attribute of the prophet Muhammad And lots of traditions are like that in the earlier recordings of the prophet's life and the way they look at the world And there's an interesting incident actually in one case his fellow Muslims come to the prophets And they complain from the prices in Medina the market in Medina and Medina was the second city You know you might read from Mecca They said you're the prices are too high Can't you fix the prices and he says no only God governs the market and God's Today some more in a free market minded Muslims look back at that and see some invisible hands Theology there in that statement And Well, that's of course the Prophet's life and there's of course Quran more important than the Prophet himself there's the Quran as the scripture of Islam and And of course, well, maybe this is Islam 101 But Quran is so central to Islam that it cannot even be compared to the Bible It is even higher than the Bible. It is compared to if you speak in Christian terms to Jesus itself It is the word of God So in that sense Quran is very central And when we look at the Quran again, we actually see a very positive attitude towards economic activity Like I won't go into all the details one of the experts who really wrote a very interesting and important book on this topic Was the French Marxist Marxin Rodinson. He has this classical book Islamic capitalism It's an old book That's really it's still a very good book and I would suggest you know that book strongly for anyone who's really interested in topic And Rodinson really studied the Quran in detail in the language and all that and he says this is a very pro-business book to coach one of his, you know and now in our analytical sentences, he says The Quran does not merely say that one must not forgets one portion in this world It goes so far as to mention commercial profits under the name of God's bounty Again, the idea that you make money you invest in you that and you you create wealth is Trace in the Quran and that's praise as the way God gives his bounty and Blessings to people It should be also interesting to mention that the longest worst in the Quran, which is about a page long Bacchara 282 in the second chapter is about a loan contract. It's about how to properly sign a contract How many reasons should be there and you know, how should we pay it back and so and so and these things were Let led to the Scott the scholars of the Sharia Islamic law to be very business-minded again When you look at actually what we call Sharia is a dirty word I know that and there that there are some reasons for it because of the corporal punishments which are in my view We should be taken nuts literally and we should be seen in its own context But many Muslims insist on taking them literally today and bring them bring those corporal punishment It's like bringing English common law of the 7th century to modern era and it sounds it looks a little You know violent, but it was good in its age. I think the same thing can be said for the Sharia and Based on the Quranic emphasis Sharia scholars and Most of the shares developed post Quranic I mean there are basic principles on the Quran so scholars create those principles and make them into the take those principles and make them into laws Specified laws and there's a great strong emphasis on property rights that no one can come and confiscate your property and Also, that was important that Sharia was rooted in the divine and not the political authority In the Islamic civilization Sharia became to what in the Western world is called the rule of law Since it was made by the religious scholars who were independent from the Sultan of the political authority It constrained the Sultan and the best example of this was in the Ottoman Empire when the Sultan dared to do something unacceptable like establishing a new tax or Or doing something unjust masses would march saying we want Sharia, which means we want justice So that that is the core of that, you know yearning for the idea of Sharia in the Islamic world It basically something which was about the political authority and we which even dictated to the political authority something Which is considered as just Well, anyway, that's another topic. Well, it's let's come back to the Quran and its idea of you know economic activity There's also an interesting worse in the Quran And I think Islamic socialists generally overlook this worse You know, it says that there are economic inequalities in the world and it's not necessarily a bad thing It says is it they who apportioned by Lord's mercy We have apportioned among them their livelihood in the life of the world and Raised some of them about others in rank that some of them may take labor from others Which in my view suggests that the fact that there are some people are One one person is a boss and the other one is working under a boss is not something that God of course It's is the way that God formed that some people who Will be taking labors and some God has given more blessing to some people than others But at the same time the Quran takes great emphasis to emphasize Sorry great takes great pain to emphasize that the rich have a moral duty to care for the poor And that emphasis has led some Muslims to in the modern world to Discover some sort of Islamic socialism whereas I think and others think that it is a moral duty It's not a collectivization of valve, but it tells the people who are wealth to be To use some of their wealth to help the poor and in that case that would be Equal to what was called in the West charity And actually some institutionalized that charity while making the cut the money given to the poor by one of one of the five Fundamental pillars of the faith. So there is certainly a compassionate a Caring in a cap idea of a capitalist, but a capitalist by its nature is not against the idea That the principles we find in in Quran and the prophets tradition Now these principles these basic, you know ideas in the Quran and the prophets life Of course these unfolded into history within the Islamic civilization And when you look at the Islamic civilization the first centuries are an amazing success In a political sense in a military sense and in a cultural in a scientific sense in all that Islam right after its beginning, you know became a great empire in its century the people who joined the empire or The conquered peoples they were not forced to convert into Islam So Christians and Jews could remain not as equal citizens but protected second-class people But they had their just rights to you know live under Islam And that's why still you know throughout the Islamic world. We still have non-muslim communities And in places like the Ottoman Empire you know churches and synagogues Continue to exist Well, that's another story, but in one of the key Dynamics of this successful civilization was again trade There was two reasons one was the one was the idea coming from the Quran that trade is a good thing And second was the lucky place of the Islamic civilization Was at the root of the world trade routes. It was at the center of the world trade routes between the between India and the Mediterranean and Europe And so the silk road and all that so Islam flourished thanks to being at the very center of the world's most important trade routes And interestingly muslims muslim scholars Some of the makers of the sharia were actually merchants themselves like Abu Hanifa the founder of the For the Sunni schools the more liberal among the Sunni schools To which was to subscribe to the Hanifi school. He was a merchant himself And these also Scholars developed some techniques or some legal devices To institutionalize free market One thing they created was an idea was a system called muhatara This was a way to go over with the ban on usury I should have noted that the Quran bends and condemns usury But whether usury is equal to interest in the way we understand today. That's a big question It has been a question for ages. It's still a question I think there are different things, but in the middle ages they at least Created some legal tricks to get over with that and to make interest possible and muhatara was the Technique to get over with that it soon became muhatara in latin and became a technique used in In question europe as well Some scholars even think the arabic term mudaraba, which means business partnership was transport Transformed to transfer to italy and became commanda, which is the origin of the idea of a limited company There are other Concepts created economic concepts created by muslims and transferred again into europe And one of them is quite clearly, you know in the way it's you can trace its origins That's the arabic term suck, which means written documents And that was the idea that you could give some money In morocco and get a written document So carry the document instead of the money because it's dangerous all the way to bag that and cash it again So suck was the written document in english. It became the check Actually Fernando brought out the greatest one of the greatest historians of civilizations in the great eminence french historian says that Anything in western capitalism of important origin came from islam And today in the english language you can even just look at the language and trace some words And find their origins actually in this islamic civilization not all of them are related to islamic capitalism But you know you can see that what muslims spanish and the middle ages and what came from that Into into the english speaking or actually into the whole european civilization These words are arabic words in english algebra alchemy alkali almanac amalgam olympic alco mask muslin tariff sugar syrup checkmate loot and guitar There's of course also the arabic So This was a very successful civilization in many ways and actually a american scholar once said If there were noble prizes like In the year 1000 all would go to muslims because of all the discoveries in medicine and science and astronomy and all that Of course muslims learned from previous civilizations like greek civilization and chinese civilization But they also created synthesis and this synthesis was especially flourishing in the more cosmopolitan centers of islam like where like back that First in damascus when they backed out in kufa in basra In in southern spain, which was called indelusia at the time whereas in the more Desert base areas of islam You had you did not have this trade and the vitality and the dynamism coming from that And this is not an accident that the more liberal and rational strains of islamic thought flourished in these Dynamic areas that i mentioned whereas the more austere radical literalist schools of thought Emerged from the desert basically from the arabic desert And you can see that for example in the sunni tradition. The hanefi school is the most flexible than Liberal school as it is compared. It was rooted in baghdad and kufa in baghdad But the most rigid and literalist School the hanbili school, which later became the wahabi school in today's salvia That originated in the desert and in the mindset I think of those people were influenced by the way, you know, they were facing by the real physical reality we were facing Well in the again just the mediae Islamic civilization there was not and Maxim rodinson uses term he says islam created financial capitalism in the middle ages There was also a theory of it created by ibn khaldun the famous 14th century scholar from north africa ibn khaldun Is an interesting figure. He's sometimes people report to him as the founder of sociology He wrote a famous book called mukad dima Which means introduction and it was an introduction into history in when you're a student And he basically studied the role of geography in the shaping of cultures And he actually emphasized what I just mentioned. He said In the desert you have a harsh, you know more harsh warlike tribes in the cities because of trade and wealth and luxury People tend to come softer and more liberal then the wild tribes come and occupy the you know cities But a few generations later they you know, you adopt to the city culture and you know this cycle goes on He just observed what is going on and he created a history a theory of history out of that which is very interesting But one of his most important contributions was also his his study of the economics In his mukad dima he he kinds of you can find the traces of an free market economy theory. First of all, he says In he says in kingdoms where the government produces stuff Those kingdoms are not successful. He says the merchants and the people in the private business people should produce it And the state should not be in production. He says the state's goal is to Make the the merchants and the market is free He also says that in in kingdoms where the state takes too much tax That that kingdom becomes much poorer because people do fear from the state and do not have much activity So he basically defines a low tax free market economy And it's not an accident that the world bank a few years ago Referred to ibn-e-Haldun as the forerunner as the forefather of private the idea of privatization So All this again to economic activity was linked with some of the more liberal state strains in islam And that's a different matter But i just want to mention a few things there were two important early schools in islamic thought one was the mutasilites These are also known as the rationalists and they flourished in bagdad and bazaar at the more Whital places in islam in which muslims faced greek philosophy in in jewish kabbalah in christian Priests and in hindu philosophy. So it was a more color palatine world. So the mutasilites flourished there They were the early rationalists of islam and they said Revelation is from god But our reason is also from god and we should use reason and revelation in together to find it through And they even said if there were no revelation, we would find what is true with our reason By we could establish that you know teft is bad with reason even if the revelation did not tell us revelation only confirms that and tells us Things we wouldn't know like afterlife on the other hand there was the literalist Non-rationalist even anti-rationalist school. We said no no something is bad only when god bends it So teft is bad only god because god says so in the scripture So you cannot use reason to establish anything So that's the other the opposite school and today in the muslim world you still have The you know conflict the the clash of these different schools The only problem is that the literalist school today which is represented by saudi arabia has the biggest oil wealth in the world and They find us lots of schools all across the all across the globe There was another school called murjiites, and I think that's very important for the general principle of freedom in islam the murjiites they're known in english as the postponers and the world postpone comes from their conviction that All important decisions about theology should be postponed to god and afterlife Because you could not have the ultimate truth And this came as a reaction to a very rigid school called another school called harijites The harijites were basically saying that who doesn't agree with us or infidels and we're going to kill them They were the first radical violence school like movement in islamic history Very marginal but violent a bit similar to the radicals of today So they were arguing that they have an access to truth nobody has but they they have it But the murjiites which again flourished in the more cosmopolitan centers of islam said No, god knows who's ultimately through and we cannot judge today So we should postpone the judgment to afterlife So they so they created an idea of a pluralism On the reach of theocracy would not be possible because since you cannot have Ultimate access to truth. You can't say this is a truth except, you know, establish a theocracy based on that Well, I mean and This was of course the Medieval islamic civilization and the thing is there are many Interesting debates and discussions among those early muslims. Some of them are most of them are gone or forgotten Unfortunately because because something became the orthodoxy and that orthodoxy, you know became unquestioned after some after some time And the the fact that the orthodoxy was formed more by The literalists in a traditional school Has again something to do with the decline of trade and economic prosperity in the muslim world That began with the mongol conquests, which were disastrous Which destroyed a lot of agriculture and even even books and libraries and Big part of islamic civilization in the very disastrous event in the 13th century and then the crusades But the big big change and the big decline for islam was the change in world trade routes When majelaan turned the cape of hope and you know found a way from the oceans to india The world changed forever Soon the the middle east and even the mediterranean started to decline as northern europe that you know, poland and later britain And started to flourish and you know because oceans became the world's new New source of wealth and trade and then dynamism and open-mindedness and activity and all that whereas even italy You know started stagnates, but even before that the islamic middle east so It's the problem was not that there are not right ideas in islamic the problem was that the context was not very helpful And the change of context Is Made the west prosper and you know, of course they had right ideas as well as mech's favor showed in In his famous thesis about the origin of capitalism in europe But also at right context and the context was not favorable to islam after you know the 14 and 15 centuries as per sure So the Ottoman empire was the latest the last you know strongest muslim power and it was It was based on the idea of law and if a and i agree with professor stone that it's The fact that it was successful was not just because it continued the Byzantine traditions which had something to explain But also because it had the idea of asheria a law You know That constrained the sultan and created a legal system And in a tradition of the state But as we all know the Ottoman empire despite its successes failed to create the economic activity the success that The west had it is said that the one of the latest Ottoman sultan sultan abul hamid one of the most important ones once said that I wish our forefathers were More into trade than you know war and conquest because the Ottoman empire basically suffered the lack of a dynamic bourgeoisie And they realized that towards the end and brought new laws about you know Freeing trade and so on and promoting trade and in the middle class in the bourgeoisie class, but it was too late Now one thing I think I'm running out of time. Okay Three moments, that's good What happened in the 20th century is a Worst story because we know what happened after the fall of the Ottoman empire The Ottoman empire was what we called the middle east today From its ashes 28 different nation states emerged and you're in just one of them turkey Most of them almost all of them were colonized Uh and the colonizers were looking down upon the uncivilized peoples And what what you have when you have colonization you have anti-colonization Which becomes an ideology which becomes a culture which becomes a spirit And then came the reaction to israel and all that this led the whole arab world in the 20th century almost the whole airport Into nationalism socialism a combination of that Which ultimately took a new form in the name of islamism That sort of turned worldist anti-western reactionary islamism is not the only political manifestation of islam It's a particular manifestation of islam born out of this context But is there a different example? Yes, and that is coming up in turkey Turkey was never colonized turkey had a chance to establish its own democracy despite its struggles inside And a very imperfect democracy for many reasons But turkey also has been able to in the past three decades to even two decades Flourish help floor something that we can call an islamic capitalism again Today right now turkey. We are speaking about the rise of a muslim bourgeoisie Rise of an entrepreneurial muslim middle class. These are devout businessman Who look at prophet Muhammad and not emphasize his warrior side, which is which is a part of his legacy But emphasizes businessman side Recently a german think tank wrote a report about turkeys muslim calvinists And they said their spirit is just like the you know early calvinists in their the way that max waiver defined And their attitude towards business making very pious very conservative Not heathen us at all making a lot of money and spending it for charity and schools and you know And sending their kids to nice schools in the west and so on and that is Creating an interesting new culture in turkey in which islam is seen as something which Encourages first of all economic activity and second even individualism And there are lots of you know examples in terms of society on that One just one example that I can mention one of the actually conservative islamic thinkers a few months ago In his column was criticizing this new upper class muslims The you know starbucks coffee drinking that's card very this new type of Girls and you know that whole subculture and was saying they speak about not coran and obedience But they speak about coran and freedom And I think that's the right message and that's the way to go. Thank you so much