 It is widely believed that Islamic economic system is a variant of capitalism. The goal of this presentation is to show that this is not true. When we say capitalism versus Islam, this creates surprise because capitalism is an economic system where Islam is a religion. But actually capitalism is also a religion and it's the religion of worship of wealth, as we will show. To understand this better, we need to understand the historical origins of capitalism. In a pre-capitalistic era, the scholastics attempted to build the theory of society on the basis of the Bible. But this led to centuries of religious wars in Europe and this led to the realization that society cannot be built on Christian principles because it leads to continuous wars. As a result, Christianity was confined to a personal belief system and the study of society was done on secular grounds. So Hobbes was the first to create a political theory without reference to religion and economics also followed suit in being built on secular grounds. The principles of modern economics show clearly that it is based on rejection of God, judgment, heaven, hell. Man is just another type of animal and so human society is governed by the laws of the jungle, greed, competition, individualism. All of these are written into the textbooks of microeconomics. Since there is no life after death, we need to create heaven on this earth. So both individually and collectively, we should try to maximize wealth and pursue pleasure, power, profits, all of the things that are considered good in this world. And these are the founding principles of capitals. The founding principles are in dramatic contrast with the principles of Islam. So Islam is built on generosity as opposed to greed, cooperation as opposed to competition, social responsibility as opposed to individualism and striving for success in the Akhira instead of the pleasure and power and profits of this world. In Islamic society, the institution for managing excess wealth was the Waqf where people gave what they had excess above their needs to set up institutions which would provide for the poor and thereby purchase the Akhira. This is opposed to the bank which people use excess wealth to create even more excess wealth. So the fundamental principle is that we should spend excess wealth on others to buy the rewards of the Akhira. The principle of cooperation versus competition is illustrated by the guilds of Andulus and the Ottomans. These guilds were collections of merchants, traders, professions which had the object of providing service to the population. So if you have a collection of doctors and their goal is to make profits, then this is extremely harmful because they can charge extort large amounts of money. But if the guild of the doctors is entrusted with the goal of providing service to the population, this leads to an entirely different mindset. And that's basically the critical difference between Islamic and capitalist firms. Islamic firms are organized for the sake of providing service while the capitalist firms are organized for the sake of making profits. In the jungle, it's each one for himself and this philosophy of individualism that led to the breakdown of the family. 50% of the children are born to single mothers. They don't live in a warm and nurturing environment of a family and they learn to be individualists. Whereas Islam teaches us that Ummah is like one body and if any part feels the pain, all others should share in this. And Islam places great emphasis on the unity of the family, our duties and responsibilities to elders, to the children, to our neighbors, to our society. And we are encouraged to spend on others for the sake of the love of Allah. There's a dramatic difference between striving for success in this dunya, which means searching for pleasure and power and profits, as opposed to striving for success in the Akhira, which often involves sacrificing the pleasures of this dunya for the sake of the rewards of the Akhira. We've seen the fundamental principles of an Islamic society are radically different from the principles of capitalism. And so the immediate question arises, so where is this Islamic society? Why don't we have a working model of it today? And if it is so superior, we should just show the world what it looks like, but we don't have a good answer to this question. Another question of why there are no good Islamic societies, which we can show as models, we have to study history. And in particular, as Ibn Khaldun first recorded, all civilizations evolve over time, going from youth to maturity to old age. When Islam came as a fresh new religion, these teachings of Islam catapulted ignorant and backward Bedouin into world leadership, and they created a civilization which enlightened the world with knowledge for more than a thousand years. But for the past three centuries, the West has taken the lead in the production of knowledge. And today, the challenge facing us Muslims today is to show how we can implement the guidance of the Quran to solve our modern problems and rebuild Islamic society on the foundations of Islam rather than of the colonized societies that we are currently living in. So this project of revival of Islamic societies and rebuilding the Islamic civilization after the traumatic effect of colonization has occupied the minds of many thinkers and many different ideas have emerged as to the source of our problems and how to solve them. And I have a set of seminars on the Ghazali project. And the central idea of the Ghazali project is that the fundamental problem is one of knowledge. Today, the knowledge of the West dominates and we need to replace it and rebuild knowledge on Islamic foundations. And there are a number of seminars given here which explain the details of this idea.