 Bismillahirrahmanirrahim. This is a brief intro to the first lecture of my course on a new approach to Islamic economics linked here on this page. To understand Islamic economics we have to contrast to modern economics. Modern economics was born out of the terrible historical experience of Europe with religious wars which led them to discard religion as the basis for organizing society and come up with secular methods for economics and politics and other social institutions. The first of these secular social sciences to emerge was politics because that was the urgent necessity to prevent wars and civil unrest. Discarding religion led to the need to rebuild the entire structure of knowledge starting from zero and the Enlightenment was the process of recreating knowledge on the basis of observations and logic discarding all authority and tradition and religion. This led to the conceptions that universe is created by accident, life is meaningless, man is an animal, society is a jungle of competition governed only by the survival of the fittest and obviously with no judgment day after life the goal of our lives is to pursue pleasure and power and profits and society and social constraints have no meaning. This led to the basis of modern economics, the homo economicus which is an ideal of rationality and this is obviously a normative theory. It tells you how a rational person should behave. Behavioral economists who have tested to see if people actually behave this way find that it is false. This is not a descriptive theory nonetheless the idea the claim by modern economists that their theory is positive has been widely accepted and this is why Islamic economists have not rejected this theory and our new approach to Islamic is based on the realization that these are toxic moral foundations on which to build a society and we need to find alternatives which Islam provides us with. So in our new course we take a three-dimensional approach to building Islamic economics. We provide some normative ideals then we take a realistic look at the reality of man who is not capable of achieving these ideals. The heart of man is a battleground for good and evil as Allah Ta'ala has described and man has infinite potential he can rise above the angels and also be worse than beasts. So then we have the job of transformation which is given to us that how can we learn to be better than the angels and how can we create a society which allows all members to develop the capabilities which with they are born. The capitalist economy is built on the foundations of greed, competition, individualism and hedism which is natural to a picture of the world as a jungle and man as an animal. Islamic economics is built on the ideals of generosity, cooperation, social responsibility and striving for success on the day of judgment not for the pleasures of this world and these ideals these these foundations are natural for a society of spiritual beings connected with each other by compassion and social senses.