 Bismillahir Rahmanir Raheem. This section 4.2 of our new approach to Islamic economics describes the methodology of how we go about studying social change. One of the key factors is that all dimensions of change, political, economic, social, educational, environmental, they must be considered together because they interact with each other. This denies one of the basic premises of modern social sciences that you can study each dimension in isolation. We need to develop a new approach to the study of social change because modern social sciences were created on the basis of a triple mistake. The idea that science is the only valid source of knowledge, which is false as we have already discovered, the idea that scientific methodology is what logical positivists understood it to be, which means that it doesn't involve unobservables. This is also a wrong understanding of scientific methodology. And then the third mistake was the assumption that we can use scientific methodology to study human societies. This is not true because human beings have free will and are not subject to mathematical laws like physical particles or galaxies. So some of the key features of our Lumil-Umran methodology is to reject the scientific approach. The scientific approach assumes that there are universal laws which apply to all societies across time and space. We go back to the previous historical and qualitative approach where human beings are free and societies evolve across time in a way that depends on the environment, on human thoughts and actions, and many other things. In particular, the key item of importance is that social change is actually driven by human agency, human responses to change. And these responses come from human analysis of history. So different groups analyze the causal factors for change. And because causal factors are never observable, different groups come to different conclusions about the process of social change, which theory emerges to dominate does not depend on what is true, which may never be discovered because the causes are fundamentally unobservable. But the theories which come to dominate depend on the relative power of the different classes and also the environment. To explain a bit further why this is in such a dramatic contrast to modern economics, we consider the evolution of thought of Europe. Newton's laws became enormously popular because science became a substitute for faith after rejection of Christianity. The Newton's law lead to a picture of a deterministic universe. This had an enormous influence on philosophy. Kant basically set out to prove these laws as being objects of pure reason. Economists set out to imitate physics. And some of the things that they did was that all theory had to be derived from one principle, just like Newton's law took one law of gravitation and derived a large number of different phenomena. This led to a simple formula for human behavior. And it led to the treating each individual as a particle separate. And this ignored the central role of community in social change. And this key defect persists till today. Whereas Ullumran focuses on the roles of community as the driver of social change. So the dominant view became material determinism. And this led to a change in the imagination of the public. Instead of viewing the world as an evolving organism, they came to view it as a dead machine subject to laws. And this had an enormous impact on philosophy and on the development of science, of social sciences. But in order to find laws, one had to assume that human beings behave deterministically. And so two scientific methodologies, one is the contemporary one, the one which is used in modern economics that all things are subject to universal laws of mission. So we can find mathematical descriptions of how societies evolve and how humans behave. Marxist theory is more sophisticated and allows for human feelings. But it also subjects them to the material forces. And so basically we cannot act independently of our environment, we cannot break free of these chains, our thoughts and spirits are all determined by the material environment. Ullumran takes as fundamental the entanglement of man and matter. So matter affects us, and our thoughts and actions are influenced very heavily by the material circumstances, but also we affect matter. It's just like the relationship between the roof and the body, the spirit, the soul and the body, and the soul acts through the body, and the body is dead without the soul. So they both depend on each other. One of the primary illustrations of this entanglement is the rise of Islam itself, the knowledge given to man by Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala, and the spiritual training given by our prophet Muhammad sallallahu alayhi wa sallam. This changed the course of history without any material accompaniment. So the template we will use for analyzing social change is that some exogenous events occur which create social change. Humans respond to these changes and the responses are by collective action in groups. These responses are governed by theories that we make about the change, which tell us how to affect the change. But the theories are also chosen in correspondence to class interests and the relative power of the different classes. And our collective actions, how different groups respond to the change process, determine and shape the course of history. So there's a lot of human engagement in shaping history. This is very different from standard approaches, scientific approaches. This is actually a natural methodology which was abandoned by the West. The scholastics had a study of society based on Bible, but the warfare between Protestants and Catholics was very damaging to faith and led to the abandonment of the scholastic approach to building society. And then the entire base of human knowledge had to be reconstructed from scratch on the basis of observations and reason. And this basically the abandonment, the loss of the certainties of faith led to the elevation of science as the sole source of certainty and the only path to true knowledge. And in particular, the heart and soul which had misled the Europeans to believing in God were abandoned as a basis for knowledge. This creates a crucial difference between Western methodology and Islamic methodology. So to conclude this segment of the lecture, we understand that historical events in Europe have dramatically shaped European thought. In particular, rejection of Christianity led to the replacement by a faith in science which is over exaggerated. The adoption of scientific methodology to the study of society has led to massive confusion in the foundations of social sciences. In particular, there has been an attempt to create value free economics because obviously, morality does not apply to physical objects. They cannot act, but morality does apply to human society. And the attempt to create a value free economics has only led to the concealment of moral values within the concept of rationality and the power of human beings to shape and change history in accordance with our visions has completely disappeared from the view in modern treatments of social science.