 And in particular, his work in Islamic economics is quite revolutionary, leading the quality in that field and helping all of us understand and maybe rethink subjects like economics, statistics, econometrics, and also not just questioning the Yorah century and the Western narrative, which is embedded in these, but also providing more than it is. So he earned his PhD in economics from Stanford University and master's in statistics from Stanford University. And he has a bachelor's in mathematics from the MIT. He has also taught economics at several economics departments in very highly ranked international universities like Columbia, UPEN, Caltech, John Hopkins, as well as Lums. He is the author of several books. His one book in particular, which is on econometrics, called the Statistical Foundations of the Econometric Techniques, it's widely used as a reference textbook for graduate courses worldwide. He has published over 100 articles in top-ranked journals and with more than 1,800 citations. And he previously served as the Vice Chancellor of the Pakistan Institute of Development Economics and was also a member of the Economic Advisory Committee to the Prime Minister of Pakistan. The topic for today is history, the mother of all social sciences. And in this, we will be just an opportunity for us to look at history. We sometimes think about history as a thing about the past. But actually, history is about the present. It's about understanding the present. And the present has many different aspects. And I think one very important aspect of our life is the financial aspect. So understanding our present current financial context and using history in full line. So that's really the broad view for this today's talk. And within, I think one particular element which is really important, finance is money. I think all of us agree, money is really important. So to understand the history and the nature of money that we have, the modern-day money. So that would be the narrative and that would be the analysis which Dr. Azad Oman would be sharing with us. And we're really grateful and thankful that he came all the way from Islamabad to the IFA for this particular talk. So without any further ado, I shall have a look at the left. This will be that. Actually, I was planning to talk about money, but the unit told me that we should introduce the students to these topics in a way that is at the level of the students. After thinking about it, I realized that this talk is going to be too complex, especially to non-economists. So I'm going to talk about money separately. I have a weekly, monthly lecture on Islamic economics, which I'm trying to rebuild the theory from scratch. And the next lecture will be about money and a very unorthodox perspective. So I encourage you to join the lecture. First Sunday of every month, Ms. K. Oki will get the links to that. So today I will be talking about more generally the idea of history and how it is actually very central to all of the social sciences. So to get the economics lecture, you can join my weekly mailing list, and you will get a notification about the next lecture. All right, so we start with anybody who looks beyond his nose and beyond his personal life concerns will be struck with the amount of wealth disparities in this world. So we have glittering high rises and massive amounts of luxury on the one hand, and people living in camps and actually under the open skies. And sometimes, and often in the same country, there are homeless people on the streets of Los Angeles as well, and one of these is a shanty town in South Africa, and the other picture is Johannesburg, which is very, very advanced. So question arises, why are there so many? And why is there such extreme inequality, which has been increasing over the past 50 years also? So very related to this question is, why is the West so far ahead of the rest? And so on this topic, there are zillions of books. Literally, and I have listened to just four of them here. There are at least 20 different major feasts about this, and countless books and articles. And this is not just objective economics. It's also sociology, anthropology, everywhere else. This distinction between the West and the others is almost central to the study of whichever social science you go, psychology. So this question is, why is there such a difference? And side question is, then, how can we become like them? And that's all what development economics is about, how we can learn to be like Europeans. So then there are also a narrative which questions this idea. Do we, or should we try to become like Europeans? Is that what development is about? Getting more money. And so there are a number of these. These are just a few of the books which question this narrative. And some of them say that this idea of development, development itself means becoming like Europe, because they are, by definition, the most advanced society on the planet. And so to develop is to become like Europe. Now, as people affect the rise and fall of development theory, this idea that becoming like Europe is the acme of human civilization, this has itself received major blows in the 20th century. And now, because this idea has been very much discredited, so this whole idea of development theory has been called into question. But the mainstream narratives are still the same. This is mostly in the unorthodox sector. So if you go to any mainstream economics department, they will be doing this line which has now been rejected, that to develop means to get more money. And ministries are planning all over the world. And ministries are financing. They are trying to increase GNP per capita as the means to become developed, even though that's shown to be nonsensical by many leading economists as well as non-economists. It's just the power of the narrative is so strong that it carries the word even more. So one of the counter narratives is that this pursuit of wealth at all costs without any attention to anything else is putting the future of the planet. Actually, the planet will survive the future of humanity at risk. And there's lots of strong evidence for climate change. We can see it in our own lives. And this climate change is threatening to be catastrophic. And it's a geometric process. It will go slowly at first. And then it will go very fast. And it will have the potential of wiping out the large proportion of mankind. It has already wiped out the large proportion of animal species. So these are the bigger questions of life that we face. But you will not see any discussion of them in your classes. Why are we not involved? Should we be trying to develop? Should we be trying to get more wealth? Well, there is an accepted framework of answers which are taken for granted. So they are never discussed. And these answers, which are assumed as the background basis of everything you are studying in all courses, it is assumed that life is about pursuing careers, pursuing becoming rich and famous, maybe. So why is life about that? What is life all about? These are questions which are not discussed. Because there are certain answers which are assumed. And where do these answers come from? They actually come from history, from not just history, but a particular view of history, your eccentric history. There are the so-called little questions, although if you think about it more naturally, then these are the big questions and the others are the small questions. So what should I do with my life? This is maybe a small question, because I'm just 1% 7 billion other people they all have. So in some sense, considered from a one perspective, it's a real question. But it is the most important question in my life. What should I study as a part of where to plan to live, whether I should emigrate from Pakistan, and send away a classic crisis, or career to pursue, or to marry that's a big part of our life. Career, should I pursue career, should I invest in my family more, or should I pursue larger social change, the world, the revolution, and so on. So these are three demands. All of them have their own. So how we answer the little questions, how I should live, are shaped by the answers to the big question. But because the big questions are never really discussed, we take for granted a set of answers. And then we answer the so-called little questions in a certain way, without being aware that our answers are actually how we live. So how we live is shaped by a view of history, which is a Eurocentric view. So how does history shape our thoughts about, normally we don't think much about it, but basically, capitalism is built on the pursuit of wealth. This is Max Weber's insight, said that the spirit of capitalism is the pursuit of wealth to the point of being irrational. Because actually, wealth is useful as a means to an end. If you acquire wealth, you can use it to do many things which you couldn't do otherwise. But it is not sensible to pursue wealth as a goal in itself. No one should have the goal that I should die with $10 million in my bank account. Makes no sense. In fact, our prophet said that, where he says, my wealth, my wealth, but wealth is only that which he consumes or has belongs to his inheritors. So there's no point in accumulating wealth for it. So that's one of the strong influences. I can count the number of students who have come to me and asked, what career should I pursue in which I will be able to make the most amount of money? So I try to persuade them that that's not the goal of life to make more money. But this is what students have been trained to do that. The goal of life is to make more money. So I should pursue a career which gives me the most money. Maybe there are other careers which will give you more life satisfaction. But you haven't been told to pursue life satisfaction as a goal. So that's the influence of capitalist society on our parts in action. And there is the thesis of Orientalism, which Edward Said wrote a book. And basically, if you can boil down the thesis of Edward Said to 102 sentences, the Europeans conquered the globe 90% of it. And they got a superiority complex as a result. And those who were colonized got an inferiority complex. That's my part of the thesis, but it's a consequence. So one of the forces which shapes our life is the fact that we have been colonized. So we think that we are inferior. You can find manifestations of this everywhere, given examples. Even people who think they're self-free of this are not. And then we live in a market society where market societies are designed in such a way that everything is for sale. And consumption is the source of pleasure. So when I think that what should I do with this evening? Let's go to a restaurant and eat some food now. Actually, when I was growing up, you could not spend 10,000 degrees on food because there was not that kind of food was not available. As we have become richer, we have developed into a consumer society, and people have the money, and they want to spend that money on luxuries. See, Islam, if you have more than you need, you should spend on people who have less than what they need. And Allah says in the Qur'an, somebody asked, what should we spend? Spend what is in excess, that is in excess of what you can use. If you have more than what you can use, then you know that there are many people who have less. And there are people whose children cannot get medicine for illnesses because they don't have the money to buy them. So why is that not worth more than a meal at the finest hotel? Of course, I think everyone would agree. It's not that we are in humans. Everyone, given the opportunity to do so, would contribute to saving the lives of children. But the capitalist society is set up so that the advertisements for the finest restaurants are in front of you all the time and the social media. But nobody is contacting with a message that such and such a child is sick and dying and he needs a little bit of money to help. If those messages were on the social media, we would actually prefer to do that. But those opportunities are not made open to us. That's not the way capitalism works. So these are the forces which have shaped our society and these forces have shaped our minds as well. We think in these terms. And we think of these as natural. We think it's natural to do this even though it's not something which has been created by history. So the question is, how can we free ourselves from these ideas which have shaped our minds? So basically the clue is that the root of these ideas are the big questions which we have been taught to ignore. We have been given ready-made answers. So for example, if you are an economist, then you have been taught that you are a unit of labor for sale in the labor market. And the worth of your life is the marginal product of your labor. So people come and think that if I get a job, that the value of my worth is how much I can earn. This is exactly what economics teaches you. And so if you can get a job at a multinational making a dollar income, then you're golden. And if you can get a job in a local program, you're a B grade, then a C grade, and so on. So anyway, the idea that our lives cannot be purchased for all the gold in the universe, which is explicitly mentioned in the Paran and the Hadith, that we are precious beyond belief, this doesn't occur to us that our lives are infinitely precious. So first question that we must learn about is, who am I? And there are many ways to think about the answer. I'm not going to give you an answer, because there's no answer to this question. The answer must be found by you, because everyone is unique. Every single human being is unique. But one of the goals of a capitalist education is to turn you all into identical parts for use in a machine of production. So everything unique about you is completely ignored. And in fact, there are instruments used to turn you all into wheels with regular gears so that you will fit into the machine. No one ever addresses you as a person. There is a sign in a traditional Madrasa, old, which I have written. It's called, in this Madrasa, we don't teach fish how to fly, and we don't teach birds how to swim. So this is the thing that you take the student as he is, and then you help him or her develop their capabilities, which they have been given with, which in which every single individual is unique. So this is exactly the opposite of what a capitalist education does. Standardize people into things which can be used in the factories as machine parts. So one of the goals, one of the ways that this is accomplished is to teach you that accumulation of wealth is the most important purpose of life. Because once you start making money, the goal of life, then you will automatically get trapped into the capitalist wealth, because money is part of the capitalist regime, and they have the most. If you want to make the most money, you will have to play game. They ball with them. So there are many different perspectives on what life is about and what human beings are. And it is a worth exploring all of them. But given that I am a Islamic audience, I will take the Islamic perspective. So Allah Ta'ala's message to mankind begins with, ittara abismir abdukal yakhala. This is very significant, because Allah talks about reading and also talks about the pen. So these are not accidental. Knowledge, there are two ways to perpetuate knowledge. One is the heart to heart, and that is essential. That's why you need the teacher, and that is why the prophet shall, as I said. But the other way is the book, and both of them are necessary, otherwise. And the book can contain inherited traditions. And if you look at the books, they contain the knowledge of thousands of people working across centuries, billions of people working across centuries. You can possibly capture all that knowledge in any one lifetime. So the books are also essential. So Allah Ta'ala says, in the very first sets of verses revealed to our prophet sallallahu alayhi wa sallam, al-nabal insana ma'ala mi'ala. So although this is, verse is actually past tense, to Allah Ta'ala's future and the past is the same. And he's actually prophesying that Allah Ta'ala will reveal to man a special kind of knowledge, which nobody has. And what was that knowledge? Let's put that aside for a while, because we are under the illusion that we know this knowledge, but look at the effects of this knowledge. And you see that these were people, ignorant and backward Bedouin, who became world leaders as a result only of this knowledge. Allah Ta'ala did not teach them how to build factories or how to new methods of warfare. Now, no material means, there's no barb of chemistry, biology, or physics in Okhara. But the knowledge that was given made the world, leaders of the world, and created a civilization which enlightened the world for a thousand years or more. So this was a very powerful knowledge. So let me talk about my life experiences, because this is, see, I was trained in the best colleges by Nobel laureates. And I was steeped up to my years in the superiority of Western knowledge. I couldn't conceive of the possibility that anything was wrong with this. And then for Allah Ta'ala, I had the mercy on me for some reason that I had to explain. I started spending some time in the league. And after four months, I was confronted with a dilemma which happened sometime in the 90s, which I've been pursuing ever since. So basically, there's only one idea that has been driving. There's a driving force of everything that I've done for 30 years. And it is this, Allah Ta'ala revealed knowledge to mankind. And Allah Ta'ala says, this is complete and perfect guidance for all times to come. And it is obvious that anybody who has believed will say that the knowledge revealed by God to mankind must be infinitely superior to anything that mankind could ever come up with on their own. This is a fundamental axiomatic. If you don't believe that, then you can't believe in Islam. So that is what I, after four months, I had strengthened faith in Islam. So I believed that with my heart. But all the evidence that I could see with my eyes and with my brains is in direct conflict. The world is shaped by Western knowledge. I'm using the computer and the laptop and everything we do in this building, it has been built by Western knowledge. So on the one hand, it seems that Western knowledge is the most important type of knowledge on this planet. And on the other hand, Islam tells me that the Quran is the most valuable knowledge. But there's no way to resolve this subject. I couldn't understand how. So basically, intimately, I must start that if there is a conflict between the evidence of your senses and the faith in Allah, then you deny the evidence of the senses and you affirm your belief in Allah. This is what iman bil ghaib means. Even so, even though it's very difficult and even though Musa A.S. is standing in front of the river and behind him is the army of Firaul, and there is no means of escape. You go forward, you drown, and you go back. You are killed by the soldiers. And yet, you have faith that don't worry, Allah will find a way for you. But this is what faith is when there is no possible escape according to your observational and empirical evidence. Still, you believe that Allah can save you. So on the one hand, we have our ancient books, which are completely useless and gathering dust, intellectual tradition of 1,000 years among the Rosali, Kindi, Farabi, Messina, etc, etc, etc. But we have never mentioned any of our curricula. We don't even know what they said. It seems completely irrelevant to our modern lives. If they were relevant, then somebody would have benefited from it. No. On the other hand, what were they doing? So, ultimately, so I believed, but I couldn't understand, so I made dua to Allah. Allah says that He will lead those who believe to the nur, the light. The light is always knowledge. And those who don't believe will be led to the darkness. But my eyes showed me that the opposite is true. Those who didn't believe had all the knowledge in the world. And those who were believing in Islam were in the darkness. They had no knowledge. So what is this paradox and dilemma and contradiction and conflict? This was extremely troublesome to me. And I just made dua, open this to me, explain this to me, make it clear to me. And very, very gradually, not in a blinding flash of insight, step by step, I started to unravel the economics that I had been taught by the best teachers. And I said, there is a problem here. Okay, so there is another problem there. And slowly bit by bit, the whole thing unraveled. And ultimately I came to realize that everything I had learned in my PhD was wrong, everything was wrong. But it didn't happen in one day. So the question is, what was this knowledge that changed the world? One thing that is sure is we don't have it. Because that knowledge, if we had it, we could also change the world. At least we would know what to do that is required to change the world. But we don't. So today, nearly everybody in the ummah believes that we need to learn from the west in order to make progress. And not that we need to learn from the Quran to make progress. Because the Quran we already know. So this is the greatest problem that we don't actually know. The message which revolutionized the world. So this again I came to gradually, in the west they rejected Christianity. And after rejecting Christianity, we had to find another religion, something to believe in. And they started to believe in science. Science became their new religion. There is a process which has been called the deification of science. So they said that, what is science? Science is the study of external world, not the study of your internal world. So they said that that is what matters. That is the only source of valid knowledge. That is objective. What is subjective is what is inside my heart. That is not knowledge. It's just, you know, just give me the facts. So this is a very putting a devaluing human beings. And if we consider the question, how should I live? You will not, and this is the most important question for us. I said this is a little question, but actually for on an individual basis. This is the most important question that all of us need to learn to answer. How should I live? But if you will not find the answer in the books of chemistry, biology, history and physics and mathematics. So this is the knowledge which Quran gives us. The knowledge of our internal world and how to live our lives. And this is the most important kind of knowledge. So one of the elements of this knowledge central is that In each of us there is a possibility to become the best and also the worst. So we can rise above the angels and also become worse than the beasts. So life is about realizing this potential, learning how we can be better than the angels. And this knowledge is not contained in any of the books that you will find in the West. So because the West teach you how to make more money, they don't teach you how to become a better person. And this knowledge you can only get from the teaching books. Now this is what our intellectual tradition is about which is considered as useless. And this is useless if you want to look to our books to learn how to make more money. You will not find anything in them. But if you look to the best of the best to learn how to become a better person, then you will not find anything there. The question in which knowledge is more important. It took me a long, long time to get to this. I am saying this very easily. So how can we become the best possible? Allah Ta'ala has put in us, it's like a seed. He has created great potential. Within a seed there is a possibility of becoming a tree. And in fact that tree has thousands of other seeds. So one seed has within it millions of trees. This is why Allah Ta'ala says in the Holy Quran that if you save one life it is like you have saved the entire humanity. This is from my mathematical perspective. I got my degree in math. It just didn't make any sense. How can one equal seven billion? But if you think about it in terms of the potential, every human being has the possibility of changing the future of humanity. The lives impacting the entire life. And we have seen so many examples of how this has happened, how many people have changed the lives of it. So we have this potential. But how to realize this potential? It is a knowledge that will create this. So Allah Ta'ala taught other walai salam the names. And what were these names? Again there is a huge debate and there are some very deep issues involved with this teaching of names. Which one does it understand? Because we are never trained in this philosophical tradition. Allah Ta'ala says are those who know equal to those who do not know? You are not talking about MBAs or other. This knowledge is the precious knowledge. So the way to realize our potential is to gain knowledge, but knowledge of a specific kind. And if you don't acquire that knowledge, that's why I said that. I have said that this European education that we receive is toxic. Because it prevents us from recognizing our potential and it prevents us from acquiring the knowledge required to realize that potential. So I have a video on lessons which MIT taught me. And I was a 16-year-old at MIT. What I really need to learn, and this is from the perspective of a 65-year-old. What I really needed to know was, and just in terms of worldly life, I need to learn social skills. But I didn't get any. I was like my fellow classmates at MIT. I was an experimenter. Because to excel in your studies, you have to have... You have to have... You have to have... Otherwise, you'll focus the water. Otherwise, you'll focus the water. So instead of helping me to develop my character, which is what I desperately need personally, they encouraged me to become worse. They actually encouraged me to become worse even more and become even more pathological as a personality by even more introverted and specialized on those skills which have nothing to do with real world. So I said earlier that everything... I was taught at Stanford, PhD, economics was around. Everything lifted. So many people... I've been in many seminars and everybody gets very, very good. It's very annoying, especially economists get very annoyed. They say that, no, you shouldn't do such a blanket rejection. And you should say that, yes, we should take the good and reject the bad and that is the way of the prophet. And that is... Prophet sallallahu alaihi wa sallam took the technology of the khanda and the other versions and so on and so forth. There are many, many examples. So I can give... Basically, if I want to hedge a little, what I can say is that the knowledge that is not in the textbooks all around the globe, this is all completely wrong. Now, Western economists, there are many heterodox economists and they have rejected neoclassical liberal economics which is the strongly dominant school and so they have some insights that are valuable. But this neoliberal economics, this is complete. And although they trace their tradition and heritage back to Adam Smith, it's not true. This modern economics was created in the early 20th century under the influence of logical positivism and created by Lionel Robbins who redefined economists. Economics as being about the science of scarcity. Prior to that, economics was about the science of human welfare as created by material consumption. So they... Prior to scarcity, economists differentiated between needs and wants and they said that, you know, feeding the poor creates more utility than listening to music, which is... But after the scarcity difference, this distinction was rejected. And wants and needs were put on par and there was only scarcity. Not having... So the job of the economists is to fulfill all the needs and wants. This is false. In Islam, we are taught that which basically means that you are welcome to... you are encouraged to fulfill your needs and even your comforts. You can wear your dress, decoration, but not to overspend. But in economists, in economic theory, there's no such thing as overspending. There's no such thing as luxury, there's no such thing as a syrup. Once you take this into account, then all of economic theory, modern economic theory collapses. Once you say that there's a difference between needs and wants and that our job is not to fulfill wants. In fact, the Quran strongly discourages fulfillment of ideal desires. Then you get a completely different economic theory. So there are, as I said, heterodox economists have, in fact, explored alternatives and they have some wisdom. So I'm saying that it's not all of the West is wrong. It's just that the orthodoxy of economics, even when I was studying in graduate school in 1970s, the Chicago school was not dominant at all. In fact, at my university, they said that these people are just idealized and they don't know anything about science. There was an intellectual coup that was performed in the 1970s which was going strong. Reagan Thatcher implemented it. And ultimately, the Keynesian economics, the Chicago school was discredited and Chicago school took over and is currently dominant all over the world. So regardless, even though the heterodox economists have some insights, they are still starting from the wrong place. Their economics is the economics of conquest and colonization. And we want to discover an economist's economics of the colonized and the conquered will have to start in a different place. So I mentioned already about the Orientalism of Food by Edward Said. This was a game changer, both in the world. Because basically what Edward Said said was that all of European knowledge about the East is influenced dramatically by the fact of the global conquest. So how does this affect us? Well, we are also studying Western knowledge, so we also acquire this complex, but on the opposite side. And what is the instrument by which people say that colonization ended 70 years ago, so how come our minds are still colonized? The instrument of colonization is education. Education you receive is the means by which your minds are colonized because it teaches you that Europe is the most advanced civilization. European knowledge is the only thing that is worth acquiring. Why? They don't never say that explicitly, but that's all you're taught. So automatically you learn that Western knowledge created over the past three centuries by the West is the only important knowledge in the world. Western doesn't matter. So you're taught to revere the West, and also you're taught to attempt and shame for your ancestors. They didn't do anything. Muslims didn't do anything. Now this is actually because of a fabricated history. A fabricated history which erases the Muslim contribution. There is a particular strategy that was used to erase the Muslim contribution. 500 years of Muslim advances in science, they've all been removed from the picture by a simple strategy. Anything that Muslims did, either you put it back to a Greek or you put it forward to the European copies. So all of the 500 years disappeared. This is detailed in. So in order to relearn, we have to, in order to understand what really happened, we have to relearn history. And basically, I'm not going to go into detail, but Europe entered into the Dark Ages with the Council of Nicaea at which one version of Christianity, Trinitarian Christianity was imposed by Emperor Constantine or Roman Empire. Anything which conflicted with that was removed. The Library of Alexandria was burnt and all knowledge was suppressed except for Orthodox Catholic downtown. So that will happen somewhere in 300 BC. So after that, basically until around 1295, 500 years of Islam around the 6th century. And then in 1270 or so, the Reconquest of Spain was begun and the city of Toledo was captured. The city went into Spain. So this time, instead of burning the library, the Europeans started translating the books of the Muslims. And of course, the strength of the Islamic civilization, why did it prosper for a thousand years? It was a unique example. Because Islamic center centers around knowledge, the acquisition of knowledge. Knowledge is the lost property of the movement, search knowledge from your cradle to the grave. So because the Muslims center lies in knowledge, they gained ascendance in the world. Today, knowledge is not to be found in the Islamic world and that's why we are in the darkness because we're not following the commands to pursue knowledge. So after the translation of Project of Toledo started, then life started to enter into Europe. And all of this knowledge was in conflict with Orthodox Catholic doctrine. So for two centuries, a battle was fought, which is described in many books. The battle between science and religion. But that's not really what it was. The battle was between the Islamic texts. It's not actually Islamic. These were not texts about religion. There were millions of books in the libraries of Toledo. They were about philosophy, science, biology, chemistry, medicine, everything you could think of. Because Islam does not differentiate between secular knowledge and religious knowledge. Unlike today where we have learned to make this distinction, we end our distinction. Knowledge is knowledge. All knowledge is one. So this new knowledge, the Church tried its best to suppress it. The Inquisition was created to suppress this knowledge. I didn't know that until recently. I thought it was partly about the remnants of the Muslims who were left behind. They were forcibly converted into Christianity. Anybody who was practicing his religion was burnt at the stake or other things like that. But this was not the main function of the Inquisition. The main function of the Inquisition was to prevent this new knowledge which was in conflict with Catholic doctrine to come in. Every book had to be censored. They had to be approved by the Catholic Church. People who were translating Islamic books, people who were getting a lot of knowledge. In fact, Descartes, who was known as the father of Western philosophy, basically translated a verbal Ghazali's book. When the passages are almost clear, you can see passages that he has copied. But to this day, Western historians don't agree with this. Similarly, Copernicus, a famous revolutionary, translated a book by Hibnul Shatir, which was in his library. But still they don't agree with Western history. Western historians don't agree to this, even though the evidence is so strong that it's impossible to reject. Anyway, so this battle took place between the Catholic Church and the influx of new knowledge which was called science, and eventually the Catholic Church lost. But the tension created by this, created a rift in the Church. It led to the Protestant faction emerge which adopted many of these new ideas coming in, which were in conflict with Catholic doctrines. And then there were battles between Protestants and Catholics for a century, ending with the Thirty Years War. And this battle really soured the Europeans on religion. But when a very explicit impact, you must understand this, that there is a tradition called the Symbolistics. And these people, they were developing a theory of society based on the Bible. This tradition was rejected. And why was it rejected? For a very sensible reason. They had experienced that religion only leads to war. So they said, okay, we have experienced, a hundred years of war, can have more of this. So they changed the meaning of the word religion. Previously religion in the West was like religion here. It's all encompassing. It covers all areas of life. But in the West they said, okay, religion is just going to be, from now on, a personal belief system. You can believe whatever you want to, but don't bring it into the public sphere. So even now in the West it's not considered good manners to discuss religion with anybody. You can talk about anything you like. But you can't talk about religion because it's not something for public sphere, it's your private belief system. So, but more importantly, more urgently, how to build what should politics be like, what should international relations be like, what should government be like. All of these questions were answered by Christianity, by the scholars. But they said, no, we won't accept these answers. So we have to rebuild knowledge from scratch. So all of knowledge had to be rebuild from scratch. Because once you reject religion as a basis of knowledge, you have to start from zero. So philosophy is the mother of all science. They started with Descartes who says, okay, let's start from zero. First thing I have to establish is my own existence. Do I really exist? So I think therefore I am. That's really, obviously, the first place. In fact, this is identical to the question that Imam Huzali posted, that there are so many different claimants to truth. How do I know what is true? And I must start from zero. So he says, okay, let's start from zero and find the truth. And he says that we can't get anywhere. To start from zero, it is impossible to make progress. Because to make progress, you have to have something. Where are you going to get that something from? He says if you use your akal, it can't get. Akal only gets from one premise to the next. It doesn't give you the... If you start with observation, they are also not certain. There is no source of certainty. And then he said that I fell into depression. And ultimately, God put Nur in my heart, which removed this depression. And so basically, all knowledge starts with the Nur of the heart. But this could not be accepted by Descartes. So he started from some other grounds. Okay, so that's philosophy. But basically, from the practical perspective, political science was the most important thing. Because that was what was leading to warfare. So they needed a new type of political science. Many, many enlightenment philosophy discussed political science. So Hobbes and Montesquieu and many others. But basically, you know, Hobbes starts with the premise that the natural state of humanity is war of all against all. So where does that come from? That's why his personal experience. He saw that for 100 years people were fighting against family when the Protestant Catholic divide was not restricted to regions. Within one family, we would have some people who were Catholic and some were Protestant. So the second field to be built was economics and slowly remaining social sciences. So basically, as a result of rejection of Christianity, they eventually, they lost faith. And again, this is over simplification. But if you look at the 19th century western social philosophers, nearly all of them had personal crises. And Nietzsche went into other philosophies. They also had psychological crises. Because when you reject God, you are placed in a very, very unpleasant world where the poor, the oppressed will never be given justice. And if somebody does enormous amounts of zulm, there's nobody watching, nobody cares. This universe is a harsh, cold and cruel. And this is what Bertrand Russell was the 20th century leader of atheists. He says that everything is meaningless. What we believe, how we act, whether we have huge vision or not, until all end. And it's just the result of chance collisions of atoms. And it will all end with the death of the universe. So, only on these truths, only on the firm foundation, unyielding despair, can we build the soul's habitations. This is very artistic language. But this is the result of rejecting God. Life is meaningless. So, a lot of that 20th century was spent in trying to find a solution to this question of meaning of life. So, existentialism, which I studied in 1971 in my course at MIT, it says that okay, so we are born, the key words are, essence precedes, existence precedes essence. That is our, we come into being first and then we create meaning. So, even God creates the universe, then our life is part of God's plan. And so, meaning to our lives has already been written in the book before we were born. But if this universe is completely meaningless, chaos, then there is no meaning to my life. I can create meaning. And so, that's what existentialism is about. How do we go about creating meaning? But the absurdists, another school of thought said that, no, this is nonsense. We cannot create meaning. Life is inherently absurd. And we must learn to live with it. And there is nihilism there. We cannot really learn to live with it. The only serious philosophical question is suicide. Basically, absurdism and nihilism are similar in the sense that they both accept that life is meaningless. But one has a more optimistic and cheery attitude that, yes, it's okay. We can live an absurd life. And another says, no, this kind of life, is it really worth living? What makes it worth living? How can we make it worth living? So, these are the big questions within which we must answer our little questions. And since life is meaningless, there is no point in discussing the meaning of life. You will find your own way. And meanwhile, I can review this nonsense that life is all about making money so that my capitalist system can work. So the question is, should we accept, or must we accept meaningless? Russell says that we must accept this. This is the logical demand of reason that it's impossible that God exists. And there are a number of books proving that God does not exist these days. But can non-existence of God be proven? People who make such arguments have really a very, very shallow understanding of philosophy. Because it's very simple. It's very easy to show that you cannot prove the non-existence of God. It's very easy to show that. Basically, let me give the argument because it's so simple. And there are many other simple arguments. Basically, universe started with the big bang. So the question of who created the universe is outside the universe, obviously. Whatever it was, it happened, whoever it was, whatever it was, it was before the birth of the universe. Now, according to the physical laws, there is no possible way that we can get information about anything lying outside this universe. That's why physics is the study of objects within this universe. And metaphysics is the study of what is outside this universe. The question of whether God exists or not is a metaphysical question. It lies outside the bounds of what we can see and therefore it's only subject to speculation. You can't prove the existence of God and you can't disprove the existence of God using logic. So to understand how the Europeans came to believe in the non-existence of God, we have to study, see, we are used to thinking that our thoughts come from reason. But this is not true, our thoughts are really shaped by history. So if you want to study how we think, how they think, and how we have been influenced by how they think, then we have to study the streams of history. And so we have to study how Europeans lost faith in God. And so it's a long and complex story which I will skip. But basically over a long process, religion became marginalized in Europe. And Tony in his book says that religion which was the master interest of mankind winded into a department of life with boundaries. And the whole book, Religion and the Rise of Capital, is about this process which took place over the course of two centuries. One of the keys there here is that the Bible says that the love of money is the root of all evil. And that was the social consensus in the 16th century. But in the 18th century, the social consensus became that the lack of money is the root of all evil. So it was a dramatic transition which took place in European thinking. And we have all come to think like Europeans. So social science was a replacement for Christianity as already discussed. So social science is really a religion of Europe. It is what replaced the Christian religion. And therefore at its foundation, it's in conflict with religious ideas. So the basic foundation of all social sciences, economics included, and your MBA included, is that there is no God, no judgment, no afterlife. So let me start with that as a premise. So universal life are meaningless accidents. So then, given that this is so, then life manages another animal, and life is a jungle of competition. Survival of the fittest is the only morality. And so the purpose of life is pursuit of pleasure, power, and profits. This all is natural once you reject God, judgment, and afterlife. And these lessons are built into everything that you read, everything in your, this is the core of a Western education. These ideas, which are never explicitly expressed, they were explicitly written, then you could think about and reject them. But they are just assumed without any discussion. So you need to develop an Islamic alternative by gently. And I have a couple of lectures on this. And also a lot of other people in the Islamic world are becoming aware of the need of this. Recep Shantar has been doing a lot of work on decolonizing the social sciences. And he has, basically, the need to do is what is called a rooted revival. That we have to base the revival on our own intellectual heritage. We can't just pull it out of nowhere. Because the heterodoxy in the West is also developing critiques, although they are not useful for us, because they are not rooted in the Islamic intellectual tradition. I have developed a proposal which I have called, the work of Ibn Khaldun. Because we need to reject all of these three or four centuries of European word, we have to go back to our own roots. And actually all of the social sciences, Ibn Khaldun has been rightly called the father of social sciences. Because he was the first one to do an analysis. And he says that also. I'm the first to do this kind of analysis. About how there is systematic change in social change, and how the process of social change can actually be subjected to intellectual analysis. Nobody had done that before. This was just a collection of words. This happened, this happened. What he was trying to see was a logic of history. How history flows through forces which are larger than individuals. So one of the key insights of the Ibn Khaldun is that the communities are the drivers of social change. And communities formed by collective identities. And so this is very much strongly in contrast with the economics view of the world, or generally social scientific, that life is just, everyone is an individual. So there is no setting as society except for the collection of individuals. And so one of the practical implications of this is that there is no possibility of collective action by individuals. Because they all have different goals. So collective action can only take place at the government level. And this has blinded Muslims to the possibilities for change today. But while Halakh says that the nation state, which is a creation of Europe, is actually built on concepts which are antithetical to Islam. And to make it very simple, the nation state puts the state, gives the state the authority to create worlds. And nation state is above all other authorities. And in the Islamic state, God is above all. And even if there is 100% majority agreement that you take is correct, in the Islamic state it will not be accepted because it is the Sharia. So Sharia overrides consensus and overrides what the ruler wants. The ruler is subject to God, but in the secular state this is not true. The ruler decides who will be your God. So a lot of people all over the Islamic world are trying to harness the power of the state to implement Islam. And this is an impossible task because the state itself is antithetical to Islam. So you can't use un-Islamic means to get Islamic outcomes. So I have provided framework based on my study of Nefandunde. Social science claims, although it's false claim, is that we are just like physical science. We just study the reality of what is happening and we don't prescribe knowledge. But this is not true. If you look at unpack the ideas then you see that there is a normative idea and then there is a positive description and then there is transformative. How do we get from our current imperfect state to the perfect state? So in Islam we have all three. We have a normative idea which is spelled out in the sharia. This is what you're supposed to be like. But we recognize that people are not angels. So when we study positive we study actual society and then we study what can be done to bring this closer to the ideal society. So one of the things that falls out of this framework is that human agency. When you study social science you say that society is subject to these laws of supply and demand, etc. Which just force everybody to do whatever the law says. We don't have any agency. We can't shape history. But this is not true. We can take history in whichever direction we want by... So economic teaches us that human beings are robots and their behavior is subject to mathematical formula. That is just false. And similarly in all other, most of the majority of social sciences, humans have no agency. Societies work according to certain mechanisms and rules. And we study these mechanisms to find what will happen. But if human beings have freedom then to ask the question what will happen tomorrow is not valid because what will happen tomorrow depends on what we will do today. And we have a choice to shape our future. So I have been working on Islamic economics and the difference between my approach and the other approach is that generally speaking other approaches take some part of capitalist economics as truth and try to mix it with Islamic principles. This cannot be done. I am saying that Islamic economics should be a replacement for Western...