 economics. So we get to part two what can we actually do now? So I have listed some of the obstacles but and there are many which I have not listed but we have to understand that whatever obstacles we face today are far less than the obstacles faced by our Prophet Muhammad Sallallahu alayhi wa sallam. He had a very very hostile environment he faced was much worse than what we face today but the teachings of Islam transformed ignorant and backward Bedouin into leaders of the world and created a civilization which enlightened the world for more than a thousand years and the final message of God to humanity is complete and perfect guidance for all times. It is just as revolutionary today as it was 14 centuries ago. So we take these as axioms and this means that we don't really have to work out very complicated calculations to learn what to do. We have the solution in front of us we are just not looking at it. Today when we have economic problem what do we do? We call in the expert from Harvard and for any other solutions we are looking to the western books for solutions to the extent that when I was VC of Pied I had a course in business ethics and I called in the teacher who was a weirded man and a very sincere Pious Muslim and I looked at his outline and he was basically teaching business ethics from a western text. So even in our own home ground we are borrowing from the west. So to start the process we need to follow Iqbal who says that we have to we have all been basically such that to the western gods of knowledge and we have to lift our eyes because and look to God and the Quran for guidance and this requires decolonizing our minds. What is decolonization? Well there are many signs but the most basic thing is that the colonized mind believes that the most important knowledge that exists today was produced by the west over the past three centuries physics, chemistry, biology, political science, economics, mathematics and this colonization is automatically created by western education. Why? You study for four years in a university and these are all the things that you learn. You never learn about the Quran or the Hadith or anything and in fact you see that these Quran and Hadith are irrelevant to the knowledge that is useful today. So automatically anybody who gets a bachelor's or even high school in western education which is everywhere in the Islamic world you end up with the automatic idea that knowledge is produced by the west and then the Quran and Hadith are irrelevant for the modern world. So part of this knowledge is also economic knowledge. It tells us how to conduct our economic affairs. So if you want to rebut this, you want to break the spell of western knowledge we have to start with the fundamentals and ask what is the goal of our lives? Now you will not find an answer to this in the stock of western knowledge. If you look at economics textbook they say that the goal of our life is to maximize pleasure in this life. Why? Because you've seen that after you reject God's judgment after life then this is the natural conclusion that Islam teaches us that real success is in the day of judgment. So economic theory tells us that society should try to maximize wealth because that's dunya. But Islam tells us that life of this world is pursuit of an illusion and Allah created us to see who can do the best of deeds in adverse circumstances. So the fact that the another issue is that economic theory is outcome oriented. It says that if you eat something then you get pleasure. The struggle doesn't matter. Allah says this dunya is meant only for struggle. The rewards are in the akhara. So the fact that the circumstances are adverse is not of serious concern to us because we are here only to struggle and to show Allah what we can do. The outcomes, the rewards are waiting for us in the akhara. So we start the process of change by setting our internal goals to spiritual progress instead of making money. So many Muslim students come to me and ask for advice on which career should I choose, which path, what should I study, economics, computer science, etc. etc. to make the most amount of money. They have already been indoctrinated into believing that the purpose of life is to make money. So the purpose of life is really that we are giving nafs-e-amara. And in fact nafs-e-amara is an exact description of the homo-economics, which is the goal, which is the rational human being of economic theory. So our goal is to go from nafs-e-amara to nafs-e-labwama to nafs-e-mudmaina and discussion of how this works is given in my paper. So this is actually what we call the work of the night because we also have external goals. External goals are again economic theory and social science mindset tells us that the social society is governed by the government. So we must look to the government if we want to go beyond the individual. Basically this is one of the things which happened in a secular society because they were always fighting each other. So they said that common action can only be done by the government. This has not been the case in Islamic societies. In Islamic societies, the driver of change is the community and so our goal, our target for action is the communities, the local community. It's the family, our infos, our neighborhoods. Values are taught at the mother's lab within families and within the larger circle of extended family and within neighborhood communities. Strong families are central to the development of individuals and communities and today the worship of nafs, which is being promoted all over the world by Hollywood and by social media, this is very damaging to love, commitment, sacrifice, and responsibility, which is at the heart of the family and we need to actively counter this because this poison is spilling into Islamic societies and it's having effects and you can see it all around you. So now there is, I've said that there's the effort on our individual self and then there's the effort on the community and sometimes people get the mistake and idea that one should go and sit in a cave for 40 days and then you can come out and work on the community. So if you work personally on becoming a saint, then this will never happen and so you will never be in the position to actually make change. So Islam actually does not teach us monasticism and this is a unique feature that we work on our soul by struggling to change the community. The efforts of the night are complementary to the efforts of the day, the two go together. So somebody said that one is that the spiritual energy, the zikr, the salat, this is like the petrol for the car and the activity is like the driving of the car. So without any petrol you cannot drive but if you just keep filling petrol in the car and never drive it that's also a useless thing to do. So we need to do both at the same time. So how can we create strong communities? This is one of the keys to Islamic revival. We have to support families, prevent them from breaking up in this environment which is toxic to family values. We have to specially support mothers who have been emphasized heavily because that's the basic training ground of the society tomorrow. If all mothers ruin their children today, our society will be gone tomorrow and in contrast, if all mothers train their children well, the society will be wonderful tomorrow. The men have the job of using the masjid as community centers. Today we have lost the but this is the thing that the masjid is there but it is not acting to create the community. Today we go and pray in masjid for 10 years but we don't know the name of the person praying on the right hand side and even though we recognize them by face. So we have to work on creating pooled information at the community level and using this information to transform the community. There's a technical aspect and one can create community banks and community currency and this was actually done in the first Islamic bank which came into existence. Well we have a short break please do note down your questions so that we can address them. First of course we'll give priority to the written questions and then of course we'll give opportunity to ask verbal questions as well. Alright so I needed some water so the community banks are things that can be created without government intervention. So basically one of the things that I'm saying is that people because of the secular mindset people are thinking that first we need to capture the government then we can do anything. This is not true there are many opportunities open to us at local levels. One of the things is that the concept of nation was invented in Europe after the dissolution of the concept of a united society. In the religious era the society is united by the religion but after that an artificial imagined community was created at the nation level and this has been the greatest of the new gods. As Akbar says that this nation state has created enormous amount of bloodshed unparalleled in history. So instead of looking to the nation to change to transform the world and instead of seeking to capture national government in order to bring about Islamic change we have to work with communities and create change at the community level. So we come to part three of this talk which is state level interventions which is exactly contrary to what I have said that we don't need to worry about the nation state but as any