 بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم أعطا عالة لإنسان و this is a knowledge that they could not have acquired on their own Islamic teachings place a central importance on knowledge the pre-islamic area is known as the age of ignorance and Islamic scholars have written enormous amounts of material about the nature of knowledge بخصوات صيتا تهادس المتحدة has been built on radically different foundations very briefly the influx of knowledge from islamic Spain split the church into two and caused more than a century of warfare between protestants and Catholics which led to the rejection of religion as a basis for organising society in the west و this led to the need for rebuilding the entire stock of human knowledge on new foundations and the west rejected the heart and intuition and the soul as sources of knowledge because they had led to continuous warfare and instead chose to build knowledge solely on the basis of reason and on observations. So a more detailed discussion of contrasting views of knowledge is deferred for later but some central points can be said catch briefly Islamic knowledge is built on the heart and intuition and on the foundation of the certainties provided by the Quran. Human knowledge is always prone to error and these errors multiply when our hearts are blinded by worldly desires. تزكية or purification of the heart is a first step to knowledge. In contrast to this western knowledge excludes the heart and the intuition and uses reasons and observations of external reality not of our internal world as the sole sources of knowledge and it strives to achieve a certainty which actually cannot be obtained. So how does this matter for our study of economics? Well modern economics is built on exclusion of our internal subjective human experience as a source of knowledge and this is replaced by rational analysis depending only on logic and scientific knowledge and excluding our emotions and spirituality. This leads to a model of human behavior which is suggests that humans are cold, calculating, calculus and cruel. So in Islamic approach we replace this model by an understanding of human behavior based on our direct intuitive and experiential understanding of our own selves and of our fellow human beings around us. One of the immediate consequences is that we abandon mathematics because we understand that mathematics cannot be used to describe our behavior or the behavior of any human being we know. One of the things that might seem to be in conflict with what I have said earlier is that in order to learn we must learn from human experiences and to learn from the experience of another we must abandon our own attachment our own emotions and stand in his place in order to learn of his experience. So this involves detaching ourselves from our own emotions and judgments and because these can cloud our understanding. So in other places I have advocated the positions which seem to be entirely the opposite and this has to do with stages for understanding in order to understand the experience for others other points of view you have to abandon your personal judgments after acquiring a solid grasp on the major perspectives then you can take the step forward to to judge between two different perspectives and evaluate them. An illustration of the perspective needed by the student is the attitude of the companions who used to say to the Prophet صلى الله عليه وسلم that when when he would tell them do you know of matters such and such so they would say that Allah and his Prophet know better even if they knew about the matter so they would set aside all prior knowledge in order to listen to what the Prophet had to tell them. A larger lesson which also emerges from our study of the social states and transitions between societies is that increasing levels of unity led to increasing strength and the final stage in this evolution has been the nation state of Europe but this has been enormously harmful to human welfare by dividing people against each other and leading to continuous warfare. Islamic ideals require unity at the level of the Ummah and also at the level of humankind we are all brothers and sisters sons and daughters of Adam and Eve and this unity comes from our hearts and it cannot come from calculations so this concludes our segment on pedagogy which is a sort of a side note to our central concern which is the impact of capitalism on our minds and hearts but it illustrates how we plan to study it we plan to study the impact of capitalism by looking at our own hearts and how they have been infected by the desire for wealth and the desire for fame and the desire for the goods of this dunya all of these are against the teachings of Islam and in fact there is a very strong hadith that one who strives to acquire knowledge in sake of for the sake of fame or popularity or for disputing with the scholars will not be able to taste the pleasures of paradise or something to that effect so the taking the heart as the source of knowledge into account leads to a radically different approach to both the nature of knowledge and how we should pursue how we should go after acquiring this knowledge