Hamlet's ghost, Orientalism and the tragedy of Islamic economics

Abstract

Referring to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, this paper explains the “tragedy of Islamic economics” by looking at the issue of the moral economy of Islam as an orientalistic “ghost” that, if may distress the “world” of conventional economics, represents, instead, a false problem for its own methodology and a major obstacle for its own theoretical development. In fact, as much as Prince Hamlet is worried by the vision of his father (King Hamlet)’s ghost in Shakespeare’s tragedy, so Islamic economics seems persistently obsessed by the challenge of (self-)legitimizing itself from a moral perspective, as it was its own duty to overcome the limits of conventional economics, avenging its weaknesses, and its own destiny to perpetuate an underlying dichotomy between the West and the Orient. But, beyond Orientalism as a practice of knowledge and culture creation (that is, in the end, subservient to Western domination), if one resides in the real “world” of Islamic economics, morality is not detached from economics and, accordingly, there is no need to rectify economics through morality. In other terms, to the extent to which it does not embrace the Western spirit of capitalism, no orientalistic moral economy’s ghost should haunt the house of an eco-system really founded on Islamic principles. On the contrary, when the tawhidi framework is adopted and shari‘ah-based rationales of abundance, sharing and cooperation nurture the pillars of economy, an Islamic eco-system (by fully integrating economics and morality) can develop its own paradigm of shared prosperity autonomously from conventional economics and its ghosts. Following this reasoning the paper suggests that time has come for Islamic economics (Prince Hamlet) to “liberate” itself from the need for “revenge” inspired by the double-sided spirit of capitalism and moral economy’s ghost, so to depart from the orientalistic legacies of conventional economics and Western cultural domination (King Hamlet).