Right Livelihood & The Common Good: A Report on the Islamic Gift Economy Discourse in London

by Dr. Adi Setia

Background
Sometime in January 2014, I received an email from Rahat Siddique inviting me on behalf of the London School of Economics Student Union Islamic Society (LSESU-IS) to present a talk there on the theme of engaging modern economics from an Islamic perspective. I quickly agreed, seeing this as a chance to dialogue directly in person with some of the brightest young Muslim students (and perhaps some non-Muslim academics) in one of the foremost intellectual and academic bastions of modern western economics and finance, the very brain, as it were, of global neoliberal hegemony.

So it was quickly arranged to have the formal event on Thursday’s evening, March 26 2014, consisting of two 40-minutes talks by Dr. Karim Lahham and myself, followed by a half-hour or so Q/A session. To optimise on this unexpected opportunity (fully sponsored by the LSESU) to be in the UK, I arranged with Rahat and Abbas Maysam, coordinator of Rumi’s Cave,5 to extend my stay in London for a week or so after the formal event in order for me to have more time to get to know the local London Muslim community better. My boss and mentor at CASIS-UTM, Professor Wan Mohd Nor Wan Daud, cryptically said, “You should go,” when I informed him of the LSE invitation.

So, all in all, there was one formal LSE event, two informal discussion sessions with some LSESU-IS members and affiliates, and three talks at Rumi’s Cave, one talk at the Malaysian Hall with the Malaysian Muslim community, and one talk at a regular sufi gathering at Tukdin restaurant. I also managed to find time to visit and talked with Shaykh Yahya Rhodus and Shaykh Jihad Brown in Cambridge; Shaykh Dr. Talal Azem and Dr. Karim Lahham in Oxford; and Tarek el-Diwany, Ustadh Muhammad Zaki Ismail and Jumana Moon in London. Throughout my post LSE talk week-long sojourn in London, I was most gracefully hosted by Abbas Maysam and Amer Farhad, who generously offered his comfortable Paddington apartment for me to stay; while Tuk Din, proprietor of the neighborhood Malay restaurant, Tukdin, and his wife and staff ensured my frequent dinners there were always warm, cosy and complemented by free use of their restaurant’s Wi-Fi.

And just in case I forget, it needs to be mentioned that Dr. Sachi Arafat of Glasgow University was the key person behind this terrific network of like-minded, purpose-driven scholars, intellectuals, professionals, activists, students and ordinary folks facilitating my fruitful trip and providing me with the audience I had in mind. The following are the four posters prepared for some of the talks:

Report

In the formal LSE event (see the first poster above), Dr. Karim Lahham spoke on “The Relation of Metaphysics to Sociology.” His presentation was very abstract, conceptual and philosophical, and I think (and I suspects he thinks so as well), well above the minds of the mostly young-student audience, who most probably lacked the required academic background to follow his discourse. I forgot to ask him for a copy of the paper (and am still kicking myslef for that oversight), and now has only a dim recollection of what he said. But the gist of it was that over the course of the European Enlightenment leading up to Modernity, the social sciences (or humanities), including economics, have discarded or ignored the role of metaphysics and philosophy (including ontology and epistemology) in general in determining their subject matter and directing their study. The upshot of this sorry development is the current focus on abstract, formal mathematical models largely ungrounded in the concrete economies of the real world of culture and nature. A detailed analysis of this metaphysical, and thereby ontic and empirical as well as experiential barrenness is set out in the many works of Professor Tony Lawson, while a more accessible account is set out in a recent paper by Yusuf Jha.

Thereafter I spoke on “Right Livelihood & the Common Good: Engaging Structural Greed & Reviving the Gift Economy.” That choice of words for title of my talk was a deliberate move to bring economics back into its proper engagement with real people and their concerns instead of continuing on its current track of generating abstractions addressing an audience of abstractions. Inter alia, I pointed out that the way economics is currently defined effectively renders it not only a “dismal” science, but also an impossible science, the science of the not-enough (scarcity) chasing after the never- enough (ulimited wants)—effectively, the science of the impossible, and hence a meaningless science generative of endless pseudo problems that are in turn generative of pseudo solutions, or “layers upon layers of darkness,” as the Qur’an says. The remedy is to return to the original, classical and traditional meaning of ‘economics’ or ‘economy’ as household management/stewardship/caretaking (tadbīr al-manzil), and thereby to the redefinition of economics as the “science of the organization of livelihood” (ʿilm niẓām al-maʿāsh) or the “science of earning and provisioning” (ʿilm al-iktisāb wa al- infāq). However much I had wanted to, I could not find time to prepare a formal dedicated paper or powerpoint presentation for the talk, but since I have over the past few years written published articles on various aspects of the issue, I forwarded these20 to Rahat for circulation amongst interested members of the LSESU-IS community.

The Q/A sesssion was lively, and the upshot of it was our emphasis to the audience of the need to take a more dialectical or dialogical approach to ther study and teaching of economics, to acquire the cognitve capacity to “talk back” to economics, which is only possible if they are conscious and articulative of their conceptual point of departure for entering into the modern economic conversation. This conceptual point of departure will largely be a function of their committed and creative engagement with their worldview, and for Muslims, this will be the Worldview of Islam.

Over the next couple of days I had two informal discussion sessions with some members of the LSESU-IU, in which I mostly expounded on Imam al-Ghazali’s Book 13 of the Iḥyāʾ on the “Proprieties of Earning and Living,” (Kitāb Ādāb al-Kasb wa al-Maʿāsh) which basically summarizes the traditional Islamic understanding of the interconnection and integration between private devotional (ʿibadāt) and public transactional life (muʿāmalāt), and how this understanding impacts on our engagement with modern economics and the modern economy, and thereby on our effort to create autonomous space therein for a creative revival of classical adab and fiqh of muʿamalah. As we were going out for dinner after one of these informal seesions, a LSE economics student confided to me, “I’m already into my third year at LSE, and I still do not know what economics is.” I responded, “O, come on; you can’t be serious.” But he was, and it is a great waste of intellect for this situation to continue.

My first talk at Rumi’s Cave (see the second poster above) was on “Problems are Solutions: Experiments in Radical Economics,” which draws from insights in permaculture, especially the principles that one should always try to find solutions in the nature the problems themselves and thereby solve them at their very roots (hence the word “radical’) without creating new and possibly worse and more expensive problems. The upshot of the talk was that problems like abandoned agricultural lands (as in Malaysia) present good opportunities for the establishment of viable businesses and meaningful careers dedicated to bringing them back into production through a mixture of private, public and community investments.

There are many problems—intellectual and the Ummah. So what? So we look at those problems and choose one or two that really really interest us and capture our concern (mā yaʿnīnā), and then devote our lives and minds and skills finding solutions to those problems as a full-time career, vocation and livelihood. Careers or businesses that create more probelms—direct or structural—for the Ummah and humanity at large are not careers or businesses; they are crimes that destroy the order of the world (niẓām al-ʿālam). Just as we need to look before we jump, we need to look before we work (for anyone or anything).

The second Rumi’s Cave talk explored aspects of the insanity of modern life, one
of which is that many if not most of us are trapped in and enslaved to in mind-numbing, soul-destroying meaningless paper-pushing or screw-turning jobs (as in Charlie Chaplin’s film Modern Times or Charles Dickens’ book Hard Times) that stunts our innate need for creativity and meaning in the work we do. This theme of the human need for creative, wholesome work, in which the worker or craftsman can see and direct the structural and functional ends of his labour is well explored in E.F. Scumacher’s book, Good Work, and reasonates with the Islamic emphasis on virtuous earning (kasb ṭayyib) and wholesome work (ʿamal ṣāliḥ). Since man is both physical and spiritual, then meaningful work must be one that brings not only its monetary and material rewards, but also emotional, intellectual and spiritual satisfaction and contentment in the way he relates to himself, his family, his community and his Creator. This means that one must always ask the question, “Do I really have a life in the way I earn my livelihood? Am I alive or am I dead? Is it life-lihood or is it death-lihood?”

The third talk invited the audience to reflect on the history of the modern academia, which have its roots in Plato’s academy and in Christian religious seminaries, or “preparatories” for training students for ordination as clergy or other ministry in the church (as in the case of Harvard, Oxford and Cambridge); and how over time as a result of the modernizing process in western history these venerable academic institutes have been transformed from being seminaries of religion to seminaries of secularism, which is in many ways a kind of atheistic-agnostic religion in the garb of science, technology, sociology and economics. Again, there is a need to go back to origins, to the notion of the academia as a community of scholars and their students, sharing and committed to a common unifying philosophical and ethical vision of the meaning, function and goal of education, as denoted by the terms ‘college’ and ‘collegial’ (kulliyyah). The antidote to the toxic, community destroying, over-centralised, faceless state and now increasingly corporate controlled and directed modern academia, is a return to community-rooted and community-relevant localised and decentralised educational initiatives providing vocational and academic training and guidance that answers directly to the genuine needs and problems of the local community context.

Under the current difficult circumstances, the way forward may have to take the form of a loose, informal network of autonomous grassroots educational and research initiatives, such as centers, institutes, colleges, foundations, academies, madrasahs and think-tanks, build up by independent, community-rooted scholar-intellectuals of conscience and vision and their student- and business-supporters, who know one another intimately through collegial, formal and informal visits, talks, conferences and other avenues for close intellectual and personal interactions toward a common educational and civilisational mission.

The talks at Tukdin (Tuesday’s night, March 04) and Malaysian Hall (Thursday’s night,
March 06) were both on aspects of the lessons and insights to be gleaned from Imām al-Ghazālī’s Book of the Proprieties of Earning and Living, and the importance of instituting regular structured study and teaching of this text in the mosques, madrasahs and study circles. A Muslim or Islamic community is constituted by both ʿibadah and muʿamalah, by the mosque and the market, by dīn and dunyā, but while courses on various aspects of ibadah (solah, sawm, hajj) are regularly given in the community, hardly any are conducted for muʿamalah. In my on-the-ground survey of the situation in Malaysia and elsewhere, hardly any imams, shaykhs, ustadhs or muftis are teaching the adab and fiqh of buying and selling, hiring and renting, of business partnerships and their related contractual forms, which serve to ensure justice, fair exchange, and transparency. This sorry situation will really have to change for the better if we want to return the Ummah to the true and liberating path of an economy of working-together (which is what muʿāmalah literally means) from their current enslavement to the current dog-eat-dog economy which is driven from below by fear of impoverishment and pulled from above by greed for enrichment.

Reflection, Suggestion & Conclusion
On the whole, I should say the trip was fruitful, allowing me to swing from the ivory tower of the London School of Economics to the grass-roots reality check of Rumi’s Cave, and through various way-stations in between (Malaysian Hall, Mara Hall, Tukdin, and nearby Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park), meeting and interacting with professors, students, shuyukhs (including Shaykh Babikir Ahmad Babikir, founder of Rumi’s Cave), professionals, community activists and artists and artisans, and businessmen and budding entreprenueurs; and along the way making, what I hope to be some lasting friendships. The only sadness, if it can be called that, was the inability of Dr. Sachi Arafat to come down from Glasgow to participate in at least some of the talks and discussions (due to his academic commitments), and my inability to venture north to visit him (due to my poor itinerary-planning), since he was so instrumental in pulling this whole thing off out of his networking-savvy.

If I may suggest to the LSESU-IS (and other parties interested in intellectual dialectics and dialogue), I do not really think it is optimum return on investment in time, energy and money to host someone from half-a-globe away to give a one- or two-hour talk, especially on such a multifaceted topic as critical engagement with modern economics. If the idea is to provide the audience with a cognitive map or grammar to navigate or come to terms for themselves with the topic at hand after the speaker or talker is long gone, then it should be more fruitful for both parties to hold a three/four-day intensive workshop on it. That will allow sufficient time and interaction for guiding participants to approach and understand the tradition in a way that allows them to creatively rearticulate it in conceptual terms effective for its evaluative engagement with (in this case) modern economics, and along the way, to identify and find intellectual alliance with current counter-economic thinking substantively in tune and thereby supportive of the classical and traditional “common-sensical” understanding of economics and the economic life. The two dialectics so far organized by the Oxford Traditional Knowledge Foundation (OTKF) can be a good pointer towards effectively conducting these economic, or rather counter-economic intensives.

If I can stop one heart from breaking, I shall not live in vain;
If I can ease one life the aching, Or cool one pain,
Or help one fainting robin Unto his nest again,
I shall not live in vain.
Emily Dickinson
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