A model of distributive justice in Islamic economics

Abstract

This thesis concerns the idea of distributive justice, an important subject matter immensely debated in studies of philosophy, political, behavioural and social sciences; yet to be thoroughly analysed in economics. Despite its relevance, works in the formulation of the Theory of Distributive Justice in Islamic Economics are lacking relative to those available in Western scholarship. The existing scholarly products deal mainly with limited and applied aspects of distributive justice. Alternatively, the current work is a comprehensive analysis of the notion of distributive justice in Islamic economics aimed to guide individuals and policymakers in finding practical solutions to economic problems in the Muslim world in particular. This thesis attempts to undertake two tasks, namely; to critically review accessible literature written on distributive justice from the Islamic and western perspectives and to develop a model of distributive justice in based on Islamic heritage that can serve as a foundation to resolve the glaring distributional challenges faced by a number of Muslim countries. It consists of seven chapters, of which four are core to identifying, examining, and cognizing distributive justice within the economic sphere. The first part of the thesis is arranged into two chapters that include the research background, objectives and methods, followed by another chapter exploring justice as a general concept in Western and Islamic Economics. The second part of the thesis investigates distributive justice in its natural form from the perspectives of the western mainstream economists and Islamic economists in two continuous chapters. The academic contribution lies in the extensive literary survey conducted together with the critical appraisals generated as part of responding to the stated research objectives. The second half of the thesis concentrates on developing a model of distributive justice based on the Holy Quran and Sunnah. More specifically, the last two core chapters develop the proposed design of distributive justice according to the Islamic heritage (Turath) and offers a detailed account of the process of operationalizing the theoretical concept of distributive justice; beginning from the identification of key components to its potential dimensions and eventually to the proposed blueprint from an Islamic standpoint. The final contribution is put forward in the forms of assessment, confirmation and justification for the proposed Islamic model of distributive justice . In particular, it contains the required information that supports and validates the proposal as acceptable. Overall, these two chapters synthesise the responses to the remaining research objectives. The concluding chapter offers closing remarks and more importantly, recommendations for future studies related to theories of economic distributions, comparative distributional policies between mainstream economics and Islamic economics as well as empirical analysis of the economic implications of different distribution mechanisms readily available in the Shari’ah.