Mechanisms of a Moral Economy | Shahid Bolsen

You say that you do not subscribe to any Western economic theories like capitalism or communism, and you insist on what you call epistemological sovereignty. And you say that your own Islamic traditions and belief system can provide workable approaches to managing an economy that are better than what the West has done. Can you elaborate on that?

Okay. But why do you say insist? Why insist? You said that I insist on epistemological sovereignty like it's some kind of quirk. Right?

Like it's some kind of stubbornness on my part, an ideological eccentricity of some kind. I mean, why on earth would anyone follow your theories? Why would anyone follow your theories? Why would anyone follow your models rather than their own? I mean, I'm sorry, but the way that the that the question is framed is as if it's somehow fanciful for me or for anyone else.

For anyone else who's not following western models, it's as if it's fanciful or if it's as if it's strange to not just accept and not just adhere to western theories and western models by default. Like, it's strange to actually believe that, their own belief system, their own belief system is adequate or even superior to western thinking. Now, the framing of the question is as if this is a strange position that has to justify itself for some reason. No. It's strange to follow western theories and models in the first place.

That's a strange thing to do because they have been completely and catastrophically failures. I'm a Muslim. I'm a Muslim. So if you're asking a Muslim if you're asking a Muslim, you're asking someone from a tradition that has 14 centuries. You understand?

14 centuries of very sophisticated economic thought. 14 centuries of legal development and jurisprudence. 14 centuries of, building institutions for society. Building societies. 14 centuries of practical governance experience.

Successful experience, by the way. And then you're asking a Muslim. You're asking a Muslim with all of that experience and history and knowledge to justify why they don't simply defer to theories that are what? Two or 300 years old? Theories that literally just got here?

And theories that have already been thoroughly discredited. Because yes, again, by the way, your theories have produced a planet that is environmentally collapsing. Your theories produced a a a working class in your own societies that can't even afford housing. Your theories produced a financial system that crashes cyclically. You understand?

Crashed on itself in 2008 and then got bailed out by the same people that, that they had just robbed. You understand? Your theory has produced wealth disparity that is so obscene that just eight people on earth own more wealth than the bottom half of the entire human race. That's your track record. That's the track record of your western theories and your western models.

That's what you have produced. Not to mention literally hundreds of millions of direct and indirect murders. Not to mention enslavement, not to mention colonization, starvation, rape, pillage, plunder. You understand? You produced the most predatory system that the world has ever seen.

Not to mention you created weapons of mass destruction that can literally destroy the entire human race and you've actually used them. And now you've produced artificial intelligence, you produced AI, which you keep telling us is either eventually gonna take over the world and and kill all of us or enslave all of us. This is what you gave us. You you don't stop stumbling into ways to destroy the world, Suhannamah. And now I'm supposed to to to justify why I don't subscribe to that, why I don't subscribe to that catastrophic failure of a system.

Those absolutely horrendous theories and those horrendous models that have nothing to show for themselves whatsoever except unparalleled human suffering. I have to justify why I don't believe in that. You haven't produced a single technological innovation that isn't soaked in blood, that hasn't been made possible by carnage and exploitation. Why you'd have to be a fool or a demon to subscribe to those ideas, to believe in those ideas, be serious. I'm not being stubborn, I'm not insisting, I'm not being quirky, right, to reject these ideas.

I'm being rational. Your theories are irrational. Your theories are unreasonable. Your theories are impractical and they're immoral. Yes.

They're immoral. There's no way to not see that. See, this is what I always talk about in my, critiques of the West. Your system reflects your core assumptions about life and about humanity and about the purpose of our existence. It it you your your philosophical moral base, understand any system is gonna start from there.

Yours does and ours does. The foundation is there and everything built from there on up is gonna be based on that. Right? Your fundamental understand your fundamental assumptions rather, your fundamental assumptions are deeply flawed. So no matter what you build on top of that, it's gonna be unsound.

And that's just the way it is. I mean, the most basic question, the most basic question that any economic system has to answer is at first philosophical, if not theological depending on how you look at it. And the first question that you have to ask is, what is a human being? What is a human being? See, most of the people who talk about economics are not gonna think that this question has anything to do with economics, especially westerners, most westerners are not gonna think that has anything to do with economics.

But you have to know what a human being is before you can ask what a person is for economically speaking. You understand? Because your economic system, your economic system has to be, informed by your basic understanding or your basic assumptions about people, about what our nature is, about what our purpose is as human beings. So your answer, the West's answer, capitalism's answer, and they're very frank about this in capitalist doctrine, is that the human being is nothing but a rational maximizer of their own self interest. That's human nature at its core as far as capitalism is concerned.

We are selfish creatures. We're selfish, self serving, and greedy. That's your core assumption about human beings. You're coming from a fundamental contempt for human beings and a fundamental contempt for human nature. The truth is it's a satanic assumption from the outskirt.

So then you build your system. You build your system in a way that makes sense according to this belief and these assumptions, according to this contempt, you know. You built the system for human beings basically according to what Iblis, Shaitan, thinks about human beings. Right? People want more all the time.

They want more more more. That's all they want. Just more. And they are willing to pursue. They will always pursue what they want.

That's the driver of human behavior. The pursuit for more according to you. Capitalist theory calls that the invisible hand. That's the invisible hand. That's what drives the market.

That's what drives the economy. Okay? This is what you say. Okay. Fine.

You told me that's what I am. You told me that's my nature. You told me that's what I'm like. Right? You told me that's what I want.

And you told me that's how I behave. So if I'm nothing but a self interest self interest maximizer, then my labor is a cost. My effort is a cost. So logically, I'm gonna try to minimize my costs. Meaning my labor and my effort.

My profit is my benefit and my profit is my self interest. So that's the thing that I'm gonna try to maximize. Right? That's according to the the pure and and and and or simplistic calculation of cost benefit. The cost benefit formula, which is allegedly the only calculation that human beings ever adhere to according to your theories.

So if I'm managing other people's labor, people's work, then they themselves are a cost to me which I will try to minimize. And if I can externalize my cost onto a factory in Bangladesh, if I can externalize my cost onto the environment, if I can externalize my cost onto future generations, well, the logic demands that that's what I do. I'm not a monster for doing that. I'm being what the system says I am. What the what the what the system says that I am innately, my nature.

You told me that I'm nothing but a being dedicated to self interest maximization and that's what I'm doing. So it's fine. So the pollution, the precarity, the desperation, the exploitation, the oppression, this is not my problem. All of these things are not my problem. All of that is just the inevitable byproduct of human beings being human.

Humans being human beings. Right? Because fundamentally the West, capitalism, and all agree. The West, and capitalism all agree that human beings are essentially no good. So you hurt people, you rob people, you pillage, you destroy, you do all of that.

Well, that's just to be expected because that's just the way of nature according to you. Your system follows a logic that is based upon this is what I'm trying to tell you. It's based upon your foundational morality, is amoral. And it follows a logic that is based upon your philosophical assumptions about human nature and about human purpose. And those assumptions are that human beings are nothing but ravenous predators.

That's what you think we are. That's why your system is the way it is and that's why your system is a catastrophic failure. And I mean catastrophic on multiple, levels, on many levels because you have wrought catastrophe everywhere that you went. You wrought catastrophes everywhere you go, and your failure is catastrophic. Now our foundational morality, our foundational beliefs about human nature and about human purpose are drastically different from yours, drastically different.

We took ours from the creator of human beings and you took yours from the sworn enemy of human beings. See for us, we understand that the human being is a calipher. Is a calipher, a steward, a trustee, a custodian. You're here with a trust. You're here on earth with a trust.

It's an amana. You know, you're here with a responsibility on earth. You didn't create yourself. You didn't create the earth. You didn't create the world.

You didn't create the resources that are here on earth. You didn't create any of that. You're here managing something that belongs to Allah You're managing it on behalf of everyone who needs it. Okay? That's a completely different starting point.

That's a completely different starting point. And everything that flows from that is gonna be different. It's gonna be completely different. You know, whatever systems that we develop, whatever systems that we have developed in the past, whatever rules we have, whatever ethics, whatever jurisprudence, whatever legal principles and so forth, these are all going to be based upon this fundamental understanding. This fundamental understanding about life and about human purpose.

So for instance, in our jurisprudence, in our there's a concept called or a principle called which is basically the prohibition on shifting risk onto the weaker party in any arrangement. You understand? The weaker party the weaker party in any agreement, in any transaction, any deal, any contract, or what have you. The weaker party cannot be burdened with the risk that is involved in that undertaking, whatever it may be, that enterprise. Okay?

They're not liable for that because that's unjust. And justice is something that actually matters to us in all affairs. We don't divorce justice from commercial issues or financial issues or economic issues. Okay? So right now in America, in the West, this entire gig economy so called, Uber, DoorDash, what have you, Amazon, right?

It's all built on one single idea which is we, the corporations will capture all of the upside and we will transfer all of the downside to you. And then we'll call you independent entrepreneurs, you know, contractors or what have you, so that you can't sue us when things go sideways. Okay? That shifts pretty much the entirety of the risk to the weaker party. Okay.

Well, in Islamic commercial law, this arrangement is void. It's completely void. That's an illegitimate arrangement because you're shifting all of the risk onto the weaker party. All of the risk. The risk is supposed to be shared proportionately in relation to the reward, in relation to the benefit.

Do understand? So if you're getting a billion dollars out of this agreement, out of this arrangement and I'm barely getting enough to eat, then I can only be subject to barely any risk. You can't offload all the risk on me and then not give me a share in the profit that is proportional to the risk that you off offloaded on me. That's a void arrangement. It's unjust.

So if you implement a principle like that in the West, just that one principle, if you implement that in the West, you dismantle the whole so called platform economy's business model overnight because it is inherently exploitative. It's inherently exploitative. And then I know everyone talks about everyone talks about interest. Everyone knows that in Islam charging charging interest, paying interest is forbidden in Islam. Everyone knows that.

But you have to understand what actually, structurally what it does. Means money produces money independent of any productive activity. Understand? That doesn't make sense. It doesn't make sense.

I lend you a $100 and you now owe me a $110 regardless of whether or not anything was built, anything was grown or anything was made by me. So I'm literally getting paid for my wealth because of your need. I'm I'm literally getting paid because I'm rich. Okay. Well, that mechanism at scale over decades is why wealth concentrates.

Riba is like the pump that takes money from people who who work and transfers that money to people who hoard. Okay? Student debt, medical debt, credit card debt, mortgage interest and so forth. This is all riba. This is all interest.

This is all riba. These are all mechanisms for transferring wealth from labor to capital while nothing is being produced. This is literally the mechanism of, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer because you're acting like having money, is is is in and of itself a productive activity, like it's a skill. It's a skill to be rich. Uh-huh.

Like you're doing something by just having money. See, you've been trained in the West. You've been trained to believe that money has a right to grow just because it exists. It has a right to grow just because it exists. The capital deserves guaranteed returns even if, nothing real is ever produced, even if the risk is carried entirely by someone else.

But we don't think like that. Muslims don't think like that because it's irrational. No. Money doesn't work, people work. If you want profit, then you enter the arena of risk yourself.

You involve yourself in real activity, and only then do you get to have a share in the outcome. That's what we know in Islam as Understand? That's when you can have you can have one party who brings the capital, brings the money, and then you have one party who does the effort, who brings the the the labor. Okay? That's fine.

You can do that. Invest money. I invest money. You invest time. You invest effort.

But neither party is allowed to dominate the other. Neither party is more important than the other. Neither party deserves more than the other. You bring the money. I bring the labor.

I bring the labor. You bring the money. And if the undertaking succeeds, then we both win. But if it fails, then the one who put up the capital will absorb the loss because wealth is what was at stake for him. Wealth was what was at stake for him.

You understand? I already lost my time. I put my time in, I already lost it. I put my work in, and I already lost it. If you put your money in, then you absorb that loss.

The loss of the money, that's fair. You cannot have extraction without exposure to the downside, without exposure to the risk, without exposure to the loss. That's equitable. That's just. That's rational.

That's fair. Okay? But equitableness and fairness and justice and rationality, this has nothing to do with the way that you people look at economics. This has nothing to do with the way that you people look at commercial contracts. Well, again, we are not like that.

We have a different starting place than you. And then we have in Islam, which takes this concept even further. Now everyone is in it together with All partners, all stakeholders, everyone is in it together. Everyone is exposed. Everyone is exposed.

Everyone is accountable. There's no one sitting like above the system, siphoning off guaranteed returns while everyone else, carries the burden. You understand? This isn't just a financial model. This is a literally the moral conditioning of power because once you remove a guaranteed profit, then you dismantle the entire psychology of domination that is embedded in Riba, the Riba system.

You force capital to now become a participant instead of a master. And that changes everything. That changes everything. That changes how wealth circulates. It just it changes how decisions are made.

It changes how societies are either stabilized or collapsed. The system that you built provides certainty for the powerful, but risk for everyone else. You literally take the opposite approach that we do. You literally shift all of the risk to the weak and and secure risk free status for the wealthy and for the powerful. It's the opposite of our approach.

Means if you provide capital and I provide labor, we're supposed to share in what we actually produce. And if we produce nothing, then neither of us gets paid from the other's pocket. You understand? That's the foundational restructuring of the relationship between capital and labor. See?

You in the West, you think that being rich isn't in and of itself isn't enough in and of itself. It's supposed to come with all sorts of other privileges. It's supposed to come with all all sorts of other entitlements. We don't think like that. Okay?

Or you can look at zakat, for example. Everybody knows about zakat in Islam. People always refer to zakat as charity, but that's not exactly accurate. It's not really charity. Zakat is basically a kind of wealth tax.

2.5% on accumulated assets above a given threshold, offered every year annually, distributed to specific categories of need in the society. It's not routed through some bureaucracy, you know, NGOs or or nonprofits or government or whatever where 60% is lost overhead. Is community level distribution. Zakat prevents the unlimited, unaccountable accumulation that you have in the West that produces oligarchies. It's a kind of a structural break on the concentration of wealth.

You can still be rich. It's no problem. You can still be rich. You can still own things, but you don't get to sit on a mountain of wealth and and and let that mountain of wealth just continuously grow forever while people around you are starving. It has to circulate.

Okay? This isn't communism. That mountain of wealth is still yours. It's still yours. Still belongs to you, but there's an obligation attached to it.

Ownership in Islam is not absolute. It's always custodial. This is what I'm saying. Because you're a caliphate, you're a steward, you're a trustee, first, last, and always. And again, I've talked a few times about the institution in Islam called Waqf, Waqf.

This is maybe one of the most underappreciated institutions in human economic history. It's an amazing institution that was developed in Islam. A walk is basically a property or an asset that is dedicated permanently to community benefit. It can't be sold. It can't be privatized.

It can't be enclosed upon or foreclosed upon. Okay? In the Ottoman Empire, that's how they ran their hospitals, how they ran their schools, their water systems, their housing for the poor, their markets, all of it. All of that was was run through structures, and that went on for centuries. No taxation required.

No taxation required. No corporate profit motive needed. No shareholder dividends needed. The infrastructure serves the people because that's its legal purpose, and that can't be changed. That cannot be changed.

Now think about what that would mean today. What if the hospitals could not be privatized? What if they couldn't be privatized? What if housing couldn't be bought by some hedge fund and then converted into unaffordable rental units? What if the the the platform that these people are using, these these the gig economy people, the the digital infrastructure that those workers depend on?

What if that was a WAF and it was permanently owned by the community that it serves, and it was legally obligated to distribute benefit rather than just extract benefit? While the entire landlord economy, the entire private equity health care system, the private equity health care model, the entire so called platform monopoly model, that would all be dismantled, not regulated, dismantled, structurally prohibited. And again, in our history, we had something that was called Hesba, which was a a sort of a market oversight institution. This goes all the way back to Medina. All the way back to Medina in the time of the prophet The would walk into any marketplace, that's the the the agent, would walk into any marketplace, and he would inspect any transaction, and he could intervene on the spot if there was any exploitation or if there was any unfairness.

On the spot, not after some, you know, five year legal process, not after the company was able to lobby the regulatory agency to look the other way. No. On the spot. On the spot intervention in the case of exploitation or unfairness. Real time market ethics enforcement on the ground with community standing, not just, government authority, community standing, respect.

You compare that to the SEC or to the FTC, completely captured agencies that are staffed by people who three years from now are gonna be working for the same industries that they're regulating today as part of the FEC, the SEC. You tell me which model makes more sense, which mark which which model takes market ethics more seriously. And you ought to think about that after what Trump said. Trump said about the SEC and how federal regulation should be offloaded to the state level. See?

What we're talking about is putting conscience back into the marketplace or or injecting it, not that it was ever there with you people. You know? We're not talking about a regulator who shows up after the damage has been done, not some bureaucracy that files reports while while people are getting exploited in real time and can't get any redress of their grievances. We're talking about a a a a presence on the ground, visible, immediate. We don't believe that the market is supposed to be a free for all.

It's a trust. It's an like everything else. Means you don't get to hide behind corporate structures. You don't get to hide behind legal loopholes, while you cheat people, while you poison the environment, while you manipulate prices and so forth. All the things that you people and your corporations get away with.

No. There's there's supposed to be someone there. Someone who's empowered and grounded in moral authority who can step in right away and right then and there as it happens and say, no, this has to stop right now. Not because it violates just some technical rule, but because it violates justice itself and that matters to us. And once you understand this, once you understand how our systems work, you're gonna realize very quickly why why they're so scared of Islam.

Why our kind of system has to be completely obscured and completely demonized. Why they want no Sharia, no Islamic law, why everyone has to hate Islam because our system brings accountability. You don't want that. You can't financialize your way out of that accountability with us. You can't outsource the damage and keep the profit when it comes to us.

We force capital to behave like it's being watched, like it's accountable, like it's monitored. I mean, now you've got you've got the situation in your country, in your societies where capital is monitoring you all the time, twenty four seven gathering your data and whatnot, but nobody's monitoring capital. Nobody's watching the rich, but they're watching you all the time. So if you wanted to revise something like that today, you wouldn't just be reforming markets. You would be challenging the challenging the entire psychology of how power operates in the West.

You'd be saying that the public space belongs to the public, belongs to the people. That economic life itself answers to something higher than shareholder dividends. It answers to something higher, a standard higher, an accountability higher than investor returns. You'd be saying that exploitation, no matter how sophisticated and complex it may be, it doesn't get to hide behind that complexity and that sophistication. That's when you start to see that this isn't just about systems.

Like I said, it's about foundational morality. The fundamental foundational morality. We do not have the same beliefs. We do not have the same beliefs, and our approach to the economy reflects those differences. I mean, I could keep going.

For example. In Islam, coercion and compulsion are completely prohibited in all matters. That even means that compulsion if compulsion is present, then that voids any contracts that you might have signed. Yes. We don't validate that gangster approach of make him an offer he can't refuse.

An offer is only valid in the first place if it can be refused. Do you understand? That will completely transform employment law in the West because it would recognize that a worker who is negotiating from a position of desperation is not freely contracting by choice. In Islam, we talk about which which refers to necessity. Okay?

That means that even legal obligations have to be modified or have to be adapted if survival is at stake. So think about what that means when you're talking about a majority of your population in the West who are facing eviction and facing homelessness if they even miss one or two paychecks. Just one or two paychecks and they're out on the street. No. The basis of any system, any Islamic system, any system in Islam comes from the whole moral function of the law.

The which requires that every law, any law must protect life, protect intellect, protect family, protect faith, protect property. You understand? That gives you a five dimensional human welfare test that will make GDP look like exactly what it is, which is just a one dimensional measure of transaction volume Transaction volume that will count the sale of cigarettes and the cost of cancer treatment as equally positive contributions to the economy and contributions to well-being. It even counts debt as a positive contribution. Now you don't care at all.

You don't care at all about your people. Now I'm not claiming that in the Muslim world any of this or all of this is being implemented perfectly. Of course, it's not. We're grappling with a world that has been dominated by your theories, that has been dominated by your models and your systems for a very long time, and has been has dominated the world brutally by means of those systems, and we're all trying to claw our way out of that. We're all trying to claw our way out from under your boot, the boot of your systems and your theories and your models.

So I'm not saying that any of our countries are doing it perfectly, but what I'm saying is that the framework that we have is coherent. The framework that we have is sophisticated and has been tested across centuries and across diverse gen geographies and diverse populations and has a track record of success. Whereas your track record in the West, the track record of your theories and your models and your framework is nothing but an indictment. Our models and our framework address the correct questions. Yours doesn't.

Capitalism only asks how do we maximize profit. That's all you ask. Islam asks how do we ensure that everyone has enough? How do we ensure that, no one is wrongfully taken from? How do we ensure that all human beings within our jurisdiction can live with dignity?

These are very different questions. These are extremely different questions based on entirely different conceptions about the purpose of life and the nature of human beings, and the purpose of human beings. And those questions and answers to those questions produce completely different systems. And given what, capitalism's maximization of profit, maximization of self interest logic, what that has actually delivered, not in theory, but in practice in the real world right now. Well, I think that the burden of proof has shifted completely as far as who has to justify whose theories to who.

Who has to justify their models to who. No. The West didn't invent economics. They invented a very particular, very aggressive, very extractive, very predatory version of economics, and they called it capitalism. And then they told everyone else that their own traditions and their own systems and their own models had nothing to offer.

And you did that precisely because what our civilizations did have to offer would have completely discredited your approach. We have 14 centuries of commercial jurisprudence. We have 14 centuries of institutional innovation, 14 centuries of of having actually functioning economies that fed people, that housed people, that educated populations without without without without unlimited accumulation, and all of that gets dismissed by you as just religion, it's just Islam, just religion, theocracy, pre modern, irrelevant, what have you. You dismiss all of that, all of that success in the face of your catastrophic failure, but I'm supposed to be the one who's irrational because I insist upon our epistemological sovereignty.