Islam and Economics in Pakistan: Critical Perspectives

The modern world characteristically stands divided into developed and developing countries, or into core and peripheral societies, which exist at different stages of development but in general comprise a single global economy. The former dominate the latter in a typical division of labour in which the economically rich countries of the core areas specialise in the manufacture of industrial goods of high technology, whereas the developing countries where the majority of population depends on agriculture as livelihood specialise in the production of mainly agricultural raw materials. Some semi-peripheral countries mediate between these two categories in a complex web of socio-economic relations, structures, and formations. [Wallerstein (1979; 1984)]. Therefore, the economic problems of particular societies, regions, and countries are now closely connected and even inextricably intertwined. Developing countries like Pakistan have now been integrated into this global economy. The capitalist world-economy has been expanding since the sixteenth century, and has developed more rapidly after the Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution in the eighteenth century. It has now been extended to the whole world. Subsequently, a great transformation, continuing from previous centuries, has occurred in modern society, in which primordial socio-economic organisation based on the family and the subsistence household-economy has gradually been replaced; first, by a local-national economy, and then by a global economy based on the principles of limited liability corporation, factory system, wager-labour, moneyeconomy, and production for the market.