Download Islamic economics and global capitalism

SCIENC~ V
ANDMODERN
V
l N
' ~mHP'lilt y
(Volume 44, Number 1)
Islamic Economics and Global Capitalism
Robert W. Hefner
y any measure, the scriptural and early historical legacy of Islam is among the most marketfriendly of all the world religions. In contrast
to Christianity's merchant-thrashing Jesus, the Prophet
Muhammad was a trader, and the Qur'an abounds with
commercial imagery. Islam's holy book enjoins believers to engage in trade in a spirit of goodwill (4:29),
faithfully fulfill contractual obligations (5:1; 16:91),
and behave in a manner that recognizes the importance
of private property and uncoerced exchange. The first
three centuries of the great Islamic expansion are
recognized as having been an age of unprecedented
commercial growth. By the tenth century, Muslim
merchants and jurists had developed credit and investment institutions that were among the most advanced
in all of Eurasia. Although the late Middle Ages (12501500) saw a decline in the Middle East's economic
dynamism, the period was followed by a commercial
boom in the Muslim-dominated Indian ocean. There
Muslim merchants created the world's largest and
most lucrative trade emporium, a vast network that tied
coastal East Africa, southern Arabia, South Asia, and
Southeast Asia into a vast trading zone. In the Southeast Asian wing of this trade oecumene, the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries saw the development of an
independent merchant class that, like its counterpart
in Renaissance Europe, patronized the arts, promoted
individualized styles of religiosity, and even sought to
curb the authority of rulers.
Notwithstanding these precedents, Muslim civilization never developed the banks or other corporate
instruments so central to the development of modern
B
capitalism in the West. Muslim civilization's relative
decline was visible in other spheres as well. By the
twelfth century, the Muslim world's "colleges" (madrasas) had institutionalized a curriculum that, with
the exception of schools in Iran and northern India,
banished science and Hellenistic philosophy from religious education. By the fifteenth century, the Muslim
world's proud tradition of astronomy, physics, and
mathematics had begun to lag behind that of Western
Europe. When, in the late eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, Europeans challenged the world's three
powerful Muslim empires, the Ottoman, Safavid-Iran,
and Mughal India, Muslim observers were startled to
realize that their once self-sufficient societies had fallen
far behind those of the West.
y purpose in this paper is not to explain just
why it was that a civilization as great as that
of Islam s came to lag behind its upstart rival
on the northern shores of the Mediterranean sea. That
question has preoccupied historians and sociologists for
more than a century, and an adequate survey of their
analyses would take us far beyond the main topic of
this paper, namely, how adherents of different religions
have responded to modern capitalism. To understand
Muslims' response to modern capitalism, however, it is
important to know something of this broader historical
background, since it has conditioned Muslims' perceptions of their place in the world. With good reason, Middle
Eastern and South Asian Muslims had long tended to see
themselves as politically and culturally self-sufficient.
This civilizational legacy only made Muslims' recogni-
M
This symposium is based on a conference hem on May 4 and 5, 2006 under the auspices of the Institute on Culture, Religion,
and Worm Affairs at Boston University. Grateful acknowledgement is made to the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation
for its generous support in making the conference possible.
16
SOCIETY| ~ NOVEMBER/DECEMBER2006
tion of their own lag vis-h-vis the West all the more awkward. It has also deepened some Muslims' ambivalence
about a global economic order that bears the all-too-clear
imprint of having been "made in the West."
In the remainder of this paper, I want to focus on the
nature of the Muslim responses to modern capitalism.
My discussion will focus less on the sociology of Muslimowned business organizations than on the religious and
ideological effort to devise what has come to be known
as an "Islamic economics." Islamic economics is an
intellectual and economic enterprise that professes to provide the terms for an alternative economics to that of the
modern West. The central claim of Islamic economics is
that Islam provides an all-encompassing model for social,
economic, and political life. The concerns and debates of
Islamic economics provide a fascinating point of entry
into the thoughts of Muslim leaders on global capitalism,
as well as the depth of the ideological schisms that run
through public opinion in the modern Muslim world.
The Third Way
Islamic economics is not an ancient intellectual
tradition, but a modern movement that asserts that
Islamic traditions of law and organization provide a
more just and equitable model for economic growth
than do the rival systems of Western capitalism and
socialism. Western capitalism, it is said, has been
capable of great dynamism and expansiveness, but its
achievements have been premised on gross inequality
and the exploitation of workers by capitalists. By contrast, the Islamic economist avers, socialist economies
have placed greater emphasis on equity and social
justice, virtues also highlighted in Islamic economics. But socialists, the Islamic economist laments,
have highlighted these values while also suppressing
commercial traditions of which Islam approves. In
principle, then, Islamic economics presents itself as a
salutary third way: avoiding the inegalitarian excesses
of modern capitalism, but unleashing the energies of
entrepreneurs and merchants.
Leaving aside the question of whether their characterizations of capitalism and socialism are accurate,
Islamic economists' appeals for a third way between the
two Western systems are of recent origin, having taken
shape only since the 1970s. Indeed, the first and most
important fact to underscore about Islamic economics is
its unquestionable modernity. Although some of the institutions that Islamic economics highlights as Islamic
have their roots in classical and middle Islamic history,
others, like the centerpiece institution of Islamic banking, have no direct cultural precedent.
Calls for the implementation of an Islamic economics began to be heard in the 1960s and 1970s as a result
of three developments. The first was the decline of Arab
and Muslim socialism, itself the result of the discrediting of its allied ideological current, Arab nationalism,
after the shocking defeat of Arab armies in the 1967
war with Israel. The second major influence appeared
shortly thereafter. Beginning in the 1970s, a resurgence
of Islamic piety and activism swept across the Muslim
world, and it fueled a growing interest in Islamic alternatives to all manner of political and economic institutions. Although in the 1950s and 1960s, modernization
theorists like Daniel Lerner had forecast the decline of
Islam as a public religion, the revitalization of Islamic
piety showed that there was to be no end of religion in
Muslim-majority societies. The political temperament
of the Islamic resurgence varied from moderate or moderately conservative to radical and even revolutionary.
Notwithstanding this political variation, most Muslim
resurgents agreed with an idea popularized by earlier
Islamist ideologues, such as Egypt's Sayyid Qutb and
Pakistan's Sayyid Abdul-Ala Mawdudi, that Islam was
a "total way of life" and it provided positive prescriptions for politics, economics, and culture.
The third and final influence underlying the recent
popularity of Islamic economics has been the related
effort to bring about an "Islamization of knowledge."
Not all Muslim intellectuals agree with this movement's
demand that science and modern inquiry be purged of
their allegedly secularist and Western biases. Indeed,
as illustrated in the writings of the great Indonesian
modernist, Nurcholish Madjid (d. 2005), and the
Iranian reformer, Abdulkarim Soroush, a leitmotif of
modernist and liberal Muslim thought has always been
that science and technology of "Western" provenance
are best regarded as the fruits of God-given human reason, not things that are uniquely Western. Science is a
gift of God to all of humanity. Nonetheless, in keeping
with the ideas that Islam is a total and perfect way of
life, the movement for the Islamization of science and
knowledge gained momentum in the 1970s and 1980s.
Islamic economics has come to be regarded as one of
this intellectual movement's most important pillars.
Islamic Banking
Although aspiring to provide a full-blown alternative
to neoclassical economics, the programs recommended
ISLAMIC ECONOMICS AND GLOBAL CAPITALISM
17
by Islamic economists are actually modest in scope.
They focus on the effort to build two institutions: a
system of Islamic banking that steers clear of charging
interest, and a program of religiously mandated almsgiving, the zakat, the purpose of which is to purify wealth
and redistribute some of its surplus to the needy.
he religious premise that underlies the first of
these institutions, Islamic banking, is that the
Qur an prohibits riba, and that riba refers to
interest on capital in all forms. Although all Muslim
scholars agree that the Qur'an prohibits riba, the term's
translation as "interest" is controversial. In Islam's first
centuries, some jurists argued that riba refers not to
interest on capital per se, but only the usurious forms
of interest once widespread in Arabia. In those early
years, individuals who defaulted on loans were liable
to being condemned to debt-bondage or slavery. It is
predatory arrangements like these, some jurists insisted,
to which the prohibition on riba really applies. By the
Middle Ages, however, the majority of jurists adopted
the broader position, insisting that the prohibition on
riba referred to all forms of interest on capital.
Notwithstanding the jurists' consensus, the practice
of lending money with interest remained widespread
across the medieval Muslim world; it remains so today.
In the early twentieth century, Western banks began
to play an important role in the economies of many
Muslim-majority countries. The growth of conventional
banking encouraged Muslim jurists to revisit the question of riba's meaning. Although many continued to
insist that the prohibition on riba applied to all forms of
interest, several influential jurists in Egypt and Indonesia argued to the contrary. They said that non-usurious
rates of interest on loans were compatible with Islam,
because they brought benefit to both individuals and
the community. Although many jurists continued to
disapprove of conventional banking, from the 1920s on,
the institution played a growing role in the economies
of Muslim-majority countries. Today conventional
banks remain the most popular institution for savings
and finance in all Muslim-majority countries except
Iran and Sudan, which have abolished interest-charging banks outright.
The first tentative steps toward the creation of nointerest "Islamic" banks were taken in the 1960s. The
initiative gained further momentum a decade later, in
the aftermath of the spectacular increase in oil prices
and state revenues during the early 1970s. Governments
T
18
SOCIETY| 9 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER2006
and private foundations in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf
committed some of their new wealth to religious programs, including think-tanks and institutions dedicated
to the cause of Islamic banking. The founding of the
Saudi-finance Islamic Development Bank in 1975 lent
additional support to the cause, since the bank was supposed to sponsor interest-free financial institutions.
Soon Islamic economics caught the attention of
politicians. In the late 1970s and 1980s, Pakistan took
steps to reorganize its banking system along Islamic
economic lines; Iran followed suit in the early 1980s.
Today institutions dedicated to Islamic forms of banking have succeeded in establishing a significant presence in most Muslim-majority countries. They have
also acquired a foothold in several Western countries.
Where conventional banks remain legal, however, they
remain the preferred financial institution for the majority of Muslim businesses. Western banks like Citicorp
and the Deutsche Bank have also developed deposit
and credit arrangements based on Islamic banking
principles. Although Islamic banks have not been able
to fulfill all the hopes of their promoters, they have succeeded in carving out a small, but respected position
in global finance.
The prohibition of interest is the sine qua non of
Islamic banking, and, so as to conform to this ambition,
Islamic banks have developed a handful of lending arrangements based on profit-and-loss sharing rather than
interest. The two most popular instruments are mudaraba and musharaka, economic partnerships that were
recognized in classical Islamic law. It is interesting to
observe, however, that the legal partnerships recognized
in Islamic law refer to relationships between individuals,
not corporations. Islamic jurisprudence did not develop
laws for corporations, and, therefore, it did not develop
a concept of banking or corporate finance. This is to
say that the broader legal framework on which Islamic
banking depends actually owes more to Western civil
law than it does to classical Islamic precedents.
otwithstanding this latter genealogical linkage,
in matters of finance, Islamic banks do differ
from their conventional counterparts. Under
the terms of mudaraba, a bank or group of investors
provides capital to a producer or merchant, who invests
the money in his enterprise and then repays the bank
with a previously agreed share of the profits, along with
principal. If the enterprise fails, the bank or investors
bear the loss. Musharaka works in a similar fashion, ex-
N
cept that the merchant or producer also risks some of his
and its opportunity costs. As in any other economic
own capital in the enterprise, thereby earning a higher
enterprise, the costs of an Islamic bank's intervention
share of the profits than under mudaraba contracts.
in the management and execution of a project increase
Deposits in Islamic banks are premised on a similar
the more deeply involved the bank becomes in these
profit-and-loss sharing principle. Under one type of
activities. Costs to the bank also increase in proportion
deposit, depositors earn no return on their capital but
to the variety of fields of enterprise in which the bank
the deposit is risk free. A second category of deposit,
chooses to become involved. Where an Islamic bank
the investment deposit, exposes the depositor to the risk
has many venture partners and those partners operate
of capital loss, but this arrangement also provides the
in differing economic fields, the bank may have to
depositor with a share of the bank's earning.
devote additional staff resources to learning the rules
As this brief overview indicates, from the perspecof these different business games. The costs the bank
tive of Western finance, the principles underlying Isincurs will rise accordingly.
lamic banking are not in the least alien. On the contrary,
In the case of Western venture capitalism, investors
they operate in the same manner as the venture capital
have sought to reduce transaction costs of this sort
industries that have financed some of the American
by concentrating their investments in fields such as
economy's most dynamic enterprises, including Silicon
computers or software engineering where the venture
Valley's software industries. As with
capitalist already commands the exthose venture capitalists, the Islamic
pertise required to assess the business
Costs to the bank also prospects of his partner. Although
bank typically gets more deeply involved in assessing the profitability of increase in proportion some of its supporters have tended
the entrepreneur's project than is the to the variety of fields
to overlook this fact, Islamic banks
case with conventional banks, since of enterprise in which have had to respond to the costs of
the terms of the investment contract the bank chooses to
partnering with their business partners
depend on the scale of the risk assumed become involved.
using a similar cost-benefit calculus.
by the bank-investor. Proponents of
Unable to be a financial jack-of-allIslamic banking often cite the greater involvement of
trades, many Middle Eastern banks have concentrated
Islamic banks in project management and execution
their investments in real estate, commercial trade, and
as proof of the greater fairness of Islamic banking by
other relatively safe enterprises that do not demand a
comparison with conventional banking, on the assumpspecialized technical knowledge.
tion that bank involvement provides helpful managerial
Idealistic proponents of Islamic banking are often
assistance to the enterprise in question.
disappointed to realize that Islamic banks operate in
As with venture capital finance, there may be truth
so conventional a manner, since one of the ambitions
to the claim that Islamic banks provide useful manaof Islamic banking has been to provide investment
gerial services, but the claim is true only inasmuch
services to Muslim enterprises too poor, too varied, and
as the transaction meets two empirical conditions:
too poorly connected to get access to conventional bank
first, that the bank actually has some technical or
loans. However laudable this ambition, its proponents
managerial expertise to provide its business partners,
have sometimes overlooked the fact that the effective
and, second, that the bank staff have the time and opprovision of managerial services requires hands-on as
portunity to provide the relevant managerial counsel.
well as general knowledge, and the acquisition and
Although proponents of Islamic banking often write
provision of this knowledge has economic costs. Alas if these conditions are automatically met as a result
though, particularly in their early years, Islamic banks
of the terms of a bank's investment in an enterprise,
in countries like Indonesia and Pakistan made a laudthe recent history of Islamic banking has shown that
able effort to provide capital to small-scale businesses,
this is by no means always the case. There are sound
the high cost of doing so has meant that succeeding
economic reasons as to why this is so. The acquisition
generations of bankers have opted to commit much of
and provision of business expertise is not a free good
their capital to safe and relatively established business
but, like any business service, has economic costs. The
partners. Inasmuch as this has been the case, the effect
costs of managerial expertise are related to the difficulty
of Islamic banking on the neediest sectors of the capital
of its acquisition, the time required for its transmission,
market has typically been modest, to say the least.
ISLAMIC ECONOMICSAND GLOBALCAPITALISM
19
A second problem that has limited Islamic banks'
ability to play a larger role in financial markets is
related to what Muslim economist Timur Kuran (an
articulate critic of Islamic banking) has called the
"adverse selection problem." In the great majority of
Muslim-majority countries, conventional banks operate
alongside a smaller Islamic banking sector. As a result,
entrepreneurs interested in getting access to capital
have a choice as to which type of financial instrument
they may use. For entrepreneurs worried that their business venture may not be profitable, it is economically
rational to opt for a profit-and-loss sharing arrangement like that offered by an Islamic bank, since this
minimizes their exposure to loss in the event that the
venture fails. By contrast, for entrepreneurs confident
that their business can reap great rewards, it makes better economic sense to work with a conventional bank,
since the fixed loan rates it provides allow entrepreneurs
to keep a greater share of their profits.
Inasmuch as this adverse selection problem has
influenced Islamic banking, it has undercut Islamic
banks' profitability, and insured that the conventional
banking sector often remains the more dynamic in
countries where both types of banks exist. In this and
other examples, the social impact of Islamic banking
has been limited by the fact that, notwithstanding idealistic hopes to the contrary, the Islamic system is subject
to the same constraints of cost, benefit, and information
management as conventional banking.
Religious Redistribution
One of Islam's five pillars, the zakat is a tax levied on
income and wealth for the purpose of their purification;
the levy is also intended to provide assistance to the
indigent, the handicapped, travelers in need of aid, and
teachers or leaders active in the promotion of Islam. In
modem times, proponents of Islamic economics have
pointed to the zakat as a key symbol of the difference
between Islamic economics and capitalism. Muslim
authors of a progressive or "social transformationalist"
disposition (to use a phrase popular in some Islamic
countries as an alternative to what Western writers
might call "left-leaning") have tended to cite the zakat
as proof that Islamic economics show greater concern
for the disadvantaged than does Western capitalism.
As with Islamic banking, claims of this sort place
a heavy burden on the shoulders of an institution of
considerable symbolic significance, but, in the broader
scheme of things, modest economic impact. Although
20
SOCIETY* ~ NOVEMBER/DECEMBER2006
the Qur'an makes clear that the payment of zakat is
incumbent on those who can afford it, it is unspecific
on the types of wealth to be taxed, relevant rates of
taxation, to whom the accumulated wealth should be
redistributed, and whether the zakat should be administered by the state or private individuals. During the early
years of the Prophet's leadership in Mecca, the Muslim
community's assistance to the poor was personal and
voluntary. After Muhammad's flight to Medina and
establishment of a state in 622 C.E. the zakat became
compulsory and was administered by state officials.
After the Prophet's death in 632 C.E., however, leadership struggles broke out among different factions in the
Muslim community. The conflict caused the collapse
of state bureaus responsible for zakat administration.
From that point on, the state zakat was replaced by a
variety of decentralized and voluntary arrangements.
In the great majority of Muslim countries, decentralization has remained the pattern for zakat payment to
this day. In a few countries--Saudi Arabia, Pakistan,
and Malaysia--however, the government has re-instituted the policy of administering the zakat through
state agencies. Although Islamist politicians in other
countries have advocated a similar policy of dtatization, the levy elsewhere remains voluntary. Consistent
with this decentralized pattern, the zakat is collected
by a variety of social agencies, including religious
schools, welfare associations, village councils, and
local networks of family and neighbors.
Just as there is disagreement over the proper form
for administering and distributing zakat, jurists and
activists disagree over the types of wealth subject to
taxation, and the rates that should apply. Mainstream
jurisprudence has tended to emphasize that the tax
should be levied on the types of wealth to which it
was applied in seventh- and eighth-century Arabia:
agricultural produce, livestock, precious metals, and
minerals. The same sources provide different rates of
taxation for each of these categories of wealth, ranging
from 2.5 percent for precious metals to 20 percent for
minerals. Since modern economies have a wider array
of income-generating activities than was the case in
classical Arabia, many Islamic economists have suggested that modem sources of revenue, like manufacturing and services, should also be subject to the levy.
Strict-constructionist jurists have objected to this suggestion, insisting that to innovate in this fashion is to
violate the letter of God's law. In countries where the
zakat has been made compulsory, state officials have
o~
often fallen back on a compromise position, extending
the scope of coverage to new sources of income, while
keeping close to the letter of the law with regard to rates
for traditionally recognized revenue sources.
Proponents of the zakat have also had to deal with
the thorny problem of convincing the Muslim public to
pay the levy, and what to do with the funds once they
are collected. In most countries today, even where the
state administers collection, enforcement remains difficult, not least of all because modern forms of savings
and investment have made it easier to hide personal
wealth. The enforcement problem is aggravated by the
fact that in many countries the zakat administration has
been plagued by corruption and disagreements over just
who should receive the payment. There is also a longestablished tradition in Muslim jurisprudence that, not
merely the poor and handicapped, but those involved in
the promotion of Islam, such as teachers and religious
leaders, should receive part of the levy. Sometimes
the share given to well-connected leaders becomes
the lion's share. In these instances, then, rather than
diminishing inequality, the zakat can actually reinforce
it, channeling the Muslim community's surplus wealth
back to the well-connected and powerful.
Many of the world's religions make provisions for
some kind of religious charity, and most of them have
had to deal with problems similar to those faced by
proponents of the zakat. As the administration of zakat
has become subject to greater public scrutiny, reformers have called for the distribution to be made more
transparent. In many countries, the once-controversial
idea that zakat should be used not merely to provide
payment to individuals but for broad-based programs
of education and poverty elimination, has come to be
accepted even by traditionalist jurists.
These examples illustrate that, rather than an unchanging entity, the zakat is and will continue to be
drawn into modern discussions of the proper forms
and meanings of Islam, similar to the debates that
have taken place in other religious traditions in modern
times. This is to say that the uses of zakat today have
less to do with timeless traditions, than they do with the
efforts of believers to imagine and organize themselves
in the new public spheres of the nation-state and the
global economy.
Moral Idealism and Market Realities
Notwithstanding the efforts of Islamist activists,
Islamic economics remains a respected but decidedly
peripheral portion of the Muslim world economy. The
situation of Islamic banking is telling in this regard.
Empirical studies confirm that most wealth created in
Muslim countries today is recycled into conventional
banks and equity markets, not Islamic banks. For pious
Muslims who believe that God's law prohibits interest
on capital, Islamic banks provide a useful and rational
instrument for capital investment. However, the Islamic
banking system has not created a comprehensive alternative to global capitalism. Moreover, in everything from
their passbooks to their tellers, Islamic banks draw more
heavily on the conventions of Western banking than on
some timeless Islamic precedent. Equally important,
the investment capital that these banks direct for a few
brief moments through the sluice gates of mudaraba
and musharaka quickly flows back into a global market
dominated by conventional financial instruments.
For Western critics inclined to gloat in the face of
Islamic economics' limited impact, it is worth remembering that the tensions that led some Muslims to dream
of an alternative economics are far from resolved. Many
Muslim countries are still having difficulty jump-starting their economies, and the problem has become all the
more disquieting as capitalist economies have put down
firm roots in places like China and India. The tensions
are also related to the fact that many of the consumption
habits promoted by global markets and media are seen
as antithetical to Muslim ethical traditions.
Libertarians may dismiss this last concern, on the
grounds that ethical questions are best left to the discretion of private individuals. But the libertarian claim
is a normative prescription rather than a settled social
fact, one to which many Westerners as well as Muslims take exception. Moreover, the chances that such a
privatistic approach to ethics will find much acceptance
in the Muslim world any time soon seem slim. At the
heart of Islamic ethics lies the injunction that believers
should command what is right and forbid what is wrong
(al-amr bi'l-ma'ruf wa'l-nahy "an al-munkar). All religions change, and the content of this injunction has been
understood differently in different times and places. But
the injunction's underlying impulse, that ethics must
be treated as a compelling public good, continues to
resonate powerfully across the Muslim world.
As far as modern capitalism is concerned, this latter
cultural fact has interesting implications. It means that
we should expect that the front lines in the Muslim
engagement with global capitalism may lie less in the
realm of Islamic banking and zakat collection than in
ISLAMIC ECONOMICSAND GLOBALCAPITALISM
21
the public effort to impose ethical constraints on the
consumption practices and lifestyles modern capitalism
makes possible. With its endless exploration of new
frontiers of consumer demand, late modern capitalism
has made an industry of destabilizing consumer values
and preferences. Consumerist capitalism and the media
and advertising industries it has spawned have strained,
if not severed, the ties that Max Weber identified a
century ago between capitalism and the Protestant
ethic. In the Muslim world, the tension surrounding
consumer tastes is all the greater, not least of all because
so many of the dress styles, entertainment trends, and
sexual media now available for mass consumption are
of Western and East Asian provenance.
fact remains that global capitalism, in all it,s
cross-cultural expressions, is today the world s
dominant economic system, and its products and
lifestyle-images will continue to flood world markets
and media. Contrary to the forecasts of some globalization theorists, these processes will not inevitably lead
to the homogenization of global culture. In the Muslim
world, we can expect to see continuing tinkering at the
edges of the productive and financial system, along the
lines of Islamic banking and the zakat. We can also expect that the largest and most successful Muslim-owned
businesses will continue to operate, as most currently
do, according to management principles that owe rather
little to the discipline of Islamic economics.
T h e
Rosemary
Stevens
Meanwhile, the more serious controversy will likely
rage in economic spheres related to consumption and
lifestyle. In these domains, we can expect to see
continuing argument and occasional culture wars
over the proper balance between private choices
and public ethics. The battle lines in this exchange
will not pit a unitary Muslim populace against an
equally monolithic West. The fiercest exchanges
will likely involve Muslims taking issue with fellow
Muslims over the question of how to consume and
behave ethically.
Seen from this Muslim perspective, the globalization of modern capitalism has not ushered in an end to
economic history. In the Muslim world, capitalism's
ascent has intensified debates over that which advertisers and marketers in the West have also long made
a target: the tastes and lifestyles of millions of citizen
consumers, who use goods and services to explore who
they are and how they should behave. In all this, one
thing seems certain. It is that, for the world's 1.2 billion Muslims, the culture-wars chapter in the capitalist
revolution has just begun.
Robert W. Hefner is professor of anthropology, associate
director of the Institute on Culture, Religion and World
Affairs at Boston University, where he directs the program
on Islam and civil society. He has published more than a
dozen books, as well as several major policy reports. He
is author of among many books, Civil Islam: Muslims and
Democratization in Indonesia.
Essays on the History of American Health Care Policy
The distinctive mixing and continuous remixing of public and private roles is a defining feature of
health care in the United States. The Public-Private Health Care State explores the interweaving of public and private enterprise in health care in the United States as a basis for thinking
about the history of health care and its continuing evolution today. Historian and policy analyst
Rosemary Stevens examines the flexible meanings of the terms "public" and "private," and how
useful their ambiguity has been and still is; the role of ideology as ratifying rather than preordaining change; and the common behavior of public leaders and corporate entities in the face of
fiscal opportunity. Rosemary Stevens is a DeWitt Wallace Distinguished Scholar in social
medicine and public policy at Cornell Medical College, Professor Emeritus, University of
Pennsylvania.
ISBN: 0-7658-0349-6 (cloth) December 2006 385 pp. $39.95
]~ transaction
Publisherof Record in International
Social Science
Rutgers--TheStateUniversityof NewJersey
DepartmentBKAD06SO09
35 BerrueCircle
Piscataway,NJ 08854-8042
22
SOCIETY |
9 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER
2006
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.