Islamic Economics and COVID-19

The Economic, Social and Scientific Consequences of a Global Pandemic

Masudul Alam Choudhury

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000373011
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Economics
• Thema: Macroeconomics

This book is a timely exploration of an unprecedented, cataclysmic pandemic episode. It examines certain critical aspects of socio-scientific theory across a variety of diverse themes, and through an epistemic lens.The book investigates the general theory of pandemic episodes and their adverse long-term effects on human and environmental wellbeing. It includes an in-depth study of COVID-19 but also looks to the future to contemplate potential pandemics to come. The existing approach to the study of pandemics is critically examined in terms of the prevalent isolated and thus mutated way of viewing human and mechanical relations in the name of specialization and modernity. The book presents a novel model of science-economy-society moral inclusiveness that forms a distinctive theoretical approach to the issue of normalizing all forms of pandemic challenges. It is methodologically different from existing economic theory, including the critical study of microeconomic foundations of macroeconomics. Human and environmental existence along with its multidisciplinary outlook of unity of knowledge between modernity, traditionalism, and socio-cultural values is emphasized in the treatment and cure of pandemic episodes.The book is a unique reference work, offering fresh wisdom within the moral methodological worldview.

1
The socio-scientific development outlook for global future

The project of wellbeing as the multidisciplinary unified model of science-economy-society moral inclusiveness

The wellbeing project of humankind collectively has to struggle uphill; or it will slip downwards in achieving the visionary moral-inclusiveness goal along with its embedding in the mechanistic arm of pedagogy. This holistic goal cannot be reached within a mechanistic approach alone of the socioscientific understanding of ‘value.’ The Oneness of God and its explanation in the experiential world-system is the epicenter of the abiding value! Teachers, policymakers, and students must and ought to endeavour to reach the great goal not separately between the mechanistic and the visionary goals oppositely. The discursively derived (interaction) integration (discursive consensus) followed by continuous evolutionary learning in terms of the primal universal ontology of unity of knowledge – thus abbreviated as IIE-learning – forms the philosophy of embedded oneness. This sustained continuity of consciousness in terms of unity of knowledge is the principal way of organic consilience (Wilson, 1998).¹

The Qur’an refers to this highest echelon of value as monotheistic oneness explainable in the fullest order of reality referred to as Tawhid. Tawhid is the primal ontological law of universal oneness (multidisciplinary ensemble). Upon this ontological primacy of the precept of value Tawhid prevails as the unique and universal law of unity of knowledge transcending shari’ah. Tawhid as law acquires its ultimate epistemic meaning of monotheism as the reality of ‘everything’ in every way.² Islamic scholars for a long time now have failed to understand the ontological meaning, formalism, application, and worldly moral sustainability of Tawhid as law over continuums of unity of knowledge, space (world-system), and time (Al-Raysuni, 2005).³ This book points out the resilient consequence of deriving the robust theory of consilience as the ultimate value according to Tawhid for the understanding, treatment, cure, and futuristic control of pandemic episode and its adverse consequences as global ecological insecurity (Choudhury & Taifur, 2020).⁴

This work has argued that the philosophy of knowledge and education ought to be different from how they have been pursued in a mechanical context with little or none of the ontological foundation for science-economy-society application within the context of moral inclusiveness. What such knowledge and education now pursue is a mechanistic road map of materiality alone. There is no holistic understanding and practice of vision embedded in techniques.

This study argues and explains analytically the consequences of the belief and practice of the empty mechanistic world-system and worldview. Contrarily, it explains how post-coronavirus pandemic times ought to be a new awakening for all in the world of socio-scientific reality. This new epistemic awakening is expected to be a new vision away from the robotic age of empty mechanism upon which the pandemic episode has ridden rough shod.

Let us ponder over these issues from the two confronting sides!

Post-COVID-19 emergence of epistemic consciousness

Our post-COVID-19 times are also of far-sightedness, creativity, and wise reflections. The resulting vast meanings ought to instil the changed future outlook of academia, education, pedagogy, and global educational policies post-COVID-19. During these cloistered coronavirus global moments at home we have thought about these points. My counterparts as students in Indonesia along with the policymakers of development institutions have joined partnership to ameliorate these dimensions of the new world of learning and knowledge that do and ought to emerge in continuous extension. The search, discovery, and pedagogy along such new dimensions blossomed even in the midst of the sombre burst of coronavirus at the doors of COVID-19 and at the self-conceited genre of our understanding of knowledge and education and the resulting continuation of the enervated world-system. Such is an individuated, mechanistic outlook of the present age devoid of the moral and social values that matter, construct, persist, and sustain life, future. The capitalistic global order with its sparkling splendour of want, greed, and self has fuelled COVID-19 with its unabated rage. We need to enquire deeply in order to reconstruct for a better future and an immediate pandemic control.

Objective

We have commenced by writing on this adoption of the epistemic world-view as a centrepiece of the new order reconstructed via science-economy-society moral inclusiveness. More so its details will encompass the study of the disciplines of business, economics, science, and society with a unique methodological insight for ‘everything’ so as to be prepared for the pandemic future.

The age of coronavirus and beyond

A definition of novel coronavirus (COVID-19) can be given. Yet the causes of this pandemic have not been identified. The immanence of the virus is not known beyond the knowledge that it emanates in nature in mammals, birds, and respiratory human tracts. This is a limited understanding of the true reality of the strange happening of this disease. Consequently, the return to sustained normalcy out of the deadly chaos has not been found. Any treatment found to temporarily halt the disease has the contrary effect of reducing immunity from imminent diseases.⁵ The question to ask is this: What treatments can lead to regain a semblance of healthy state though not the perfect and maximal level of wellbeing?

The objective in such recovery to given states of wellbeing is this: understand, and thereby construct, the awareness and socio-scientific structure of wellbeing as the objective criterion of healthy coexistence. Such objectification of wellbeing must be premised on the methodological understanding of the endemic problem. This stage of knowledge is followed by the derivation of logical formalism to treat the explanation of the endemic problem that the methodology of wellbeing explains. Logical formalism of the structuring of wellbeing and its application by necessary treatments then follows. This experience enhances knowledge of treatments for gaining increasingly sustained levels of wellbeing in all areas. Included in this are control and mitigation of the pandemic episode and of the adverse pandemic effects at large.

Thereby, the emergent remedy of the targeted problem and its treatment towards attaining better semblances of wellbeing is configured by the sequences of inter-causal relations in perpetuity. This process is explained next. The sequence of systemic continuity shown is perpetual. This is thereby sustained over the domains of evolutionary learning, events, time, and sustainability of consciousness. The emergent realms of continuity in the previously mentioned IIE-learning processes convey the essential meaning of sustainability in reducing and controlling the pandemic situation and its adversities. The core determining element in all these processes is the episteme of unity of knowledge as organic complementarities between the good choices at the exclusion and remedying of the bad and unwanted ones. The inherent knowledge-induced comprehension of any and every detail of observation, study, and inference thereby defines the embedding of the morally inclusive multidisciplinary domain of knowledge, knowledge-induced space, and knowledge-induced time.⁶ The substantive meaning of sustainability in respect of moral inclusiveness at th...