islamic economic renaissance 393under a repressive regime. Fifth, Our Economics appeared in the
late nineteen sixties and early nineteen seventies when Islam is said
to have been re-emerging in the state that is known as Islamic revival-
ism. Sixth, as al-Sadr never had the opportunity that was available
to his contemporaries in being exposed to Western economics and
education, his thoughts on the subject were reflections of his own
thinking as based on purely Islamic teaching with little influence
from Western culture, at least not at the same degree as his con-
temporaries. Furthermore, seventh, the book, which, in parts criticises
fervently the communist economy, appeared at a time when leaders
and policy makers in the Islamic world were calling for a socialist
approach to economic development as the way forward. For these
reasons, and probably more, al-Sadr’s Iqtisàduna deserves the due
space and time.
Iqtisàduna is a follow up, as al-Sadr is telling us in the introduc-
tion to the first edition, to Falsafatuna, Our Philosophy. The intention,
seemingly, was to develop a series of writing on Islamic social sci-
ence covering a wide range of issues from an Islamic perspective.
But that was not to be, as his life was brought short by the anti-
Shì"ah repressive regime of the time.
By al-Sadr’s own assertion, Iqtisàduna is meant to provide an
objectively analytical study of Marxism, Capitalism, and Islamic eco-
nomics by looking into the systems, conceptual principles and the
details of their application. This has been asserted as a subtitle of
“Our Economics”. At the outset, it would not be difficult to con-
ceive from the start that the comparison would lead to the demon-
stration of the superiority of the Islamic economic system to other
systems. This is an aim that is hardy surprising as writers of all sorts,
the apologist and the less-apologist, Muslims and non-Muslims invari-
ably have that end in mind. What differentiates writers, however,
are the depth of analysis, the objectivity of criticism, and their knowl-
edge of the subject. And in that al-Sadr is not demonstrating any
deficiency.
We find him spelling out his intention in the book’s foreword
when he asserts that his aim is to compare and evaluate the viability
of the European economy, socialist and capitalist, as compared with
Islamic economics in spurring the economic development of the
underdeveloped Islamic economies.
Economic development was therefore the main concern of al-Sadr.
And this can be seen throughout his Iqtisàduna. The idea, hence the