The Concept Of Islamic Economy As Articulated In Sokoto

Captures the theoretical and actual dimension of social welfare in selected African Islamic countries. Describes State involvement in the post-colonial period, the roles of pious foundations, Sufi orders, and NGOs.

To be a Muslim is to be a part of a culture with distinct beliefs, ideas, institutional forms and prescriptive roles. Yet there is a complex inter-relationship between a system of knowledge and belief, such as Islam, and the immediate political, economic and social context of its adherents. This book aims to improve understanding of Muslim social and political action by examining a broad spectrum of Muslim discourse, both written and spoken, to see how meaning is formed by context. It is a broad comparative study and examines discourses produced in opposition to government as well as those produced, in Iran or Pakistan for example, under an authoritarian Islamic state. Through cogent analyses of socio-historical contexts and textual materials from East Java, Nigeria, Iran, Pakistan, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Maghreb and Egypt, this book shows how to ‘read’ a familiar Islamic movement, period of change or textual source in a newer and better light. First published in 1987.

This book explores transformations in the relationship between ecology, politics and labour in the Nigerien Sahel over two centuries.

The vast majority of Muslims in Africa generally do not 'objectify' concepts such as poverty and religion in discussion. Poverty is a situation for 'ordinary' poor people in rural or urban poor areas where people seek to make marginal gains in income to avoid ever-threatening destitution and social disintegration. Most of these 'ordinary' poor people, especially poor and illiterate women, do not really believe that things can change. There exists, however, in all Muslim societies and communities in Africa a minority that criticize social and political conditions in society with the stated aim of striving for an Islamic solution to poverty and injustice. The common denominator for this group is that they are urban educated Muslims, having both a traditional educational background and, usually but not always, a modern, secular one, too. For them, the concept of poverty more readily forms part of a religious discourse involving feasible strategies for change. Their basic idea is to highlight the possibilities of generating new forms of financial resources by combining Islamic ethics and norms with a modern development-oriented outlook. Their vision is the usability of obligatory almsgiving in a modern context, namely that, instead of the traditional individual-centred 'person-to-person' charities, zakat or obligatory almsgiving should be directed to become the source of communal and collective societal improvement. This study focuses on the conditions of poverty and the debate among Muslims in Ghana, a West African country with a substantial but largely economically and politically marginalized Muslim population.