Introduction

The Questions

Political philosophers, political scientists, social anthropologists and sociologists—all of whom have religious sympathies or curiosity about the influence of religious faith in societies—explored with theologians where and how practising Christians and Moslems might together address these questions in dialogue with sacred texts and significant thinkers from the traditions. We assumed a loose working definition of ‘capitalism’ as any economic system in which processes of capital circulation and accumulation are largely privately owned and operated for profit.

Diverse Contexts

Many participants had met previously as part of the NRPL British Academy funded Religion in the Public Sphere: Comparing the Iranian and British Experiences project that examined religion’s role in public life in modern Iran and Britain, identifying contrasting and common elements. Given the difficulties travelling between Iran and Britain in 2010–2014, the project took us to Turkey, where friendships were formed and experiences shared. The differing contexts of Britain, Iran and Turkey have contributed to different academic commentary on the role of religion in public life and religious critiques of capitalism.

In Iran, the Revolution of 1979 brought in an intensification of religious influence on policy formation in health, education, transport, law, economics and planning. This process, sometimes called Islamisation, offered religion as a source that could inspire all (or most) public policy objectives. In more recent times, this totalising religious justification has, to an extent, given way to a division of labour between religious and non-religious justifications for policy. Islam remains the overall inspiration and theoretical justification for the structure of the state; however, on the detail of, for example, transport planning or the provision of basic services (water, gas, electricity), policy is linked to broader aims and objectives (cost, efficiency, utility). These broader aims and objectives are said to contribute towards a more developed, and hence better resourced society, which in turn can be justified by generalised Islamic values; but the perceived need for a specifically Islamic inspired water-supply system (for example) so prevalent in the days following the revolution has subsided, and in many ways Iranian policy formation in these areas is not different from non-Islamic states.

In Turkey, the principle of secularism has been decisive in public life since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire after World War I and the founding of the republican political system in 1923. Islam as an established religion was struck out of the constitution in 1928 with the constitution stating explicitly in 1937 that Turkey was a secular state. For some, however, the key word for understanding Turkey in recent years is not secularism but capitalism: ‘It is capitalist development that has determined the political journey of the Turkish republic.’ ¹ The biggest achievement of Kemal Atatürk after the revolution was to lay the foundations of state-supported capitalism including high walls of tariff protections. More recently, Turkey’s economy has become more integrated into the global economy with Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party and religious conservatism raising questions about the seemingly comfortable relation between the practice of Islam as a religion and modes of capitalist development. One of our contributors to this volume, Recep İhsan Eliaçık, was chaplain to the crowds in Taksim Gezi Park during the 2013 protests where inter alia his teaching sessions expounded historical and political reasons significant in permitting and enabling interpretations of the Qur’an and the practice of Islam deaf to the critical implications of its teaching.

In the UK, the financial crisis of 2008 has brought renewed intellectual engagement with the economy, increasing inequality, poverty amongst working people, the promotion of superficial materialist values, destruction of the natural environment, tax avoidance, debt, debate whether economic growth be the primary goal of economic policy, and more. Institutions around the country (e.g., St Paul’s Institute and the Al-Mahdi Institute) are making space for multidisciplinary and multifaith debate that engages the financial world and brings faith-rooted ethics to bear on our understanding of finance and economics. The need for this kind of cooperation is urgent. A recent government-sponsored report by the National Institute for Economic and Social Research and Landman Economics, published by the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission, considered the prospects for reducing child poverty in the UK. ² It predicts that, by 2020/2021, if earnings rise in line with the latest forecast by the government’s Office for Budget Responsibility, 21% of families with children will be living in poverty on the relative measure—11 percentage points above the government target of fewer than 10% of children living in households where net income is less than 60% of median or typical household income and 3.5 percentage points higher than the proportion living in poverty in 2010/11. Absolute child poverty in 2020 (defined as experiencing material deprivation) is forecast at 24%.

Combine this data with recent figures on in-work poverty and the picture is dismal. The most recent Joseph Rowntree Foundation annual Monitoring Poverty and Social Exclusion report, written by the New Policy Institute, says that just over half of the 13 million UK citizens in poverty, that is, surviving on less than 60% of the national median income, were from working families. The study reports around 13 million people in poverty in the UK of whom around 6.7 million are in a family where someone works. The remaining 6.3 million are in workless working-age families or families where the adults were retired. ‘This is the first time in the history of this data series where in-work poverty has made up the majority of poverty.’ ³

The NRPL conference was but one of many recent initiatives taken by Christian and Muslim scholars together in the quest for mutual understanding, bridge-building, and affirmation of shared moral values. It comprised theologians but also sociologists, anthropologists, economists, and more, which helped keep us close enough to questions about what might be done, and by whom, for conversation to be oriented towards pragmatic co-operation. That the theologians from both traditions sought to read sacred texts with careful, loving attention meant that contributors worked from the patterns of gifting and justice found deep within the scriptures for the promotion of colloquy in the face of daunting global challenges. At a time when ‘[r]eligious actors rarely speak with one voice and often target each other’, we sound (and found) some common ground. ⁴

The Essays

İhsan Eliaçık’s essay is a detailed reading of selected verses from the Qur’an. At the conference, this essay was delivered in Turkish and translated by Serdar Şengül. The written form in this collection retains the feel of that oral presentation with its short sentences, staccato style, and the dependence of some short sentences upon a succession of related sentences for the meaning to be conveyed. The experience at the conference was that of learners encountering tafsir, or exegesis of the Qur’an, as Eliaçık expounded the social and political meaning of its verses. The Prophet’s mission from the very start, he teaches, is to create an egalitarian order in which wealth is distributed, hegemonic relationships with others overcome, oppression and enslavement of the weak excluded. Eliaçık’s commitment to the Qur’an as Holy Scripture playing a methodologically unique role in the relation between God and humanity is evident and the message is strong and clear: the Qur’an is anti-capitalist—where capitalism entails a strong emphasis on private property rights, the perpetual search for wealth, and the absolute freedom of individuals to do as they please. The practical message of the Qur’an is fully binding and relevant for today. Readers of this vibrant essay experience something of how Eliaçık’s reading of the Qur’an helped develop the theoretical background of Turkey’s recent anti-capitalist movement.

Brian Brock’s essay is curiously similar in that it returns to biblical texts about human origins to relearn God’s will for our economic life. Like Eliaçık, Brock argues that the institution of ownership must be severely constrained if it is to serve the Creator’s own work of sustaining human life. Following Aquinas, Brock reminds readers that, in an Edenic unfallen state, private ownership would have been unthinkable: the Christian possesses external things, ‘not as his own, but as common … ready to communicate them to others in their need’. Similarly, the limits placed on markets in western European Christendom are a corrective to the modern heresy that the market is a primal reality provided by God for the production of human happiness, with the implication that government intervention in economics is in principle immoral. Brock is especially concerned that new or emerging markets are prone to rapacious behaviours because dominant parties tend to have better access to information and the proper regulatory institutions have not been put in place. More fundamentally, however, Brock’s point is that market relations are not to be seen as the precondition of human sociality. Christianity’s myth of primal origins is not ‘the original market’ but the finding and collecting of God’s gifts. Christians are summoned to effect poor-protecting limits of ownership and markets, and much more attentive investigation of whether or not economic practices thwart the purposes of divine giving.

Tim Gorringe writes with characteristic clarity of six priorities for an economy of life. Given that capitalism is driving global warming, Gorringe’s urgent plea is for changes in the way in which we structure the economy if we are going to survive. The problem is that the mind-set that we associate with capitalist practices undermines the cultural changes necessary for change. Loss of the ancient sense that the world was a God-saturated place, Lockean individualism that teaches that society exists to protect private property, and the replacement of ancient discourses about virtue by modern calculus of pleasure and pain, which then morphed into broader accounts of utility, all contribute to our inability to critique capitalism and failure to see beyond the immediate. Using Wendell Berry’s description of the kingdom of God as ‘the great economy’, Gorringe speaks of God’s creation of all things and the grace that sustains all that is cutting down the hubristic idea that humans make their own value. Our ultimate dependence on photosynthesis, for instance, precludes the pretension that we can prescribe the terms of our own success. We must distinguish wants from needs, says Gorringe, and reclaim the equal worth of every human being if a predatory economy that ravages the world and its weakest people is to be replaced by an economy of justice and care. Renewing our politics and economy is that simple and the condition of our very survival. So why is it not happening?

Serdar Şengül’s essay introduces Islamic sociologist Ali Shariati (1933–77), a leading figure of the reconstruction of religious thought in the Islamic world, whose term ‘abluted capitalism’ describes the misconception of Islamic belief and practice that permits the accumulation of vast capital, extraction of wealth from the poor, and economic practices that perpetuate a divide between rich and poor that corresponds to the class divide. The ablution of capitalism refers to the economic policies of Muslim sovereigns that made Islam equate uncritically with capitalist economic principles. Shariati drew attention, writes Şengül, to how every prophet in history was sent to deal with the contemporary challenges of their society and to lay the foundations for a free and just society. By expounding Shariati’s distinction between tawheed (the unicity of God) and sheerk (multiple gods), he draws to our attention an important interpreter of Islamic history and theorist of Islamic economic practice. A central point is that no one fulfils their religious obligation by paying the zakah if they have seized the wealth and the rights of the people immorally. Şengül’s conversation with Shariati is the fruit of scholarly immersion in his writings and brings to us a relatively little-known thinker (at least to me) who voices Qur’anic teaching that human beings must protect the worldly order with a spirit—and also the practices—of responsible taqwa (piety).

Matthias Varul is perhaps best known to Christian ethicists for his work as a social scientist on the ethics of fair trade, the cultural context of fair trade and how, through ethical consumption, people express and construct themselves as moral beings. His sharp eye for religious hypocrisy and the association of particular ethical choices with middle-class tastes is once again brought to bear in this essay on consumerism as folk religion, as Varul compares the imaginative possibilities of the capitalist market economy—which offers daydreams to humdrum mortals—with the spiritual curiosity inspired by Augustine’s theology of beauty and desire. Consumerism’s ‘cult of the individual’, with its ‘high church’ or ethically respectable version in modern human rights, has a spiritual/utopian dimension that touches the same sense of the inner self and its endlessness to which Augustine and other spiritual greats appealed. The implication is that worthy-minded ethical diatribes are unlikely to achieve their purpose without attention to this reality: ‘The dissatisfaction with one’s own grey existence is a thorn in the side of capitalism that cannot be pulled out since capitalism cannot exist without consumerism while consumerism’s utopian nature points beyond the constraints of the order of total production.’

Clemens Sedmak’s essay is a conversation between noted Czech economist Tomas Sedláček and Roman Catholic social teaching with respect to the meaning of good and evil. Unexpectedly, perhaps, Sedmak finds an astonishingly rich anthropology in Sedláček’s critique of ‘utility’ as a key concept in economics and the notion of rational choice. The claim is that economics is not value free but based on normative judgements about what constitutes good and evil, and shapes our inner as well as outer lives. Like the opening essays in this collection, Sedmak and Sedláček return to originating myths with the claim that the account of the Fall in the book of Genesis is a story about excessive consumption, and thus a story that speaks to economic treatments of supply and demand, and why economic activity cannot be separated from ethical critique. Sedmak finds considerable similarity between Sedláček’s economics and Catholic social teaching with respect to equity, social and economic development, and how individuals confront choices.

The fundamental question at issue in this collection is simply stated: What are the implications of our respective faith traditions for our economic life today? Seven themes interweave essays in this collection from both Christian and Islamic perspectives: faith in God requires the setting of priorities in economic life very different from those associated with many capitalist practices; human life is social and the sacred scriptures teach that the needs of all must be cared for, especially the vulnerable; every person is endowed with dignity as a creature of God and respect for this dignity and care for the earth take precedence over the pursuit of profit; markets are limited in their ability to provide for the good of societies; private property and the accumulation of wealth are fraught with moral danger because of human weakness in the face of temptation, the false allure of possessions and seeming security that wealth can bring; all will be answerable before God for their conduct in the economic dimensions of life.

On 9 June 2014 Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, the then Israeli President Shimon Peres and Pope Francis prayed for peace in the Vatican gardens. This extraordinary event included prayers in Arabic, Hebrew and Italian before each leader broke ground themselves for the planting of an olive tree. Smaller scale initiatives that attract less media attention happen around the world on a daily basis. This collection is offered as a contribution to the economics of peace and inter religious collaboration, our prayer being that increasingly detailed and substantive explication of common ground in economic ethics increases opportunities for our living together well.