ABSTRACT
This chapter employs an original approach based on economics and the humanities to undertake a comparative critique of the epistemologies that underlie conventional and Islamic economics. To this end, referring to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, it lifts the curtain on the “tragedy of Islamic economics” by advancing an interpretation of the moral economy of Islam as an orientalistic ghost that is a sub-product of the Western theatre of modernity.
In particular the chapter argues that, if the ghost of the moral economy is distressing today the contemporary world of conventional economics epistemology as counterpart of the Western spirit of capitalism, it represents a false problem for the methodology of Islamic economics and a major obstacle for its own theoretical development, as no detached economy/morality can exist in a Shari‘ah-grounded eco-system leading to a tawhidi framework of shared prosperity. Following this reasoning, the chapter suggests that the time has come for Islamic economics (Prince Hamlet) to liberate itself from the need for revenge inspired by the double-sided spirit of capitalism–moral economy’s ghost in the theatre of modernity, so to finally depart from the orientalistic legacies of conventional economics and Western cultural domination (King Hamlet).
