ABSTRACT
The methodology of the Tawhidi worldview, the primordial and monotheistic law of oneness of God in Islamic epistemological context concerning socio-scientific reasoning, formalism and application, is distinctly contrary to mainstream economics in general and Islamic neoclassical economics in particular. There is a fundamental flaw in all forms of neoclassical reasoning. The flaw is due to the ignorance of the Tawhidi epistemological roots by those who profess Islamic neoclassical economic reasoning. In the field of participatory financing, the consequences of such intellectual ambivalence have included the complete misunderstanding of the extensively relational epistemological methodology of participation derived from the Qur’an and the sunnah in the development of the purpose and objective of the shari’ah, namely maqasid as-shari’ah. The end result has been an intellectual remiss of Islamic economics and finance in the thoughtful world, which otherwise can be enabled by the new and irreducible epistemic reasoning premised on the Tawhidi methodology and its functioning in the generality and particulars (Islamic participative financing) of the world-system of unity of knowledge. This chapter bridges this methodological gap and applies the analytical Tawhidi methodology to the topic of participation and participatory financing instruments in the light of the Tawhidi precept of inter-causal relational “pairing” in diversity as the sure worldly meaning and evidence of the Tawhidi epistemic oneness.
Allah sent down the Qur’an with the embodiment of Tawhid in its ontological and evident form to unravel the fact that, indeed, Truth is manifest. Yet complete knowledge of Truth remains with Allah to be unveiled in the Hereafter (Akhira). Thus, learning from beginning to eternity and through the Prophet’s sunnah (guidance) is the command of Allah; it also comprises the thought and practice of the learning world-system. Syed Qutb (Mousalli, 1990) talked about such a functional ontology of learning as the divine attribute to humankind and the world-system. The Qur’an declares on the property of integration in the discursive experience emanating from the learning process of the shura (Qur’anic consultation and discourse) and, thereby, extracting the cognitive worshiping state of the world-system in “everything”. There is thus the complex embedded wrapping of everything in this world-system by the relational epistemology of learning in unity of knowledge and its construction of unity in the induced world-system.
57Economics is a sub-system of such an embedded, complexly interrelated and unified organic world-system. “Everything” shares the solely universal and unique law of oneness without differentiation. The Qur’an revealed the same law to all the prophets of antiquity making the historical wholeness. The Qur’an says in its allegorical language of the worldview of monotheism and its explanatory law as being bestowed on all the prophets (Qur’an 87:18–19). Thus, Tawhid is true of all the divine revelations and the world-system comprising soul, mind, matter, humanity and jinn (abstraction).
