National Centre of Excellence for Islamic Studies Australia

Okay, okay, that’s a very good question. And, I have to look for what I want to read to you. As you know, I taught economics at the University level for over 20 years. And, I had. I was privileged to engage with many students from many different walks of life, different countries, different religions and cultures. And, I taught economics to them in a very secular, value free way. And now, let me tell you what I shared with my students, what I taught them. I told them to create wealth, but I did not tell them for what reason; I told them about scarcity and competition, but not about abundance and corporation; I told them about free trade, but not about fair trade, about gross national product, but not about gross national happiness; I told them about profit maximisation and cost minimisation, about the highest returns to the shareholders, but not about social consciousness, accountability to the community, sustainability, and respect for the creation and the creator.

I did not tell them that without humanity, economics is a house of cards built on shifting sands. Where was the economic theory that reflected my students’ real lives? All these things led me to reflect about what I was teaching my students and the way I was engaging with my students. And at the end, it brought me heartache, because I wanted to have a different kind of dialogue, a different kind of teaching. I did not want to reject economics – economics is important, commerce is important, accountancy is important, management is important, Department of Economics is important, MBA program is important. But, I wanted to have an opportunity to share with my students something that they can feel is a part of the real life, rather than something in isolation and abstract. And for that, I had to search for bigger pictures.

I had to search for the fundamental values that are not necessarily economics in nature. And, this is when I decided to become a student again, because I started a journey of self searching. I wanted to rediscover myself. That journey of the discovery led me to the Department of Theology at the Plato Collage in Oxford, where I became a student. And, as I was searching for the biggest picture has meant that I have got to go and study theology, philosophy, to find out in my own head, all these economic theories, all these sophisticated and elegant mathematical models that I had learnt and I was teaching my students, to find what kind of relevance they have got to the real world, to the bigger picture. And, that’s why I went the path that I took, the path to become a student, to learn theology, religions and philosophy.

When I was doing theology, I discovered that indeed, economics and theology are very similar. Both of them want to make us happy, both of them want to give us happiness. Economics gives us happiness through encouragement of possession, materialism, consumerism, and all other values of that nature, and is a kind of happiness that is never is delivered, because it is transient. I buy the BMW, I am very happy, you come and buy the Ferrari, I am not happy anymore, because you’ve got something better than me. Somebody comes tomorrow and gets something better than what you have, again, your transient happiness is over because you’re not as high as he or she is.

Religion wants to make us happy as well, but not through materialism, not through consumerism, but through service, through vocation, through altruism, through knowing and serving the common good, and is a happiness that is delivered. Have you stopped, have you wondered, why is it that so many, for example, Chief Executives, at the height of their career, with all the power, with all that money that they’re making, with all that possession that they’ve accumulated, they go through tremendous bad times and depression and so on, they give it all up. I have seen them with my own eyes, I have communication with them, I have worked with them, and they go for example, in shanty towns Nairobi where I met a few, and they’re working in the orphanages, they were working with people suffering with AIDS. Why do they do that, because that is a kind of permanent happiness that they can receive. Why is it that so many rich people when they reached to the height of their wealth, all of a sudden they give everything away? This is a kind of happiness. Again, it was at that time that I discovered that I have got as if somebody has put a mission in front of me, that I have got to do it, to bringing economics and theology together. Again, I emphasise again, because they worked together for centuries, and economics was always a part of theology, but after the industrial revolution in Britain and so on, we wanted to make Man free of moral obligation, to allowing him to go and make as much money as possible without the burden of ethics and morality in the back of his mind. So, we turn economics into the branch of the political economy, and the last few decades have even become worse, because it has become so much mathematical economics, only concerned about the things that it can measure.

Absolutely. So, how can is it that we are the product of love and dependency, and then they tell us the world is such a competitive world, and we are here on our own, there is nothing in the world as a society. Margaret Thatcher once quoted that there is no such thing as a society in Britain. No. We are here to be together, sharing together, benefiting together, cooperating with each other. Why is it that the first thing that I taught my students, the first lesson in economics, I told them this world is such a competitive world and that is a world of scarcity. How can it be, the world of scarcity that in England now, everything is for sale, two for the price of one? Everywhere you go in the supermarkets, two melons for the price of one. Two fruit basket for the price of one. Two chickens for the price of one, so where is that scarcity? I’ve told my students that they should always look for the lowest cost, consumers look for the lowest cost to exercise when they buy something. Again, that is not true. In England now, and I think it’s in Australia the same and elsewhere, there has been a huge rise in fair trade products, ethical products, and usually these things are more expensive than the alternative. We are now spending – I think in England – 600 or 700 million pounds, where a few years ago it was nothing, on fair product – coffee, tea, bananas, clothes and so on. And, many people willingly are paying more for the same product that they would have gotten cheaper are not alternative. So, why is it that people are paying more? Because it gives them happiness that by paying more for this coffee, that more money is going to provide a clinic, a running water, sanitation, for the coffee workers and the farmers. It gives them satisfaction, it gives them happiness. Therefore, there is more to life than the lowest prices, there is more to life than always searching for the lowest price, if there is something else that makes you happy as well.

So, let us talk about these issues, let us enlarge the debate and bring other human values rather than selfishness, greed, consumerism, possession, power, and so on. And then I think, we can create a world that we can be more proud than the world that we are living in at the moment. The world we are living in at the moment is not anything that we can take pride of. So much misery in advance countries, and so much different kind of miseries in countries who are not as advance as we are – look at Iraq, look at Afghanistan, look at the Middle East and at the sort of misery. Look at the West, with all these possessions, with all these consumerism – depression, anxiety, fear, family breakdown, suicide, doctors so busy prescribing depression tablets and so on. So what is going on? What is going on? We have to ask the big questions.