REL 276
Islam and Capitalism Spring 2020
Division II Difference, Power, and Equity
This is not the current course catalog

Islam’s relationship with capitalism, in popular media as well as mainstream scholarship, is often posed as a question of compatibility. “Is Islam compatible with capitalism?” experts ask. The question itself rests on historical, epistemic, and moral premises that frame Islam and capitalism as distinct categories of comparison. Their juxtaposition, however, is beset with conceptual difficulty and anachronism: do religion and economics overlap, or do they demarcate discrete configurations of reality? Does religion latently influence economics or has capitalism subsumed all forms of spirituality? Is Islam’s regulation of commercial conduct a symptom of insufficient modernization? Conversely, is faith in the rationality of free markets akin to religious belief? What makes Islamic values, rituals, and institutions “religious” and those of capitalism “secular”? What are the historical conditions, disciplinary practices, and forms of desire that have led to the articulation of “homoislamicus” as a rival to the “homoeconomicus” of consumer capitalism? Finally, how do Islamic conceptions of human prosperity, socioeconomic justice, and ecological preservation relate to neoliberalism, socialism, and other religious traditions? We will explore these questions and unpack their underlying assumptions through the disciplinary frameworks of religious studies, history, and anthropology. Students will develop a critical appreciation of both Islam and capitalism as complex assemblages of cultural, institutional, and discursive formations with intersecting genealogies. In addition to thinking critically about religion and economy as conceptual categories, students will acquire a concrete understanding of the Shar¿’a, its commercial laws and institutions. Students will also examine the history of Muslim societies through economic regimes of agrarianism, mercantilism, extractive/settler colonialism, postcolonial development, petrodollar capitalism, and modern Islamic finance.