So, what was the IPA on about in publishing such a scandalous betrayal of western cvilisation, (sic) and, for that matter, a complete falsification of the history of classical liberal economics? There are those already speculating on the motivation of the IPA? – What is the deal behind it?, and, there must be something very rum (sic) because they still refuse to retract and correct, why have they sold out to muslims and in such an ugly fashion? The cretins at the IPA may not like it, but senior figures have made their disgust plain.

Andrew Kemp and I wrote a piece in last edition of the IPA Review on a strand of Islamic thought that could be considered sympathetic to the free market. (The article is here: “Islam and the Free Market“). The piece is pretty simple, covering three areas – the aspects of the Qur’an which praise commerce and the exploitation of natural resources for human gain, the economics of the 14th century Islamic historian Ibn Khaldun, and the potential problem of usury for Islamic commerce.

We explicitly did not try to maintain that the Qur’an or Islam itself was inherently pro-capitalist or liberal, or peaceful or something else – I don’t believe that religions can be ‘inherently’ anything. Instead, we argued that it is possible to cherry-pick a tradition of free market or pro-commerce thought out of Islamic intellectual history. As we wrote,

None of this discussion is to imply that the Islamic religion is consistently or inherently liberal, or necessarily free market. If nothing else, the process of discerning a liberal tradition in Islam illustrates the subjective nature of theology – individuals interpret sacred texts, rather than being controlled by them.

This modest argument has not been popular. (The quote which opens this post is from the latest, and certainly the most vitriolic, response at a blog called Mangled Thoughts. He goes on to characterise our piece as a ‘nasty little bit of toilet paper material’, but at least he calls my front cover ‘handsome’.)

Prodos opened the condemnation by accusing us of supporting a “free market dictator” – the Islamic Free Market Institute Foundation which we mentioned in the article approvingly quotes George Bernard Shaw on its website.

A blogger under the name Strider, before having read the article, speculated that the IPA was desperately searching out new sources of funding, (“the IPA was getting strapped for cash”) and that we wrote the piece to try to get support from Emirate Airlines. He went on to read the article, conceding that it may not be all wrong (“That might well be the case, but it is important to avoid the temptation to rewrite history.”) but nevertheless, the IPA should shut down. (“perhaps it is time after 60 years for the IPA to pack up its tents and go away.”) I can assure Strider that we were not paid to write the article, and that for the last two years the IPA has experienced a sustained boom in financial support.

Gerard Jackson, of Brookesnews, has provided the only lengthy criticism of our piece, in this podcast with Prodos, and apparently in a subsequent lecture. Speculating that we were ‘spoonfed’ our argument from some nefarious source, he badly misreads our article.

Over the course of an hour, he argues against a strawman – our article does not claim that Ibn Khaldun invented economic theory. Instead, we briefly write that “it is hard not to imagine that the leading scholars of the School of Salamanca did not have at least a passing familiarity with Ibn Khaldun’s work”. We know that Islamic scholarship was influential within the Scholastic movement – Ibn Rushd (Averroes) was highly respected by Thomas Aquinas and others as a expert commentator on Aristotle. Much Greek writing was translated into Latin from Arabic, rather than the original Greek. Furthermore, Medieval European scholars often traveled within the Islamic world and had extensive contact with their Arabic counterparts. It’s unlikely that Ibn Khaldun would have escaped the attention of Christendom.

Regardless, Jackson does not address our main contention – it is possible to detect within Islamic intellectual history a distinct, although not anywhere near dominant, strand of free market or pro-commerce thought. If there is a problem with this argument, I would be eager to hear it, but so far angry rhetoric and misreadings have dominated the critical response.

Why might this be the case? Our article was written for a audience sympathetic to the free market, asking them to reassess their existing views on the viability of Islamic liberalism. We argued that the myopic argument that there can be no free Islamic nation because Islam the religion is somehow internally deficient does not stand up. Liberal thought has existed within an Islamic framework. And perhaps this can be leveraged into a modern Islamic liberal tradition and hopefully provide a basis for a genuinely liberal Islamic state.

The response by Prodos, Gerard Jackson, Strider and Mangled Thoughts illustrates how certain segments of the right treat the War on Terror as simply a War on Islam – and they appear to be angry that Andrew and I would even consider sympathising with their enemy. Worse – we have “sold out to muslims”, as if it is every Australian’s duty to stay strong against the advancing Muslim hordes.

They dismiss Islam as a religion of violence without seriously looking at the importance of different intellectual traditions within Islam, and the way these can and have changed over time. Surely, when the Islamic world is filled will illiberal governments, it is vital to try to rejuvenate those traditions to encourage other, more liberal, paths of development?