An Islamic Perspective on Governance

It was a pleasure to read An Islamic Perspective on Governance by Zafar Iqbal and Mervyn K. Lewis. The authors have undertaken innovative research to examine the Islamic and contemporary western concepts, institutions, processes and traditions about governance: public, corporate, financial and fiscal. This study breaths some fresh air into the debate on some of the critical issues of positive economics by exploring new linkages of governance with normative goals, ethical frameworks and egalitarian policy initiatives. I hope this path-breaking study may open up new avenues of growth in the fiscal economics of tomorrow. In my view, the uniqueness of An Islamic Perspective on Governance lies in building on the contributions of the positive approach, impregnating it with a new vision of human destiny characterized by moral excellence and centrality of justice in all areas of human effort and governance. Morality, in this new paradigm is not confined only to human motivation and personal virtue; it influences the entire fabric of human life and refashions all dimensions of Governance: goals, laws, institutions, processes, policies, rules and regulations and checks and balances. The authors have made a seminal effort to reintroduce, in a highly integrated manner, moral commitment, social responsibility, and justice to the conventional agenda of political economy. That makes efficiency and equity inseparable twins, co-existing in harmony and not strange bed-fellows. An Islamic Approach to Governance presents, in a snapshot, some of the key areas of Islamic economics. It also contains a thoughtful critique of the present state of the discipline and identifies some of the challenges that beset it. It also provides some food for thought for Islamic economists and policy makers, to not only further refine their tools and products, but also to make substantive efforts to do justice to the new paradigm Islamic economics claims to represent.