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This examination of three early Islamic theological texts will show that the discursive practices within their respective genera of writing in its nascent stages were scripturally hermeneutical in character. Primary focus was on arguing for the proper understanding of Quranic statements rather than offering extensive arguments based on purely rational grounds. Formal analysis of early writings on divine determinism such as we have selected suggests that Quranic content not only made up the substantive matter of these discourses but even influenced their structure of argumentation and their modes of reasoning. What this study ultimately shows is that the development of Islamic theological thinking and the discursive practices associated with it may have had their impetus in the internal sources of the religion itself and had not merely evolved under foreign influences.

This article is a follow-up to a previous essay that mapped the dynamics of the modern world-system theory into what was called a Global Power-Field (GPF) during the colonial era phase of planetary history. It continues this mapping project by exploring the reconfiguration of the field in the postcolonial period. This field of power operated on the practice of ‘objectification’ of asymmetrical relations within its domain. The current essay extends that analysis by further identifying the forms of ‘objectification’ in the field’s contemporary phase. A prominent feature of the current field is the non-locality of its operations; a term signifying the level of dispersion of its vectors of power across the globe. The investigation will conclude with a detailed case study of how this current version of the GPF impacts the Global South by examining Post-Revolutionary Iran’s relations with the West.

This essay takes modern world-system theory and maps it into a political-economic field of power. This re-modeling of the theory better illustrates the diffuseness and the spatiality of the operations of global forces; thus, helping us have a greater appreciation of the durability and scope of Western economic and political hegemony across the world. Our exposition also tracks the structural transformation undergone by the Global Power-Field (GPF) throughout its history showing the evolving character of its dominance. Moreover, this field paradigm does not restrict its considerations to matters of political economy but also centralizes factors of politics and international relations that play a fundamental a role in driving historical dynamics. The workings of this emerging model are then illustrated by a historical case study from the Middle East: The nineteenth and early twentieth century Ottoman Empire.

Neoliberal economic theorists posit that the economic sphere is to be differentiated from the social world and governed by its own rationality that is distinct from religious, ethical, social, or political considerations. My article explores how the issuance of fatwas in the contemporary Muslim world discursively compete with neoliberal capitalist ideology by embedding religious ethics in economic discourse. First, I contextualize this analysis with a historical discussion on how the Muslim world was incorporated into the capitalist world-system, a process that peripheralized their established economic and cultural practices. Then, I examine the contemporary fatwas on commercial transactions that are issued by an international Muslim organization. My overall argument is that the Islamic moral economy proposes financial arrangements that represent alternatives to capitalist financial practices, which are the standard modes of operation in global financial institutions. Such practices pose a challenge to Muslim economic ethics and law, a challenge that Muslims are trying to negotiate using traditional legal practices such as the fatwa.