Question

Homo Islamicus: Compare and contrast Homo Islamicus and Homo Economicus.

Answer 1

In what is perhaps the best recent scholarly overview of contemporary Islamic finance, Islamic Finance and the Global Economy, Ibrahim Warde dismisses the utility of an opposition between two of what the sociologist Max Weber called “ideal types.” Professor Warde argues that the “Homo Economicus versus Homo Islamicus contrast is now largely irrelevant” claiming that these are “normative rather than descriptive” appellations that do not accurately capture the empirical reality of either conventional or Islamic finance (Warde 2010, 45). I greatly admire Professor Warde’s scepticism toward what he terms “ideological” arguments. Furthermore, I think his call for attention to the practices of Islamic finance, rather than the theory of Islamic finance, is of utmost urgency in scholarly approaches to this emerging form of economic action. However, in contrast to his claims, I argue that an opposition between homo Islamicus and homo economicus is still useful and that, properly defined, it points to one of the most significant differences between Islamic and conventional finance and the human actors that are presumed in each system. My central argument is that the distinction between these two types is useful because it illuminates one of the central questions facing the present and future of human beings: what limits, if any, are possible in the extension of economic rationality to multiple domains of human life. In advancing this argument, I would like first to make a few methodological points. First, and most importantly, when I refer to the homo Islamicus and homo economicus, I do not refer to any human essences that prefigure history, culture, or language. That is to say, I am not arguing that there are any innate characteristics of either “economic humans” or “Islamic humans” that endow them with natural or quasi-natural characteristics. Rather, my methodological starting point is that humans largely make themselves and each other, through the institutions, technologies, and other tools that they develop in the course of living and reflecting on how one should live. This is essentially a constructivist position that draws on the speech act theory of J.L. Austin and his followers as well as the analysis of the project of subjectification developed in the work of Michel Foucault (Austin 1962; Butler 1997; Foucault 1983; Foucault 1997; Rabinow 1986). However, it is not a radically constructivist position in that I do not presume that humans have complete agency to remake the world in whatever way that they desire. Human action is conditioned by a variety of already existing technologies, infrastructures, and agencements (Caliskan and Callon 2010, 8-10), the existence of which human beings are often only dimly aware or, in many cases, totally ignorant. Therefore, I use the terms homo Islamicus and homo economicus in a different manner from the way that they are deployed by those of the essentialist persuasion. That is to say, I do not presume that either figure exists apriori, but rather that they are the effects of a certain configuration of knowledge, technology, infrastructure and so forth that then configure human action and relationships. Thus, I do not assume that either of these figures exists by nature. There is no self-interested, rational actor who represents human beings in their natural form. Similarly, there is no altruistic, rightly-guided, actor who exists before history, culture, or language. Rather a particular set of institutions, technologies, and apparatuses must be formulated to bring these beings into creation. In this sense the models, formulas, and contracts used in finance (whether conventional or Islamic) are not descriptions of the world, but actually means of bringing a world (and the human subjects that populate it) into being.