Towards an Islamic Theory of Development BASED ON QURANIC APPROACH
Sayed Desouky Hassan*
Waleed F. Faris **
INTRODUCTION
One of the main worries for all so called “third world” countries, which includes mainly all the Muslim countries, is the issue of development. Unfortunately, though this matter consumed and still consumes a lot of money and efforts in the above mentioned countries, we cannot see the gist of it yet, what we can see is some infrastructure here and there and societies of consumption that buy and use the most advanced products imported from the developed countries. So, we are looking into consumption-based development not production-based development. Another major problem, as well, is that we do not have our own theory of development that we can start from it, on contrary, we are trying all sorts of theories on development that were produced in a different environment and for different societies. This is another main reason for the continuous failure in most of the development projects in the “third world”. To go deeper into the issue, we have another major problem with the definition of development itself, if you make a simple questionnaire and circulate it among most of the Muslim countries you will receive different perceptions which will lead to more confusion than ever. In this paper, we try to explain briefly, the western theories of development and the definition of development as well. Then, we will embark into outlining a preliminary theory on development extracted from Islam as the cradle for cultural values and morals in the Muslim world.