THE present millennium demands humanity to consider seriously the state of the art of our present society. In our interest to develop our modern society, we should not lose sight that our progress and the ability to sustain its development has to be in harmony with our human values. Humanity will never be able to sustain its progress if it failed to understand and formulate social programmes in line with its natural being. History has proved it and the present society can be a good testimony of how men can be destroyed if they try to play the role of God in this world.
Modern man is too confident in his rational ability to organise his individual and social life without any need for guidance from the Creator, Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) proudly noted, “It seems not to be true that there is a Power in the universe which watches over the well-being of every individual with parental care, bringing all within His fold to a happy ending. On the contrary destinies of men are incompatible with any universal principles.”
He further reiterated, “Dark, unfeeling and involving powers determine human destiny; the concept of divine justice, which, according to religion rules the world, seems to have no existence. No attempt to minimise the supremacy of science can alter the fact that it takes into account our independence on the real, internal world while religion is only a childish illusion deriving its strength from the fact that it happens to fall in our instinctual desires.”
In the realm of man’s rational and material world view, the economic factor is the centre of human social organisation and development. Adam Smith (1723-1790) clarified this stand, “society is not conceived as a static achievement of mankind which will go on reproducing itself, unchanged and unchanging, from one generation to the next. On the contrary, society is seen as an organism which has its own life history. To discover the shape of things to come, to isolate the forces which impel society along its path–this is the grand objective of economic science.”
Karl Marx further reiterated this view: “All aspects of human history, society and culture are the result of economic
factors, the individual being is nothing more than a product of his immediate surroundings and that through a progressive improvement in the material environment, a perfect society will inevitably emerge.”
The result of the above way of looking at life, the welfare for man to the materialist, can be achieved only through economic prosperity and advancement. For the capitalist system, this goal can be attained through absolute individual freedom or individualism. For the Marxist the same goal can be attained through collectivism. The difference between the two systems basically is in term of their approaches towards attaining material prosperities. The ideologies of Marxism thus has to be absolute and capitalism has to be reviewed in order to be relevant. Shandel, a sociologist, in his observation reminds humankind of the needs to change this human perspective. He commented: “The world is struggling too much time on producing houseware. This is stupidity of man’s philosophy today the meaning of aimless technology. Humanity is so deviated and devoted to materialism that another Jesus is needed to come.”
Today, it is agreeable to many that sustainable society is a qualitative concept that involves all aspects that make up an human society in equilibrium. Creating a sustainable society requires more than achieving economic success and increasing prosperity. It demands a multi-dimensional approach to human civilisation.
Despite there being an agreement on this holistic approach to develop human society and the need to sustain this momentum, the secular intellectual thought and theoretical frameworks are still not free from the realm of the materialistic world view.
The recent Bruntland Commission Report entitled Our Common Future defined sustainable development as: “Development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future questions to meet their own needs.” He further elaborated that: “In essence, sustainable development is a process of change in which the exploitation of resources, the direction of investments, the orientation of technological development and institutional change are all in harmony and enhance both current and future potential to meet human needs
and aspirations.”
Our world view definitely has to undergo a process of soul searching for the genuine truth to lead for the real well being of mankind. A sustainable society is not a national vision. Instead, it is a global vision of the human future.
It needs a holistic vision which integrate the genuine needs of mankind which transcend nationalities, space and time.
Islam has a genuine right to provide this guideline.
Mahmoud Abu Saud illustrates a clear Islamic perspective of a sustainable society: GOD, the sole Creator of all beings, the owner of everything and the Absolute and the Ultimate;
THE human community as an entity integrated in the cosmos.
THE human individual is ordained to be responsible for himself, his collectivity and his environment.
MAN is made of matter and spirit. He attains cognition by means of the logistics of his meditative faculty and the awareness of his spirituality.
THE revealed standard of values, commandments and basic criteria will have to regulate, govern and guide human behaviour.
These beliefs and guidelines, if translated into moral and positive rules and regulations, into directives for legislature, into basics on which the foundations of our aesthetic, social, political and economic systems are built, unless and until this happens, our efforts to save humanity from the present moral materialism to Abu Saud will be in vain.
Under this Islamic world view, economics becomes the science which studies that aspect of human activities related to the satisfaction of material needs required to help man in his society achieve the transcendent values.