This book invokes the Tawhidi ontological foundation of the Qur’anic law and worldview, and is also a study of ta’wil, the esoteric meaning of Qur’anic verses. It presents a comparative analysis between the Tawhidi methodology and the contemporary subject of Shari’ah. Masudul Alam Choudhury brings about a serious criticism of the traditional understanding of Shari’ah as Islamic law contrary to the holistic socio-scientific worldview of the unity of knowledge arising from Tawhid as the law. A bold repudiation of the Islamic traditional understanding and the school of theocracy, Choudhury’s critique is in full consonance with the Qur’an and Sunnah. It is critical of the sectarian (madhab) conception of relational independence of facts. Thus the non-creative outlook of Shari’ah contrasts with universality and uniqueness of Tawhid as the analytically established law explaining the monotheistic organic unity of being and becoming in ‘everything’. This wide and strict methodological development of the Tawhidi worldview is articulated in this work. The only way that Tawhid and Shari'ah can converge as law is in terms of developing the Tawhidi methodology, purpose and objective of the universal and unique law in consonance with the ontology of Tawhid. Such a convergence in the primal ontological sense of Tawhid is termed as maqasid as-shari'ah al-Tawhid.

The application of Shariah compliance in business transactions continues to increase. The Asian financial crisis of 1997, global financial crisis of 2007-2008, Enron scandal and other reported ills besieging conventional business transactions have led to advocates of Shariah-compliant business transactions promoting the latter as a credible alternative. However, unlike the banking, commerce and financial sectors, the uptake by the construction sector was sluggish due to limited understanding of Shariah among the practitioners and policymakers compounded by the lack of research and publications on its application for the construction sector.This book is intended for students, researchers, practitioners and policymakers of the construction industry as well as the related upstream and downstream activities. It offers basic theories, challenges current practices, and proposes innovative ideas on Shariah compliance and its application for the construction industry.Related Link(s)

This volume is a scholarly work on the foundations of the role that the moral and ethical law plays on human enterprise comprising economics, finance, society and science. Divided into three parts, theoretical, empirical and application, the study covers a vast area of socio-scientific investigation and is extensively comparative in perspective.

A short exposition of the value and concept of human rights in Islam as noted in the Quran and Sunnah

“A delightfully original take on…the prospects for liberal democracy in the broader Islamic Middle East.”—Matthew Kaminski, Wall Street Journal As the Arab Spring threatens to give way to authoritarianism in Egypt and reports from Afghanistan detail widespread violence against U.S. troops and women, news from the Muslim world raises the question: Is Islam incompatible with freedom? In Islam without Extremes, Turkish columnist Mustafa Akyol answers this question by revealing the little-understood roots of political Islam, which originally included both rationalist, flexible strains and more dogmatic, rigid ones. Though the rigid traditionalists won out, Akyol points to a flourishing of liberalism in the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire and the unique “Islamo-liberal synthesis” in present-day Turkey. As he powerfully asserts, only by accepting a secular state can Islamic societies thrive. Islam without Extremes offers a desperately needed intellectual basis for the reconcilability of Islam and liberty.

This book discusses the common principles of morality and ethics derived from divinely endowed intuitive reason through the creation of al-fitr' a (nature) and human intellect (al-‘aql). Biomedical topics are presented and ethical issues related to topics such as genetic testing, assisted reproduction and organ transplantation are discussed. Whereas these natural sources are God’s special gifts to human beings, God’s revelation as given to the prophets is the supernatural source of divine guidance through which human communities have been guided at all times through history. The second part of the book concentrates on the objectives of Islamic religious practice – the maqa' sid – which include: Preservation of Faith, Preservation of Life, Preservation of Mind (intellect and reason), Preservation of Progeny (al-nasl) and Preservation of Property. Lastly, the third part of the book discusses selected topical issues, including abortion, assisted reproduction devices, genetics, organ transplantation, brain death and end-of-life aspects. For each topic, the current medical evidence is followed by a detailed discussion of the ethical issues involved.

This rigorously written book on the areas of Islamic principle theory and application is expected to break new ground in modern economic analysis, both for the Islamically inclined and others. The main features of the book include analytical treatments of the essential axioms and instruments of Islamic Political Economy, their expected application, and a comparative perspective both in respect to contemporary Islamic literature as well as comparative economic theory.

This book develops and applies the methodology of Tawhid (“monotheism”) as law and the Sunnah (the teachings of Prophet Muhammad) in the Qur’an in establishing a transdisciplinary foundation for the study of Islamic economics, finance, society, and science. It employs the Tawhidi String Relation (TSR), a new theoretical framework in contemporary Islamic sciences, in the methodological formalisation and application of the Tawhidi worldview - as the primal ontological law of monotheism. It employs a deeply Qur’anic exegesis, and a mathematical, philosophical, and socio-scientific mode of inquiry in deriving, developing, and empirically applying the Qur’anic methodology of “unity of knowledge”. It is the first book of its kind in rigorously studying the true foundation of the Qur’anic concept of ‘everything’ - as the world-system extending between the heavens and Earth. The qur’anic terminology of the precept of this “world-system” in its most comprehensive perspective is A’lameen, the terminology in the Qur’an that accounts for the generality and details of the world-systems that are governed by the method of evaluation of the objective criterion of wellbeing. Wellbeing objective criterion is evaluated subject to inter-causal relations between systemic entities, variables, and functions. The cardinal principle of Tawhid in its relationship with the world-system conveys the corporeal meaning of monotheism in its cognitive implication of abstraction and application. Such a study has not been undertaken in existing Islamic socio-scientific literature in analysing Islamic economics, finance, science, and society collectively, using Tawhidi law as a theoretical framework. This book will be relevant to all such scholars who are interested in studying the monotheistic law and the Islamic principles, particularly Tawhid, Shari’ah, and Islamic philosophical thought.