"Choudhury interweaves advanced concepts and translates them in a Qur'anic context with economic examples that prove brilliant. The book's main audiences are Muslims and scholars interested in Islamic economics. ... it is a work that is very distinctive in the field, and that has great potential to pioneer a philosophical debate on issues pertaining to Islamic economics, such as epistemic methods and business ethics. Anyone in this field will highly appreciate this admirable scholarship." (Abdulla Galadari, Religious Studies Review, Vol. 43 (04), December, 2017)
Foreword; Gregory MacLeod
Prelude
Part I: The Absolute Reality in the Qur’an -- The Methodological Worldview
1. Introduction: Foundations of the Qur’anic Worldview
2. Analytical Precept of Absolute Reality in the Qur’an
3. A Methodological Overview
4. Formalism of the Methodological Understanding of the Sure Reality in Terms of Unity of Knowledge
5. Tawhid, Al-Wasatiyyah, and Maqasid As-Shari’ah
6. Technically Integrating Al-Wasatiyyah and Maqasid As-Shari’ah with Tawhidi
Methodological Worldview
Part II: The Absolute Reality in the Qur’an -- Applications to Economics, Finance and Society using the Generalized Socioscientific System
7. The Nature of Business Social Ethics in Heterodox Epistemological Worldviews 8.
An Ethical Worldview of Moral-Social Reconstruction
9. Ethics in Evolutionary Learning Models: A Critique of Comparative Perspectivesand the Alternative Applied To The Wellbeing Of Canadian Natives, Absolute Reality in Social Issues
10. Conclusion: The Ultimate Nature of Qur’anic Socioscientific Abstraction
Masudul Alam Choudhury is Professor and International Chair of the Postgraduate Program in Islamic Economics and Finance, Faculty of Economics, Trisakti University, Jakarta, Indonesia. He previously held teaching and research positions at the University of Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur; Sultan Qaboos University, Muscat, Oman; and Cape Breton University, Sydney, Nova Scotia, Canada.
This book studies the absolute reality of the Qur’an, which is signified by the struggle of truth against falsehood in the framework of monotheistic unity of knowledge and the unified world-system induced by the consilience of knowledge. In such a framework the absolute reality reveals itself not by religious dogmatism. Rather, the methodology precisely comprises its distinctive parts. These are namely the ‘primal ontology’ as the foundational explained axiom of monotheistic unity; the ‘secondary ontologies’ as explanatory replications of the law of unity in the particulars of the world-system; ‘epistemology’ as the operational model; and ‘phenomenology’ as the structural nature of events induced by the monotheistic law, that is by knowledge emanating from the law. The imminent methodology remains the unique explanatory reference of all events that take place, advance, and change in continuity across continuums of knowledge, space, and time.