Islamic concepts of the just economy
Toward a synthesis of the Left and the Right
Introducción a la Cosmovisión del Islam [Introduction to the Worldview of Islam] by Mulammad Husain Beheshti and Muhammad Yauád Bahonar1 provides a thorough and excellent introduction to Shiite Islamic thought with respect to philosophy, religion, and society. It includes concluding sections on Islamic guidelines for the economy and for a just social system, which provide interesting insights that combine ideas that we in the modern and post-modern West normally associate with the Left as well as the Right. It thus offers reflections useful for a possible synthesis of leftist and rightist ideologies, which is a task that intellectuals of the West ought to undertake, in order to transform debate from the terrain of ideological war to the much more productive terrain of consensus-seeking civility.
Beheshti and Bahonar dedicated their lives to the study of Islamic theology and to the Islamic Revolution in Iran, and both arrived to occupy high positions in the Islamic Republic o…