Mariam Khawar - What voices have been overlooked in Islamic economic philosophy?

EXALT Podcast

This month we are thrilled to be joined by University of Helsinki doctoral researcher Mariam Khawar. Mariam is in the Doctoral Programme in Political, Soci­etal and Regional Change, which is part of the Faculty of Social Sciences and is affiliated with Helsinki Centre for Global Political Economy.

Mariam’s work focuses on Islamic economic philosophy, specifically through a Marxist lens. Her work is highly interdisciplinary drawing on feminist political economy, economics, and feminism in Islamic theology and philosophy. She is working toward filling in gaps in the theoretical materials in that discipline. This work started during her master’s studies at King’s College London, where she made an analysis of Islamic banks during the 2007 financial crisis. We discuss the role of research within global capitalist banking and how her research is not about banking and finance. Rather Mariam focuses on the philosophical aspects of Islamic economics. She interrogates questions like what constitutes economic agents within Islamic economic philosophy. Within the conversation Mariam reminds us to think outside the box and to always be boldly interdisciplinary in academic work.

If you would like to follow Mariam’s work, check out her profile at University of Helsinki.

Resources

• Ayubi, Z. (2019) Gendered morality: Classical Islamic ethics of the self, family, and society. New York: Columbia University Press.
• Cooper, C. & Jack, V. (2023) ‘Mind-boggling’ profits for big oil puts tax hikes back on the agenda. POLITICO [online]. Available from: https://www.politico.eu/article/record-profits-big-oil-tax-hikes-war-ukraine-russia/
• Graeber, D. & Wengrow, D. (2021) The Dawn of Everything: A new history of humanity. First American edition. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
• Hefner, R. W. (2006). Islamic economics and global capitalism. Society, 44(1), 16-22.
• Milanović, B. (2016) Global Inequality: A new approach for the age of globalization. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
• Wadud, A. (2015) ‘The Ethics of Tawhid over the Ethics of Qiwamah’, in Men in charge? rethinking authority in Muslim legal tradition. p. 28.