MARKETS, MAQASID AND MODERNITY Islamic Law, Technology and the Renewal of Institutions by ASMAU AHMED AFOLABI ESQ.

MARKETS, MAQASID AND MODERNITY

Islamic Law, Technology and the Renewal of Institutions by ASMAU AHMED AFOLABI ESQ.

"This day I have perfected your religion, completed My favour upon you, and chosen for you Islam as your religion." — Qur'an 5:3

 "Indeed, the religion in the sight of Allah is Islam. "— Qur'an 3:19

The world is wealthier than it has ever been, and more anxious than it should be.

Our phones carry more computing power than the machines that launched astronauts to the moon. Goods cross continents in days. Artificial intelligence writes essays, diagnoses diseases, and processes in seconds what once required entire research teams months to accomplish. Financial transactions move across the globe with the tap of a screen. Yet despite this abundance, something feels increasingly fragile.

Young families struggle to afford homes. Graduates enter adulthood burdened by economic uncertainty. Food prices rise faster than wages. Governments spend billions attempting to solve problems that seem to multiply faster than solutions can emerge. Across the world, economic anxiety has become the backdrop of ordinary life, surfacing in housing debates, inflation headlines, migration crises, and a growing sense that modern economies are producing immense wealth while leaving too many people behind.

This is the defining paradox of our age: unprecedented productivity alongside widespread insecurity.

For Muslims, these developments deserve more than economic explanations. They demand civilizational reflection. If Islam is a perfected religion, its relevance cannot be confined to prayer, fasting, and personal morality. A religion that claims completion must also have something to say about markets, ownership, institutions, and the organization of economic life. Yet somewhere along the way, many Muslims gradually accepted a troubling arrangement: let Islam govern the soul while modernity governs the economy. We import economic theories, governance frameworks, development models, and technological architectures from elsewhere, and only afterwards ask whether they can be made compatible with our values.

Far less frequently do we ask a more fundamental question: does the Islamic intellectual tradition itself contain resources for thinking about prosperity, distribution, ownership, and economic justice? The question is not whether Muslims should reject modernity. The question is whether they can engage modernity without surrendering their own civilizational imagination.

One of the unintended consequences of modern Islamic discourse has been the reduction of Muʿāmalāt to a compliance exercise. Discussions that once revolved around markets, institutions, and economic organization are increasingly narrowed to questions of permissibility. *Is cryptocurrency halal? Is blockchain permissible? Can artificial intelligence be used?* These questions matter, but they do not exhaust the purpose of Muʿāmalāt.

Historically, Muʿāmalāt was never merely concerned with validating transactions. It was concerned with organizing economic life itself. The classical jurists were not simply legal technicians issuing rulings from a distance. They were builders of institutions who understood that principles achieve little unless embodied in durable social structures. Their concern extended beyond legality to the circulation of wealth, the prevention of exploitation, the preservation of trust, and the cultivation of economic systems capable of sustaining social harmony. We have inherited their rulings. What we have often failed to inherit is their ambition.

Buried within a single Qur'anic verse is a principle that may explain much of our contemporary economic disorder:

 "...so that wealth does not merely circulate among the rich among you."

— Qur'an 59:7

Notice what the verse does not say. It does not condemn wealth. It does not demand equal outcomes. What it insists upon is movement. Wealth must circulate.

Modern economies have become extraordinarily efficient at generating wealth. They are far less efficient at ensuring that prosperity reaches broad segments of society. The consequences are visible everywhere: widening inequality, concentrated ownership, declining social mobility, and a growing feeling that prosperity has become something that happens to other people.

Islamic economic thought recognized centuries ago that the health of an economy is measured not only by what it produces, but also by where that production goes. A market that accumulates wealth at its centre while leaving the periphery stagnant is not prosperous — it is a fragile one. The maqāṣid of Muʿāmalāt were therefore never limited to facilitating exchange. They were concerned with cultivating an economic order in which opportunity could be broadly accessed and prosperity genuinely shared. That insight did not become obsolete. We simply stopped teaching it.

When the Prophet ﷺ arrived in Madinah, he established a mosque. Yet he also established something that receives far less attention in contemporary discussions of Islamic economics: a market.

The Madinan market was not an incidental feature of the new community. It was a deliberate institution designed to lower barriers to entry, encourage participation, resist monopolistic control, and draw as many people as possible into productive economic life. It was more than a place of trade. It was an architecture of participation. This matters because contemporary conversations about Islamic economics often orbit around finance — contracts, instruments, and banking structures. Yet the Prophet ﷺ did not begin with a bank. He began with a market.

The lesson is profound. Economic justice begins not with financial products but with the design of systems that allow people to participate meaningfully in economic life. The market of Madinah represented a vision of prosperity rooted in circulation rather than concentration, participation rather than exclusion, and opportunity rather than dependency.

Few episodes in Islamic history illustrate this institutional mindset more clearly than the Kharāj policy of Umar ibn al-Khaṭṭāb (RA).

Following the conquest of Iraq, many expected that the newly acquired agricultural lands would be distributed among the soldiers who had fought for them. Umar refused. His concern extended beyond immediate reward. He was thinking about future generations, productive capacity, social stability, and the long-term consequences of concentrating vast productive assets in the hands of a small elite. The Kharāj system that emerged was not merely a fiscal policy. It was an institutional solution to a structural problem.

This was not Islamic law reacting to a crisis. It was Islamic law anticipating one. It is often said that good governance solves problems. Great governance prevents them. That capacity for institutional foresight — the ability to think beyond immediate interests and design systems that preserve justice across generations — is precisely what our age demands.

This is why much of the contemporary debate about technology misses the point.

Artificial intelligence, blockchain, digital identity systems, and algorithmic governance are not, in themselves, the central issue. Technology is neither moral nor immoral — it is an amplifier. It magnifies the values already embedded within the systems that deploy it. A technology can expand opportunity or deepen exclusion, strengthen transparency or entrench opacity, distribute power or consolidate it. What determines the outcome is not the technology itself, but the institutional environment within which it operates.

History offers a useful reminder. Islamic civilization did not flourish by resisting innovation. It flourished by governing it. New tools were assessed according to whether they advanced justice, protected rights, promoted welfare, and strengthened society. That remains the question today.

The public conversation about artificial intelligence often gravitates toward dramatic scenarios — can machines replace scholars, can algorithms issue fatwas? These are interesting questions, but they are not the most important ones. The more urgent question is whether AI can help address the economic challenges that Islamic thought has long been concerned with. Can it reduce information asymmetry between institutions and ordinary people? Can it help small producers access markets? Can it improve transparency, reduce fraud, strengthen waqf administration, simplify inheritance planning, and lower barriers to participation in economic life?

If the answer is yes, then artificial intelligence becomes more than a technological phenomenon. It becomes a potential instrument for advancing the objectives of Muʿāmalāt. The question is not whether AI is Islamic. The question is what kind of economic order it helps create.

Technology continues to advance. The principles of Islam remain intact. The gap lies elsewhere.

Muslim societies do not suffer from a shortage of values. They suffer from a shortage of institutions capable of translating those values into reality. The Qur'an remains. The Sunnah remains. Fourteen centuries of juristic thought remain. The maqāṣid remain. What is often missing are the structures capable of giving these principles operational form — within markets, governance systems, economic models, and digital infrastructures. This is the crisis that is rarely named. Not a crisis of guidance. A crisis of institutional will.

The market of Madinah was not inevitable. Someone had to establish it. The Kharāj system was not waiting in a textbook. Someone had to design it. The waqf did not emerge automatically from abstract principles. Someone had to transform moral vision into lasting social infrastructure.

What made Islamic civilization extraordinary was not simply that it possessed noble values — many civilizations have possessed noble values. What made it extraordinary was its institutional creativity: the ability to transform principles into structures, values into systems, and moral commitments into realities that shaped society for generations. That capacity has not disappeared. But it has become dormant.

The future of Islamic renewal will not be determined by whether Muslims can keep pace with technology. It will be determined by whether they can once again become builders of markets, institutions, governance systems, and economic arrangements that embody the values they profess.

A civilization is not renewed by remembering what it once was. It is renewed by rediscovering the courage to build again.

We live in an age fascinated by technological breakthroughs. Yet the future will not be shaped by the societies that build the smartest machines alone. It will be shaped by those who remember why machines exist in the first place. The challenge before Muslims is not to make peace with the future. It is to help shape it.

Asmau Ahmed Afolabi Esq. is a legal practitioner and institutional development strategist. Her work sits at the intersection of law, governance, Muʿāmalāt, and economic development, with a particular interest in markets, prosperity, and the institutions that shape flourishing.