A Genealogy of the Islamic Development Discourse: Underlying Assumptions and Policy Implications from a Development Studies Perspective

This paper is concerned with analysing the procedures, practices, apparatuses and institutions involved in the production of the Islamic development discourse in order to identify what its main assumptions and policy implications are. The analysis will be offered in form of a Foucauldian genealogy, the main building blocks for which is an archive of the key concepts and theories that have been formulated in the fields of Islamic social theory and particularly Islamic economics, including some contemporary key institutional models and articulation of practices akin to development. Despite the considerable body of literature on Islamic social theory, there is no specific tradition or discipline that has historically dealt with what could be classified as ‘development’. A concern for development appears to have been triggered by a perceived retardation in comparison to the ‘West’ which is primarily located in the concept of Islamic revival, taking a range of social, political and economic