Those who have tried to respond to capitalism have discovered that its power is not simply material power, but also imaginative, helping to structure the way in which people engage with the world by shaping the way they see it. For those Muslims concerned about the identity and integrity, let alone the autonomy of their societies and their value systems, the danger of this had been only too visible in the latter part of the twentieth century. State-sponsored attempts to introduce ‘Islamic socialism’ had succumbed to the logic of a state that was secular in intent and constitution, seemingly owing little to anything distinctively Islamic. Equally, the attempt to engage with capitalism, through the projection of the Islamic economy and Islamic banks, had mainly served to reproduce forms of capitalist accumulation. Although in technical conformity with the shari‘ah, these forms had done little to promote a distinctively Islamic ethos in contradistinction to the imperatives of capitalism. On the contrary, they had become part of the institutional and imaginative structure of global capital as new commodities were devised for new markets, driven by a general and urgent desire for profit.

Consequently, parallel with the efforts by Muslims to engage with and adapt a world of capitalist enterprise to match their values, there were those Muslim intellectuals for whom such engagement seemed to be tantamount to capitulation.