For writeup, see: http://bit.ly/AZUSD - This podcast explain the origin of dollar based trading system in Bretton Woods. The Nixon Shock of 1971 delinked dollars from gold, and led to the Petro-dollar system which continues to this day. This gives massive advantage to the USA, allowing it to spend more on military then the next ten countries combined. For various reasons, US hegemony is crumbling and the search is on for alternatives. Very likely, a multi-polar currency will emerge, where European Union, BRICS, and perhaps others will create alternatives to the Dollar

This episode is also available as a blog post: https://azprojects.wordpress.com/2022/08/08/how-power-shapes-our-thoughts/ We are used to thinking of "knowledge" as valid information about the world we live in. However, our knowledge consists of information we have received from history books and textbooks, which form part of our syllabus at schools. If the educational system, and the syllabus, is produced by those in power, to achieve specific goals, then our knowledge will reflect these biases, without our being aware of them. That is, we can be educated to believe that the social, political, and economic systems we live in are the best possible, instead of realizing their flaws, and working to fix them. This is the power/knowledge thesis of Micheal Foucault, which says that the knowlege that we have about the world is systematically shaped to reflect the interests of the powerful. The thesis is explained in this episode.

This episode is also available as a blog post: https://azprojects.wordpress.com/2022/07/07/life-journey-3-intellectual-history-of-europe/

We start from the premise that economics in particular, and the social sciences in general, are presented as "sciences", but in fact are eurocentric prejudices. Why is this case? To understand why such an obviously mistaken claim currently dominates the university curricula, we need to look at the intellectual history of Europe. Over a century of bloody religious warfare led to the necessity of rebuilding the foundations of society and state on a secular basis, safe from the controversies of religion. However, one cannot create social sciences without moral foundations. This paradox was resolved by concealing the toxic moral foundations of modern secular sciences in the code word "rationality". Modern social sciences codify lessons from European historical experience, but are not applicable to other societies. 

This episode is also available as a blog post: https://azprojects.wordpress.com/2022/07/02/my-life-journey-beginnings/ This is the first of a sequence of posts about my life journey, which eventually led me to the realization that the education given to me at the finest universities in the West, was based on fundamentally flawed foundations. Since critiques do not create change, I decided to demonstrate these errors by rebuilding current knowledge disciplines on alternative foundations, provided by Islamic epistemology. I have just launched an online course on "Real Statistics: A Radical Approach". This aims to rebuild the discipline of statistics on new foundations, after rejecting the entire century of developments of modern statistics which was built on the wrong foundations of positivist philosophy. To register for this online course, see http://bit.ly/RSRA000 - For a deeper discussion of the flaws of modern statistics, see Three Foundational Flaws in Statistics ( http://bit.ly/3FFStat ), 

{writeup; http://bit.ly/AZcrypto} There are two different questions: How to apply Islamic rules to crypto currency within the Capitalist society in which we live? This is entirely different from how to construct an Islamic society, and what would the role of crypto currency be within such a society. I am concerned in this talk with the second question. An Islamic society is based on principles of generosity, cooperation and social responsibility - these are diametrically opposed to greed, competition, and individualism which form the basis of capitalist society. Whereas money is central to a capitalist society and is able to purchase lives of human beings, money plays only a secondary role in an Islamic society. Within money categories, crypto is a privately created money which would be either illegal or useless in a Islamic society. Various kinds of community created money, backed by government guarantees, and used for enhancing lives and welfare of people, would be permissible - It may be possible to adapt crypto for this use, but this would require rethinking and re-engineering.

This episode is also available as a blog post: https://azprojects.wordpress.com/2022/06/25/introduction-to-real-statistics/  This is the introductory motivational chapter of a revolutionary new textbook "Real Statistics: A Radical Approach". It explains how the positivist philosophical foundations of statistics make it impossible to understand central concepts like probability and causality. To correct this problem, we need to rebuild the entire discipline on foundations of a realist philosophy of science, as advocated by Islamic epistemological principles

For detailed writeup, and links to relevant materials, see: http://bit.ly/AZGTET - This podcast summarizes Karl Polanyi's masterpiece: The Great Transformation: Political and Economic Origins of our Times. It explains how a traditional society based on Biblical values was transformed into a secular modern society. The key driver of this change was the industrial revolution, which created massive surplus outputs. In order to be able to produce the surplus, an agricultural revolution was required to feed the masses of laborers involved in industrial production. In addition, it was necessary to create a labor market, where human lives could be bought and sold for money. This was created by the movement for enclosures, which was a massive landgrab by the aristocracy, which prevented the masses from accessing the land to feed themselves. Land, instead being accorded respect as Mother Earth, which feeds and supports our lives, was turned into a marketable commodity. This failure to recognize the real value of our habitat is at the root of the current environmental crisis.   

How can we discover our true identities? This is the most important question we face in our lives, and it is also the most difficult. This lecture explains why. Briefly, because we are far more valuable than we realize, many powerful forces feed us false identities so that they can exploit us. For writeup and links to related materials see: https://bit.do/azwya -

{Writeup: http://bit.ly/AZrim} This lecture explains that the central problem facing the Muslim Ummah is shock-and-awe of Western knowledge. The widespread idea that we need guidance from the West is in conflict with central Islamic belief that the Quran provides us with complete and perfect guidance until the day of judgment. The lectures explains how to resolve this conflict. The solution to the problem requires massive amounts of work on the intellectual battlefield. The task facing us is to reconstruct the entire body of modern knowledge on the firm foundations of the Quran and Sunnah. For an URDU version o this podcast, see: https://anchor.fm/asad-zaman2/episodes/Atheism-2-e1gakuh  

This episode is also available as a blog post: https://azprojects.wordpress.com/2018/12/09/islamic-approaches-to-economic-problems/ This episode provides a brief description and excerpts from my paper entitled “Islam Versus Economics”, as Chapter 2 of Handbook on Islam and Economic Life, Edited by M. Kabir Hassan, Mervyn K. Lewis, Edward Elgar Press, 2014.

This episode is also available as a blog post: https://azprojects.wordpress.com/2021/02/25/the-puzzle-of-western-social-science/

INTRODUCTION: Briefly, we can state the puzzle as: “Why does Western Social Science Claim to be UNIVERSAL, when it is based on analysis of European historical experience?”. Many authors have recognized this problem, which manifests itself in many different ways. Most explicit recognition is expressed in the following quotes:

Timothy Mitchell: “The possibility of social science is based upon taking certain historical experiences of the West as the template for a universal knowledge.”

To read more ... see link to blog post above, or listen to the podcast