With the limitations posed by ethically-neutral perspectives of economic theory premised on the axioms of economic rationality and philosophical rationalism and on the inherent plurality of knowledge in these, unity of knowledge across systems can neither be defined nor attained. This debility has stood in the way of treating ethics endogenously within socio-scientific comprehension. 

In Islamic socio-scientific worldview the fundamental root of knowledge is the Unity of God. This Precept of Oneness is both of the essence of the unity of Being as well as the unity of Divine Laws. The Divine Laws are seen as the spring of absolute and complete knowledge. While the ontology of Divine Oneness is not manifest, yet the epistemology of the world-system premised on Divine Oneness is manifested in terms of the unity of knowledge. Such an externalizing of the Divine Laws reveals the fundamental unity of Being, of the Divine Laws and of the world-systems constructed on these. The Qur�an is profuse with verses invoking and exhorting human beings to search out the signs of divine unity in the order of things by contemplation and observation. 

Islamic reality is thus an expression of the Signs of God in terms of His Oneness as expressed in the fundamentally unified essence of the universe and of everything in it. The structure of Islamic economics, taken to mean the epistemology of Islamic economics, is premised on the unity of knowledge in its ontological and empirical sense.

But although God is One and complete and absolute in knowledge, He has bestowed only a little of this knowledge to world-systems including individuals, societies and scientific universes embedded in world-systems. Yet within this limited scope of knowledge He has created stages of advance that are attained by a progressive and incessant comprehension of the Divine Laws and His Signs. These are comprehended through God-conscious search. Consequently, the dynamics of knowledge production in understanding the unified nature of the universe, its systems and sub-systems are based on incrementalism, God-consciousness and the consequential development of cognitive powers (observations). Reason then becomes the result of such attributes that come to the inquirer from his conscious search for the Signs of God in world-systems.

What is Knowledge?

The concept of knowledge that we will use throughout this paper should be explained now. Knowledge that is absolute and complete with God is the Complete Stock of Reality. It neither waxes nor wanes; it is not observable entirely, but is always comprehended in increments. The Stock of Knowledge is the source of all knowing in world-systems. Entities, be they human or non-human, including systems variables and their relations, learn in an interactive mode to reach increasing consciousness by deriving flows of learning inputs from the Stock of Knowledge. Since the Stock is fundamentally unified in the sense of Divine Oneness as its cardinal attribute, therefore, derived knowledge flows are of the same essence of unity. Interactions are thus epistemologically made to converge to the comprehension of reality. Comprehension, observation and construct in Islamic world-systems are determined by the emergence of such flows of knowledge premised on fundamental unity. Such derived forms then generate the world-systems. The knowledge-induced world-systems thereafter, generate new springs of knowledge flows. 

While the Oneness of God gives the Complete Stock of Knowledge, �flows of knowledge� (or �knowledge flows�) on the other hand, constitute learning in the universe on grounds of the epistemology of fundamental unity. This learning experience is to acquire God-consciousness, to observe the Signs of God and to construct world-systems by means of that consciousness. Interactions leading to integration and further emerging to new rounds of interrelationships between fundamental epistemology of unity and the unified world-systems premised on this consciousness, determine the experience of knowledge flows.

Incrementalism in knowledge flows as so attained marks the progressive advance of individuals and societies and with these of world-systems into greater springs of knowing. It also means the reality of differentiating truth from falsehood in this same progressive mode. The creative and evolutionary powers so acquired by the agents and world-systems are explained in the various designs, methods and mechanisms of man. What emerges from such an intellectual inquiry is the search by increments of knowledge flows premised on Divine Unity (Divine Laws) for the essence of the universe that is fundamentally unified in its revealed form across diversity. 

These attributes of unification epistemology form the three core parts of the methodology of Islamic socio-scientific systemic analysis as schematized here: 

Complete Stock=Full and Absolute Knowledge (Divine Laws) 

� S Acquired Knowledge [1]

� I World-System [2]

� I Creative Evolution to more knowledge [3]

� I repetitive cyclical continuity in this order. 

Here, Complete Stock denotes Divine Knowledge as embodied in the Qur�an. 

�S� denotes Sunnah (enlightened guidance of Prophet Muhammad) and the role it plays in the order of comprehension, acquired knowledge and application of the Divine Laws in world-systems. The combination of Qur�an and Sunnah establishes the Fundamental Epistemology of Unity for human reason and cognition. From these roots arises the core of Islamic Laws (Shari�ah). 

The World-System is any selected domain with diversity in accordance with the issues and problems under study and in which unity of knowledge is reflected. Thus there exists the axiom or the �principle of universal complementarity� that unifies the diverse number of events in world-systems according to their acceptability of similars. These are the separate categories of truth and falsehood as Qur�anically understood. They are seen to be systemically unified in themselves but as being mutually exclusive to each other. Falsehood is termed here as �de-knowledge� (Choudhury 1995a). Its attribute in the unification plane is one of maintaining the essentially rationalist, random and pluralistic character of individualism that it endows. Note is to be made of the quite distinctive use of the term �world-system� in the sense of worldview developed in this paper from that for the power centric concept of capitalist world-system given by Wallerstein (1974).

�I� denotes the process of discovering rules of life and thought from the fundamental sources of Qur�an and Sunnah. While the epistemological core of Shari�ah lies in the Qur�an and Sunnah, the worldly details of Shari�ah are simulated by the discursive process of �I�. Some of these discourses belong to the area of formulation of appropriate rules, methods, instruments, policies and institutions. The process of interactions is explained in the Qur�an to exist in both the animate and inanimate realms. Hence there are interactions among agents, institutions, entities, variables, systems and their interrelations. 

Next, these interactions among diversities of world-systems lead to integration (also referred to as consensus and convergence). Thus there is convergence is a limiting process attained through interactions (discourse) among a plethora of discursive knowledge flows on the issues under investigation. 

After interactions lead to integration, a creative order of world-systems is re-generated by further emerging springs of knowledge flows from the acquired experience of previously knowledge-induced world-systems. Creative evolution is premised on the same process as explained so far. Such a complete process that takes the unity of knowledge as the epistemological premise for understanding world-systems through interactions leading to integration and followed by creative evolution in continuity, is the Qur�anic dialectical process of shura. We will call this knowledge inducing process to and from creative world-systems as the shuratic process. It is to be noted here that the shuratic process is taken in the vastly universal meaning of interactions as presented by the Qur�an and not simply that which is restricted to the political domain.

Endogeneity of Ethics in Islamic Socio-Scientific Order

Endogeneity of ethics in Islamic socio-scientific world-systems means the realization of the shuratic process in determining possibilities of life and thought according to Shari�ah. These possibilities then determine world-systems. To these world-systems belong markets and the economy. Now such human realms do not and cannot exist in isolation of the greater complex of human systems. Such a systemic interrelationship is necessary in order to maintain the strong and pervasive interactions, integration and creative evolution across extensions realized with the progress of knowledge flows rising from lower to higher levels of certainty. 

According to Ibn al-Arabi and the atomism philosophy of the Asharites (Qadri 1988) the universe was seen to be pervasively of the essence of the Oneness of God in the order of things. Ibn al-Arabi wrote on the process of knowledge formation (Chittick 1989): 

Two ways lead to the knowledge of God. There is no third way�. 

The first way is the way of unveiling. It is an incontrovertible knowledge which is actualized through unveiling and which man finds in himself. He receives no obfuscations along with it and is not able to repel it. He knows no proof for it by which it is supported except what he finds in himself�. 

The second way is the way is the way of reflection and reasoning (istidlal) through rational demonstration (burhan �aqli). This way is lower than the first way, since he who bases his consideration upon proof can be visited by obfuscations which detract from his proof, and only with difficulty can he remove them."

Ibn al-Arabi continues on to write as translated by Chittick:

Any knowledge outside of tawhid (Oneness of God) leads away from God, not toward Him. But knowledge within the context of tawhid leads its possessor to grasp the interconnectedness of all things through a vast web whose Center is the Divine. All existences come from God and go back to Him" [edited].

According to Imam Ghazzali in his Ihya Ulum Id-Din (Vol..2) (Epistemology of Divine Knowledge), Shari�ah is formulated by the reformation of the self and soul away from wants (Karim undated). In fact it is reported that Ghazzali never believed in the market function determining the law of demand relating prices and quantities as in the classical economic school. Instead, he considered all price fluctuations to be an act of God and not of any law of demand. The deep import here is that endogenous ethical elements in market exchange can alter the assumed axiomatic predictive relation between price and quantity in the demand function (Islahi 1995). 

According to Imam Fakhruddin Razi the basis of life is obedience to God which he takes as the root and essence of needs fulfillment (Noor 1995). Razi can be seen as the much earlier forerunner of the recent days social psychology theory of self-actualization given by Maslow. For a schematic design of this process see Lutz (1988). However, the structure of the needs fulfillment theory of obedience to God (Ubudiyya) given by Razi is inverse of Maslow�s and exists in continuum not in heierachies as in Malslow�s (Choudhury 1995b). 

According to Imam Shatibi in his Muwafaqat fil-Usul al-Shari�ah (Treatise on the Epistemology of Shari�ah), the rights of individuals are formed by the principle of social well-being through discourse and opinion (Choudhury 1993). These are the social interactions leading to integration in or paper. Muwafaqat gave the early version of the concept of social well-being in Shatibi�s theory of Al-Maslaha wal-Istihsan, a study of social preference making through discourse on issues of public purpose. Such ideas have come into economics only recently.

According to Ibn Taimiyyah in his Al-Hisbah Fil Islam (Social Guidance of Markets), the needs of social justice prevails over unbridled market competition. Hence a socially acceptable ethical guidance of markets was seen to be necessary (Holland 1983). This was seen to be necessary despite that Ibn Taimiyyah�s did not dispel the importance of market process that is so clearly promoted by Shari�ah.

According to Shah Waliullah in his Hujjatullah Baligah (Introduction to the Study of Social Change), historical change is a complex of interrelationships among emerging systems and stages of life starting from primitive societies to advanced ones. These ideas of Waliullah�s theory of social change are discussed by Ghazali (1990). 

In all of these classical contributions to social and economic thinking among leading Islamic scholars we note the epistemology of Oneness of God and Shari�ah as the conveyor of that Oneness into life and action has played central role in determining all kinds of rules and conduct for individual and social life. We also find in these the presence of knowledge-induced interactive and integrative approach to social meaning. Consequently, the concept and formulation of social well-being, contrary to the theoretical impasse caused by the plurality doctrine of philosophical rationalism, individual rational choices and social choice in Sen�s writing, is seen in the Islamic framework to be the result of a substantive process. This shuratic process emerges from, subsequently realizes, and then creatively evolves along the unification process of knowledge flows. In this very process individuals and society are conformably transformed across and within themselves. Systems thus unify across agents, variables and their interrelations.