The theory of consumer in mainstream economics is based on the optimization of consumer utility function and on which in turn is premised the construction of consumer demand function. The lateral aggregation of consumer demand functions at given prices generates the market demand function. The goods/services in the utility function are treated essentially as substitutes of each other. Evenwhen limited complements are assumed to exist, methodologically there can never be universal complementarity among all goods/services. This precisely because of the built-in assumption of opportunity cost in the production and consumption of goods. Resources are essentially constrained in the long run in all allocative problems of neoclassical economics. Upon this assumption, economic theory is made to revolve.

The assumptions of marginalist substitution, opportunity cost and optimization-equilibrium in the maximization of the utility functions are both coexisting and essential in pricing theory of the consumer and of the firm. The latter is shown by the fact that in general equilibrium, the optimum production point on the production possibility surface and the optimum consumption point on the consumer indifference curves are simultaneous and unique. Price ratios and marginal rates of substitution as well marginal utilities are all simultaneously determined.

Even when public goods are treated, the notions of marginal costs and benefits are not replaced by something other that can treat universal complememtarity. Rather only a disequilibrium case with inequality is assumed to exist between marginal costs and benefits. Yet when governments expand social services to the public, prices of such delivery increases and increases marginal social costs, bringing them to equality with marginal social benefits once again, even though marginal private costs and marginal social benefits may remain unequal. Thus, the same assumptions of pricing based on marginalism and substitution are found in the case of social (public) goods as in the case of private goods.

Now to allocate resources in both private and public goods and respond to consumer preference changes in the midst a continuous sequence of interactive-integrative-evolutionary methodology, the Shuratic Process is invoked. One will recall here from a reading of the earlier articles on Islamic political economy given in this series of lectures, that the Shuratic Process was the process based world view of polity-market (broadly ecological of which is the subset of market) interactions (Ijtehad). Such interactions over varied issues from the most mundane type to the most elaborate type were carried out by decision-makers (Sharees) on the basis of rule formation based on derivations from and extensions of Islamic Law (Shari'ah) to all matters of details. The objective in such interactions through the process of rule formation (Ahkam formation) was to arrive at social consensus (Ijma or Qiyas=analogy). The result of choices and consensus in this framework being in strict accordance with Shari'ah, the goods promoted are socially recommended goods. On the other hand, goods/services that go against the tenets of Shari'ah are not recommended or totally banned from the market place. We give the name to such a socially recommended bundle of goods as Social Goods/Services.

Yet when social consensus through Ahkam formation is thus arrived at, such a consensus itself is dynamic in essence. That is, one level of decision-making respecting choices is refined, developed and evolved to higher levels of similar decision-making. This is at once the inevitable result of the intrinsic knowledge forming process underlying interactions and integration (=social consensus). The implications are clear. With such dynamic change in the interactions-integration mode must come about also changes in the nature of the social goods and the nature of demand, production, technology, delivery and the underlying distribution connected with these. All these do not mean that a good/service that is not Shari'ah recommended, becomes acceptable at a later point in time. For such an evolution is not the norm of Shari'ah, Ijtehad, hence Ahkam formation and Ijma. Consequently, the knowledge formation underlying the Shuratic Process does not align with the conversion of Shari'ah recommended goods into unwanted goods or to move individuals and society towards the consumption of sociall unwanted goods and services, whether these be privately or publicly produced. The only other way is for the knowledge-forming Shuratic Process to evolve into higher vintages of social goods and to enable the Process including its institutions, organizations, choices, instruments and policies to evolve into higher categories of such knowledge-induced goods and services by paying continuous recourse and extensions of Shari'ah to emergent issues and problems of life. Consequently, we note that Shari'ah is in no way a static thing. Its details are moment to moment evolutionary in nature both by virtue of the new things that are presented to discursions among Sharees and the market order, as well as by virtue of the creative order of newness that the Shuratic Process itself generates through its knowledge-centered inquiry. The only fundamental that remains in all of the details are the principles provided by the epistemological premise of Qur'an and Sunnah taken together. Earlier Ijtehad as those done by previous persons, groups and societies remain comparative dictums of knowledge but by no means binding on the generations and subsequent new orders to imitate. The interactive-inregrative essence of the Shuratic Process has thus combined in it the creative process as well. The total methodology of the Shuratic Process is this interactive- integrative-evolutionary in essence.

When this methodology is applied to consumer theory in Islamic politico-economic perspectives, we must translate the same embryonic process to all agents in the political economy and thus render them all to interactive-integrative-evolutionary decision- making. Consumer preferences for goods and services cannot be static or datum in such a framework, as is otherwise the case in neoclassical economic theory. The exogenously prescribed forms of consumer preferences assumed to exist in the `market period' of neoclassical markets are found to be unrealistic and untenable in the viscuous domain of perpetual knowledge flux. Since knowledge is the only originary element of existence, therefore, it is also the most elemental in any conceivable `market period'. Knowledge then perturbs the market period and with this, it also perturbs to action and creative evolution, the consumer preferences. Furthermore, because such knowledge proceed towards enhancing the Shari'ah augmentations in the human and ecological order, therefore, the consumer preference transformations are also in the direction of enhancing and creatively evolving the social goods. 

Knowledge formation in the interactive-integrative- evolutionary methodology of the Shuratic Process also means that consumer preferences are not dissociated from the preferences of polity and other agents. In other words, systemic independence and methodological individualism analytically in this, cease to be the view of analytical nicety found to pervade neoclassical economic theory. The organizational implications of such interactive- integrative-evolutionary preferences of all agents with respect to every details of society and human ecology at large, means that participation in decision-making is pervasive in such a system. Such decision-making are still organized hierarchically. Families channel their preferences to community, mosques and guilds influence the preferences of families and individuals through the learning process; but between these is the important organization of educational medium to systematize the exchange that takes place. The individual himself/herself presents preferences through the family. It is therefore not distant to find in Islam the profound centricity of the family as an institution in nation building. In this way, at the other end of the spectrum, the national development plans channels the preferences of the grassroots. Such agents comprise individuals, families, poor guilds, educational system, but also all at every echelons of varied hierarchies who share in the world view of the grassroots. This is the view that expressed in so many Ahadith (sayings of the Prophet Muhammad): "O Lord! Keep me alive a poor man, and let me die poor; and raise me amongs the poor". Yet in another Ahadith we find, "Poverty may well become a cause of infidelity". The Qur'an says that mankind has been in different grades and ranks so that it may establish well- being and support within it.

The two Ahadith confirm each other; they do not contradict each other. To live, die and be raised in poverty while abhorring poverty means that incessant consciousness for the social well- being of the poor and raising that well-being in all fronts. Now if the element of Shari'ah, the spirit of individuals, the transformations of institutions and societies, the conduct of policies and instruments and the enactment of development plans as well as global communities, are swarmed by this singular precept of well-being, carrying with it the attributes of Justice, Purpose, Certainty, Felicity and Growth, then this is the world view of the grassroots. The Grassroots then assumes the realm of an IDEA.

Consumer preferences under the umbrella of the societal interactions, wherein the individual realizes his/her self-interest as an enlightenment derived from a bestowing social collectivity, now become endogenous in nature. They are endogenous because of the continuously changing nature of knowledge augmenting change preferences and this in turn governing transformations on the consumption, production, technology and distributional aspects of economic and social events. Nothing -- the human ecology, the methods of scientific discourse, the institutions of change and the expanding regions of human collectivities (e.g. economic integration and world development institutions) -- now remain insulated from the generic methodology and dynamics of the Shuratic Process.

Consumer preferences so formed also change the nature of the goods, the underlying technology, delivery and distributions in factors markets. In the still again concept of general equilibrium of the type of creative evolution under the methodology (world view) of the Shuratic Process (participatory, grassroots, Shari'ah oriented), the nature of markets for goods/services and factors become ethicized markets. The magic of such ethical transformation is knowledge. Hence just as knowledge endogenizes preferences, it also endogenizes market transformation. One could now understand, how is it that some of the heavy GDP creating and hedonic consumer passions, the consumer sovereignty and the ecologically dehumanizing effects of markets in the West, reflected in pornography, child corruption, alcohol, bestial passions, gambling and all that rut, cannot be part of the market order, of the human ecological total system in Islam. The perspective here is that it is not that human beings are coerced to accept the Shari'ah rules. Rather on the contrary, the Shari'ah rules emerge from discursions taken up extensively among agents. The validity of the process is based on its effectiveness and legitimacy gained from the participatory process of the grassroots -- the interactive- integrative pervasive whole. The moral transformation of the endogenously ethical human and scientific order, is the result of humankind's conscious acceptance of the ensuing moral-material worth. Moral rationality and the axiom of its victory over truth remains as the fundamental basis of the knowledge-evolving essence of the Shuratic Process. The Quran says in this regard, that Truth hurls against Falsehood and knocks its brains out.

Price formation in ethicized markets for goods/services responding to the interactive-integrative-evolutionary preferences formation of consumers in this social collective can now be briefly explained. To start with we ask the reader to thin and formalize (details given elsewhere) that the concept of utility in bundles of substitutes, the concequential indifference curves giving consumer choices and prices, the production possibility curve of the firms and of the aggregate production function of the economy, the supply pricing of goods and factors by means of the marginalist substitution rates along the production possibility concept and the production isoquants, the notion of optimality-equilibrium and exogeneity of technology, anf other related properties of the mainstream neoclassical economic world, are totally rejected in the Interactive-Integrative-Evolutionary Knowledge-Induced General Equilibrium Framework of the Shuratic Process. The singular concept of Universal Complementarity replaces the idea of substitution. Goods do not substitute goods; they enhance each other. Bads and goods cannot be treated in marginalist tradeoff in an ethicized market order. Bads and bads cannot be tradables as none of these can be entertained in the ethicized market order. Even when such events can exist during an incomplete process (Mubah), this is over the short run alone. Whereas in neoclassical resource allocations, they are abiding attributes of optimal resource allocation in the long run. Only interactive decision-making contributes to the nature of complementarity among goods and processes of the systems. Knowledge thus increases and replaces Mubah and well-determines the nature of the good (Truth and Falsehood, Good and Bad). Consequently, goods and services are exchanged under knowledge formation in a market venue that generates no simple equilibrium as are conceived in classical and neoclassical markets. Indeed, such equilibria are simple niceties rather than realities. In Walrasian general equilibrium, the numeraire is money, which is assumed to exogenously introduced. Yet money remains to be the most elusive economic entity. How then can the emergent system attain an equilibrium under such an elusive basis? Equilirbium and optimality, long-run stability and uniqueness of equilibria, exogeneity of consumer preference maps, etc. are all analytical types to serve the scientific axioms of neoclassical economics. They do not provide rich realities and the methodologies that must be so configured.

In a system based on universal complementarity, goods/services, decisions, technological choices, production and factor pricing are all complementarity to each other. The extent of the complementarity depends simply on the nature of the decision pervasively channelled through the total system. Such processes become visible institutions of change and not of the nature of invisible hands or analytic niceties of classical and neoclassical economics. Finally, prices in such markets are notional prices of exchange of knowledge alone. Materiality appears in such a system as an ontic category of the knowledge-induced forms. You may conceptualize the price formation now along the evolutionary trajectories of interactive-integrative-evolutionary processes instrumentalized visibly by the Shuratic Process in the human ecological order at large including institutions and markets. The evolutionary trajectory being the locus of knowledge-induced decision points, each point on it is a perturbed point. Hence the otherwise, stable, convex (or concave) to the origin production possibility curve (indifference curves) must be rejected. Contrarily, each such point of the locus corresponds to sequences of cobweb equilibrating (disequilibrating) points. An expectational equilibrium is generated but permanently and pervasively blown out to new and moving equilibria due to the impact of knowledge induction. Hence the markets formed and regenerated by the Shuratic Process give expectationally equilibrating prices. Consumers form preferences out of such expectational prices that are presented through the media to them. The actual prices are tha transacted prices of exchange. They will vary from person to person in accordance with the level of impact of the flows of knowledge variedly impacting and evolving from the interrelationships between the human ecology and the market order.

Note that the methodology of imperfect competition does not help out here. This has been found to be not different from the optimal resource allocation problem of classical and neoclassical perfect competition, and both in the case of private and public goods. The marginalist conditions of resource allocation and the axioms of stability and uniqueness abide. Reaction curves and collusive methods when used, are made predictive on the basis of momentary full information to the gamers. Consequently, the analytical results and the direction of inferences remain epistemologically unchanged in this perspective of imperfect competition. Contrarily, the reaction and collusive methods of the Shuratic Process governing markets always assume imperfect information (i.e. flows of knowledge) and develop complementarity models to continuosuly sift the Truth from the False, the Good from the Bad. Knowledge remains the single most embryonic essence of all emergent materialist. The reader will conceptualize this happening by viewing two interlinked two-dimensional goods/bads diagram. As the Shuratic Process advances, the topology of the Goods generates allocation and prices out of complementarity. But at the same moment, the linked diagram will show that a similar topology causes the Bads to price itself in neoclassical order. But with this parting of the Goods and Bads comes about disjointness of the two topologically spaces (Goods and Bads). The Bads trajectory must move and eventually collapse into a space of relative measure zero in comparison to the measure of the Goods space. That is Measure(Knowledge)/Measure(De-Knowledge) tends to infinity as knowledge advances. That is as the Shuratic Process advances, its dynamics being simply knowledge-based.

What does the consumer attain from consumption of goods? The consumer attains knowledge as the primal factor of social well- being. In this social well-being (or felicity, to avoid the corrupt idea of utility and social welfare), material things of economic value and worth coexist with social goals. Besides, abandonement of old bads via the process of moral market transformation means development of such grassroots oriented needs, technology, production and preferences that cause cost-effective transformations to occur. In the midst of all these the Hobbesian choice by means of opportunity cost in alternatives is totally rejected and adjustment costs become investments rather than costs. The consumer chooses among varieties that reflect dynamic baskets of basic needs and marginalize wants by the very force of market demand when moral preferences, incomes and resources become demand- driven in ethicized markets as it emerges through discursive nature of the Shuratic Process. Indeed the best diversities can emerge from complementarities; complementarities are possible when abundance exists; and abundance is a creative output of basic needs. The evolution of basic needs along dynamic trajectories fuelled and confirmed by needs, complementarities and diversities yield dynamic basic needs.

The study of Islamic economics, which is now about fifty- five years old has continued to treat the economics of consumer behaviour by unquestionably accepting the axioms, methods, analytical approach, behavioural perceptions and scientific nicety of received neoclassical economic theory. Indeed, mainstream economic theory was accepted lock stock and barrel by Islamic economists to propound something of economics with Islamic values. But in so treating the body of knowledge under Islamic economics, no new epistemological demands were made. Consequently, no breakthrough has taken place to give rise to anything that can be epistemologically challenging, paradigmatically revolutionary and a truly scientific breakthrough in analytical thought under the caption of Islamic economics. Ethics and morals when taken from Islam and put into the borrowed methodologies, models and perceptual order of mainstream economics, left these values to be unrelentingly exogenous elements of Islamic economics. This has proved to be a great debility for Islamic economists as it has proved to be the end of the line for mainstream economics.

Contributions to the theory of consumer behaviour (Hicks), equilibrium and multimarkets (Walras, Debreu), social choice and welfare economics (Arrow), institutionalism (North), social contractarianism (Buchanan, Rawls) and market consequentialism (Sen and Nozick) have proved that these are the areas where great strides have been and can be made if economic theory is to be renewed. The point of this author is that ethico-economics which treats ethics as endogenous essence of behaviour, markets and human ecology can be realized only in the system of non-humanly injected norms of unity of systems. In Islam this epistemological premise has been shown in the earlier lectures in this series to be Divine Unity (Tawhid). Kant and all philosophers in the West limited this premise to rationalism. Thus ethics and morals fell from their sublime alter to be subsumed by the individualistic passions of hedonic, rationalist consumers. Albeit in a slightly different sense, but economic rationality reflected all the scientific limitations and social unrealism of individuals choosing under conditions of full information and self-seeking behaviour. Sen's market consequentialism marking the transmission of ethics and morals in individuals and institutions to social preference formation and resulting market exchange, got subsumed when individuals were left to invoke pure rationalistic behaviour to order their preferences and control proved to be market distortionary. This is yet another perpetuation of the pervasive marginalist principle of neoclassical economics that brings out the tradeoff between economic efficiency and distributive equity. Nothing therefore remains untouched by the morally ruinous presence of neoclassicism in mainstream economics, science, methodology and behaviour. Here then is the impossibility of transforming out of mainstream economics toward defining the premises of Islamic economics. Such an approach to Islamic economics is both defeative and a fiasco. Its age and non-performance in the world of academic, institutions and social change in the Muslim world or otherwise, has proven this.

Since consumer behaviour theory is part of a much wider theory of behaviour, because behaviouristic theory as Boulding pointed out comprises the fundamentals of morals and ethics, therefore it should also be this very area that should draw the attention of Islamic political economic theory in an altogether new fold. I have introduced the Shuratic Process as the `globally' interactive-integrative-evolutionary methodology to describe this process. I argue and hope that here lie the roots of the new world view of behavioural sciences and society in a comprehensive human ecological mould.

We conclude now by stating that the Principle of Universal Complementarity forms a central analytical instrument of the Shuratic Process. This principle is the cause and effect of a system that is governed by the methodology of interactions- integration-evolution. Consumer preferences now become interactively determined by a vast range of interactive preferences. Such interactive preferences visibly transform consumption, production and distributional menus. In the midst of such transformations, consumers respond under a pervasive system of knowledge induction. Knowledge is of the essence of interactions leading to dynamic forms of integration and creative evolution. Goods, services, technology and preferences are generated in this kind of ethicizing milieu. Prices are now formed as value assigned to the visible nature of market clearance under a pervasive extant of complementarities.

The theory of consumer behaviour in Islamic political economy governed by the embryonic Shuratic Process and its analytical methodology is polar to the scientific niceties of neoclassicism and its emergent methods and concepts, theories and institutions in the West today. Thus, an altogether different world view is generated by the Shuratic methodology for Islamic political economy, applied in this lecture to the theory of the Islamic consumer.