For most of the post second world war period, the critique of capitalism was driven by thinkers on the socialist and communist left.
With the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989, that debate was effectively ended as countries as diverse as Communist China, Sweden, India, South Africa and of course Margaret Thatcher’s Britain, put private sector expansion at the centre of their public policy.
Until the recent crisis in the financial sector, a systemic criticism of free market policies was replaced by the lobbying of pressure groups which tackled trade, social, environmental and other single issues. Campaigns against Shell’s role in Nigeria, Nike’s sourcing in Cambodia and the emergence of fair trade alternatives for agriculture and other producers exemplify the single issue NGO approach to challenging the behaviour of Western business, particularly into poor and ill governed developing countries.
However there is an older approach to judging the behaviour of business which has also re-emerged with the collapse of the socialist project. It is the critique of the market and the behaviour of individual firms based on religious teaching. This approach has a long Judeo–Christian tradition; indeed many Western NGOs are deeply rooted in it, even if today only a few are now overtly using religious teaching as a basis for their pronouncements and actions. In Islam this tradition is very much alive.
Islam is very accepting of market economics and business activity, but it places strong ethical constraints on how a profit can be sought. The Holy Koran and other religious texts tell businessmen not to be greedy, not to manipulate the market or gain a monopoly; to treat customers and workers fairly and not to trade in forbidden goods and services, or engage in usury. Advice which many would say has stood Muslim banks in good stead for the recent financial crisis.
The Muslim world as a whole encompasses well over one billion people. Its centre is the Middle East, but the area stretches from Morocco in the west, to Indonesia and the Philippines in the east, Southern Russia in the north, to Nigeria in the south. So far the area has not been a major focus for Western investment and business expansion, but it is happening now and increasingly rapidly.
Oil has lead the way, by some estimates in 2020 around 90% of the world’s oil will come from Muslim countries. Other sectors, notably consumer goods, travel and tourism, banking and manufacturing, are also developing, particularly for firms based in European countries sharing borders with North Africa or the Middle East.
Countries such as Egypt, Libya and Chad, would welcome greater inward investment by western business to help develop their economies and societies through jobs and new technology, but militants may well oppose it. The Muslim Brotherhood for example, not only attacks the invasion of Muslim countries by Western armies but by Western multinationals too. To be accepted in these countries, Western firms need to think through what it is to be a good corporate citizen in a Muslim context. They can be helped in this by creative work going on in Muslim countries as diverse as Malaysia, the Emirates and Egypt, where business leaders and religious scholars are working on how religious values can be lived out in a corporate context, as well as a personal one. They are doing this work as a guide to their own private sector, and burgeoning multinationals and Western firms can learn from it.
Capitalism is not monolithic, it has many forms and is directly influenced by the culture of the country in which it has developed. A new form of capitalism, in part fuelled by oil wealth, is emerging in the Muslim world. Western businesses should be a conscious part of that process, contributing what it knows of modern corporate citizenship and learning how to live out its values in diverse societies unified by a common faith which sets clear standards for responsible business behaviour.
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