Reflecting on Islamic Development Process and Sen’s Capabilities Approach

Abstract

This paper aims to develop a novel Islamic development framework based on a rigorous critical discourse analysis of Islamic development process and Sen’s capabilities approach. The framework explains how human wellbeing is formed by the system objectives as knowledge, work, and social welfare through enabled freedom, and functioning. Sens’s Capabilities Approach (CA) provides an important theoretical framework while reflecting upon Islamic development. Development in the context of Sen’s CA is not measured through mere rise in income per capita, or increase in consumption, health and education measurements but as an expansion of choices and capability, which focuses on value judgement made explicitly but in many cases through engagement of public debate. This approach to development refrain from providing a set of fix dimensions to measure development like approach to development in Islam; hence comparison between these two approaches to development can be easily established. A unified framework based on both Sen’s CA and Islamic development can inform a policy that is normatively desirable and positively pragmatic.