Introduction
The late Hojjat al-Islam Seyed Moniruddin Hosseini, the founder of the movement known as the “Academy of Sciences” in Iran, was a pioneer in envisioning a new methodology and content for both human and non-human sciences. One of the key areas of his engagement with modern sciences was economics. Hojjat al-Islam Hossein Mehdizadeh, a writer and researcher at the Academy of Islamic Sciences, provides a concise report in this exclusive note on the late Hosseini’s efforts in the field of Islamic economics.
Contributions of Seyed Moniruddin Hosseini
During his scholarly and cultural struggles against the pre-revolutionary regime, the late Hosseini became aware of modern social sciences, particularly the issue of economics. As is well-known, at the outset of the Islamic Revolution, as a member of the Society of Seminary Teachers with expertise in economics, he played a significant role in bodies such as the Supreme Economic Council and the Planning Organization.
During those early years, with the support of the Society of Seminary Teachers and Qom’s scholars, he organized approximately twenty weeks of economic discussions from 1980 to 1984, attended by most of the young and revolutionary economic thinkers of the time. Nearly all prominent figures recognized in Iranian economics today were present at those sessions.
In those years, Hosseini advocated for a theory he called “Equilibrium Determinism” in Islamic economics, which he taught and presented on multiple occasions. Audio recordings of these lectures are preserved in his scientific legacy archive.
Believing that Islam offers a comprehensive framework for life, Hosseini maintained that social systems exist across various dimensions of human life wherever it is social in nature. He viewed Islam’s presence in these systems as maximal, not minimal or merely endorsing customary or rational practices.
Specifically, he advocated for an economy that neither prioritizes capital, as in capitalism, nor labor, as in Marxism. Throughout his scholarly life, he believed that Islamic economics is a system capable of transforming the moral motivation found in relationships of guardianship (wilaya) and religious brotherhood (ukhuwwa) into the driving force of a comprehensive livelihood and economic system. Until the end of his life, he worked tirelessly to complete the components of these social systems, striving to produce or reproduce their foundations and infrastructures within the limits of a single researcher’s capacity.
The Mission of Social Sciences
The most significant idea of the late Seyed Moniruddin Hosseini for engaging with social sciences was that religious social sciences—including economics, one of its most critical branches—are not meant for living in the old hierarchical societies or the modern antagonistic and market-driven ones. Instead, Islamic social sciences are disciplines through which the ethics of guardianship and social brotherhood are transformed into structured systems.
It is well-known that ancient practical wisdom was shaped by the ethics of nobility in dealing with subordinates. While this wisdom had an ethical and advisory aspect and was not a precise science, it was not without foundation. It clearly distinguished between noble humans, peasants, or slaves, defining classes of people and prescribing their economics, cities, homes, work, health, and rights.
In the modern world, the profiteering human, characterized by the persona of Venetian merchants, Anglo-Saxon pirates, and others, was central to the emergence of ethics, politics, political economy, and ultimately social sciences. Enlightenment thinkers explicitly acknowledged this. Kant, in the fourth of his nine principles in Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose, explicitly states that antagonistic and competitive ethics represent superior human morality. Less than two decades earlier, Adam Smith, in The Wealth of Nations, emphasized that we do not rely on the benevolence of others to meet our needs but on their self-interest. This idea echoes Mandeville’s The Fable of the Bees, where individual moral vices are portrayed as social virtues.
The late Hosseini did not see the starting point of transformation in legislation, the inclusion of a cooperative sector in the constitution, prioritizing labor or distributive and political justice, eliminating banking usury, nationalizing or privatizing the economy, or transparency. Instead, he focused on how to conceptualize the social human beings described in Islamic teachings and jurisprudence as a continuum, institutionalizing them through economics, culture, and politics, and making society a platform for their growth and perfection.
In this pursuit, Hosseini took steps toward constructing the economic framework of such a society. He believed that the existing economy is clearly a precise science serving the materialistic, profiteering modern human, driven by the primacy of labor or capital, as theorized in the East and West. For such a human and their material vision of life, economics was designed. However, changing the foundational human model challenges every concept of economic science, and altering the motivational framework of individuals in society renders even the precise formulas of economics ineffective in social practice.
Hosseini believed that the Islamic Revolution provided a foundation for building a society based on devotion to God and the ethics of faithful cooperation, as articulated in Islamic theology, jurisprudence, and intellectual heritage. The human of the Islamic Revolution is most aligned with the human whose life rulings are expressed in religious culture. Accordingly, he sought to institutionalize this human in societal norms and develop precise sciences to enhance their agency in society. He envisioned an economy where primacy is given to the “level of cooperative contribution” offered by each actor in society, rather than liberal competition or socialist domination.
In the early years of the revolution and beyond, he repeatedly raised this idea in discussions with Islamic Republic officials, organizing lectures and scientific assemblies on the topic, which are preserved in his archived discussions.
These sessions include detailed expositions of his framework, which cannot be fully elaborated here due to their scope. Given his belief in holistic and systemic analysis, Hosseini typically presented his ideas by describing and thematically introducing the designed system, which can be studied in detail separately.