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There are the interesting words of Myrdal in respect of the universality and commonness of what a scientific problem means:From then on more definitely I came to see that in reality there are no economic, sociological, psychological problems, but just problems and they are all mixed and composite. In research the only permissible demarcation is between relevant and irrelevant conditions. The problems are regularly also political and have moreover to be seen in historical perspective. (Myrdal, 1979, p. 106)

This chapter investigates the “pulsations” of regional interaction networks (world-systems) in Afroeurasia over the past 3,000 years. The purpose is to determine the causes of a fascinating synchrony that emerged between East Asia and the distant West Asian/Mediterranean region, but did not involve the intermediate South Asian region. The hypothesized causes of this synchrony are climate change, epidemics, trade cycles, and the incursions of Central Asian steppe nomads. This chapter formulates a strategy of data gathering, system modeling, and hypothesis testing that can allow us to discover which of these causes were the most important in producing synchrony as the Afroeurasian world-system came into being.

Oneness is the prime attribute of God. Divine oneness is the singular moral foundation of “everything” invoking socio-scientific intellection in the Islamic worldview. In this ontological sense, this concept of conscious oneness means that the ultimate and indivisible absoluteness and completeness of creatorship, knowledge, will and power over all things, rest with God alone.¹ Because God's oneness belongs to the domain of purity (Ikhlas), removed from the material and cognized worlds, it marks the topological domain of the fullness and purity of the knowledge stock. It exogenously by itself creates, governs, and acts upon the created universes of all kinds, abstract, and evident. By itself, the precept of oneness of God is not causally affected by anything. It creates all but is never created of itself, or by any other.²

The economic, financial, social, and scientific reasoning in Occidentalism is a profound example of the reasoning dichotomy caused by the problem of heteronomy. The duality consequences of economic rationality and rationalism between the spiritual and material domains remain entrenched in all the sciences (Dampier, 1961).

The generality of the universe is “everything.” In this regard, the Qur'an declares abundantly on the ultimate and perfect domain of the divine law in creation. This also means the profundity of the divine law in explaining and applying to all things in the knowledge–time–space dimensions of the conscious universe. Such observations or insights that span the complete universe comprise the Signs of Allah (ayath Allah).¹

This article argues that social scientists should reconsider the analytic value of the term “capitalism.” The paper argues that the two most coherent definitions of capitalism are those derived from classical Marxism and from the World System theory of Immanuel Wallerstein. Marx and Engels’ formulation was basically a genetic theory in which the structure of a mode of production is determined by the mode of surplus extraction. During the course of the 20th century, however, Marxist theorists had to modify this framework and the result has been an uncomfortable hybrid. Wallerstein resolved these tensions by redefining capitalism in terms of the logic of a world system. However, his argument has difficulty in explaining the consequential variations over time in the specific rules and institutional structures that operate at the global level. The article goes on to argue in favor of Karl Polanyi's concept of market society because it focuses attention on the political governance of market societies at both the national and the global levels.

To establish these definitions we revisit expression (5.3) of Chapter 5. Since this expression describes a phenomenological model of knowledge transmission from its epistemic origin to the world-system by learning processes, therefore, we first summarize the arguments on what can be the nature of (Ω,S) in this expression. Our arguments were centered on the contrasting nature of moral absolutism and the ethical meaning so derived. This axiomatic core of the arguments stood up against moral relativism of both the rationalist and religious types on which is premised a different meaning of ethics.

Setting the field of economics as the study of value in exchange, Blaug (1968a, 1968b, p. 6) wrote:The problem that gave rise to economics in the first place, the “mystery” that fascinated Adam Smith as much as it does a modern economist, is that of market exchange: there is a sense of order in the economic universe, and this order is not imposed from above but is somehow the outcome of the exchange transactions between individuals, each seeking to maximize his own gain. The history of economic thought, therefore, is nothing but the history of our efforts to understand the workings of an economy based on market exchange.

The paper examines recent debates on “Empire” and offers a feminist perspective. It asks: what are the gender dynamics of the new imperialism and its rival, Islamism? Drawing on world-system theory and feminist studies of international relations, this paper examines hegemonic masculinities in empire, war, and resistance; the cooptation of women's rights for neoliberal and expansionist purposes; the world-system's transition from U.S. hegemonic power to an alternative yet to be determined; and the role of global feminism in challenging Empire and shaping an alternative world.

We commence answering the above questions first with an extension of the definition of Economy given by Gerard Debreu (1959). Choudhury (1999a) has extended Debreu's formulation by introducing the learning parameter of unity of knowledge. The ethically induced economy in the light of conscious oneness is a complex relational universe of its micro-parts. These comprise prices, quantities, incomes, resources, preferences and production menus, and technological choices. These are studied in relation to multimarkets and their agents represented by vector-variables of each of the above-mentioned categories. All of these categories of the representing variables are mutually interactive according to the interactive, integrative, and evolutionary (IIE)-learning processes (explained earlier) by the medium of knowledge-flows that emanate from the episteme of conscious oneness.¹