Sayuti Hasibuan, Jakarta
One striking fact about the state of human development in the world today is that Muslim countries rank generally low on the human development index. No Islamic country comes anywhere near the industrialized countries in terms of human development.
Every year, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) issues its Human Development Report, which ranks countries in the world.
In 1999, out of 165 countries, the highest-placed Islamic country was Brunei Darussalam, at No. 32. The lowest was Niger, at No. 161. Islamic countries with larger populations, such as Indonesia, Egypt, Morocco, Pakistan and Bangladesh, failed to make the top 100.
The relative positions of these Islamic countries did not improve in the 2005 report. Western European countries, North America and Australia ranked among the top 25 that year, while Indonesia fell to 110th out of 177 countries.
The latest UNDP Human Development Report, in 2006, revealed that developed economies still led the pack, with Norway perching on top. There was a slight improvement made by five Islamic countries compared to their 1999 rankings, namely Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman and Tunisia. But overall the relative positions did not change significantly.
The human development index covers the degree of human achievement in the fields of education, health and the economy. So the lower ranks in human development indicate that Muslims in general have lower educational levels, lower health status and lower economic capabilities than non-Muslims.
From the income point of view, a large number of Muslims live in abject poverty. Based on the US$1/per capita income per day standard, in the period of 1990-2004, 7.5 percent of the population in Indonesia, 3.1 percent in Egypt, and 17 percent in Pakistan lived in poverty. If we use the World Bank's $2 per day per capita, the proportion of the poor population increases to 52.4 percent in Indonesia, 73.6 percent in Pakistan and 82.8 percent in Bangladesh. Such poverty situations are a far cry from the Koranic injunction that each and every Muslim (as is every other human being) is a representative of Allah on earth.
One may justifiably ask why these sad conditions prevail long after many of these countries gained their freedom at the end of World War II.
Muslim intellectuals have been acutely aware of the poverty situations in their countries and there have been brilliant analyses of these problems. More than that, there have been successful action programs to reduce poverty directly, albeit partial ones, as in the case of Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, which saw Prof. Muhammad Yunus rewarded with the Nobel Peace Prize last year.
The governments of these Islamic countries have taken on systematic development efforts in the form of a series of five-year development plans. These efforts have been going on for decades, often with strong support in the form of funds and ideas from international donors such as the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank and USAID. And yet, as we have seen, the results are far from satisfactory. Why?
The short answer is that the economic and political elites of these countries operationally idolize the materialistic and individualistic ideologies of neoclassical economics. Such idolization can hardly be conducive to the full utilization and development of human resources. Such idolization comes in many manifestations but the most well-known ones are economic growth and high per capita income.
Take Indonesia, for example. One sees in Indonesia economic growth during the period of 1969 to 1993/1994 increased on average 6.8 percent per year. Per capita income increased from $70 in 1968 to $700 at the end of 1993.
But at the same time open unemployment increased from 1.7 percent of the labor force in 1980 or 891,000 people to 3.2 percent of the labor force in 1995 or 6.3 million people. During 1997 to 2006 period, income increased from Rp 413.8 trillion to Rp 3,338 trillion but open unemployment also increased to 11.1 million people or nearly 11 percent of the labor force in 2006.
That material achievement is not wanted for its own sake but as a means to something else has been known since Aristotelian times and the Muslim holy book is full of injunctions against such idolization. So why do Muslim leaders and elites idolize material achievement? This is because they follow the precepts of neoclassical economics literally.
Not that all the precepts of such economics are wrong. As part of the human legacy of wisdom and knowledge, such precepts cannot all be wrong. But the practical precepts of neoclassical economics need to be cast in the framework of the basic aims of the societies in these countries and the basic methodologies to be pursued.
The aim is to make Muslims an effective catalyst for the development of their multi-racial and multi-religious societies. The case of Indonesia, the country with the largest Muslim population in the world, may be instructive in this respect. It will be interesting to pursue this point further in the future.
The writer is dean of the Department of Economics at Al Azhar University Indonesia, Jakarta, and a professor in the Graduate Program of Muhammadiyah University, Surakarta. He may contacted at sajoeti@yahoo.com.
