"If the political advantage of translation is the expansion of the discursive field,

then the greatest gains will be had where the differences seem to be the most extreme, while problems may lie where the task of translation confronts too little resistance. As an example, "Islamic economics" has integrated itself quite completely into the global, capitalist economy. The Pakistani economist Muhammad Akram Khan writes that Islamic economic thinking, constrained by lack of "intellectual freedom" and a fear of "dissenting opinion," has been focused far too narrowly: "The entire enterprise of Islamic banking has become a doubtful proposition, more devoted to literalist or legalistic solutions, satisfying theologians but not yielding any benefit to humanity"; it is too exclusively concerned with "material betterment to the neglect of the environment and distribution of income and equity among the people." [14] Oliver Roy states bluntly: "[T]he 'Islamic bank' is a marketing tool and not a scheme for a new economic order....The Islamization of the economy is thus largely rhetorical." [15] This is despite the fact that, as Rahman insists: "The basic elan of the Qur'an" is its "stress on socioeconomic justice and essential human egalitarianism." [16] A thought-experiment: What if the "Islamic economy" did not take the easy way of identity politics, defining itself as an economy belonging exclusively to Muslims, but considered its natural constituency to include the anti-globalization movement as the most authentic, contemporary political expression of Islamic principles regarding nature, labor and economic justice? If we are to speak in terms of a global Left rather than regime-change within Muslim counties, what may be needed is not less religious reasoning, but more.

-Susan Buck-Morss, Thinking Past Terror: Islamism and Critical Theory on the Left, p. 11-12