Asad Zaman

rdf:langString Asad Zaman

rdf:langString Asad Zaman (born 1955) is a Pakistani professor, economist, and social scientist. Previously he has served as Vice-Chancellor of the Pakistan Institute of Development Economics, Islamabad, member of the Economic Advisory Committee to the Prime Minister, and Director General of International Institute of Islamic Economics, International Islamic University, Islamabad. He earned his Ph.D. in economics from Stanford University in 1978, MS in statistics from Stanford University in 1976, and BS in mathematics from MIT in 1974. He is also the editor of International Econometric Review, and on the editorial board of many other journals. For more biographical material, see “Reflections on an MIT education”, “The Education of an Economist”, and https://asadzaman.net/about-me/. Books like “The Long Divergence: How Islamic Law Held Back the Middle East”, “Rulers, Religion, and Riches: Why the West Got Rich and the Middle East Did Not”, and many others, explore the reasons for the great divergence in growth rates of European Societies and the rest of the world. This question has been one of the central foci of Dr. Asad Zaman's research over the past few decades. He argues the global conquest and colonization by the West led to shock-and-awe, and an inferiority complex in the East. The conquest of the Mongols was easily overcome, but the loss to the West occurred on the intellectual battleground. This is the real source of the current difficulties of Islamic Civilization. The imposition of alien structures of knowledge, and foreign colonial institutions, unsuitable to Islamic societies, has prevented the development of indigenous analysis and institutional structures. He has proposed the “Ghazali Project”, described in greater detail later, as a solution to this problem.