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Last week, the English version of the book: Post Economic Development Themes: Development as Freedom- Mahmoud Mohamed Taha and Amartya Kumar Sen (A Comparative Approach), written by Dr. Abdalla Elfakki Elbashir, Political Expert, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Doha, Qatar, was released and available as paperback in Amazon store. The book is a comparison between the work of the propounder of The New Understanding of Islam, the Sudanese humanist thinker Mahmoud Mohamed Taha, who was executed in the Sudanese capital Khartoum, on January 18, 1985, and the work of the Indian economist and philosopher Amartya Kumar Sen, the 1998 Nobel laureate in economics, and the professor of economics and philosophy at Harvard University in the United States. The comparison centres on their mutual visions of development. Sen presented his vision in his book: Development as Freedom (1999). For Sen, freedom is the essential means and the ultimate end of development, which he views as essentially a process of expanding true freedoms that should be enjoyed by the human being who is its center and goal. According to Sen, it is a development that can only be achieved by combining increased income and advanced capability. Advancing capabilities expand opportunities for freedom of choice and control of one’s own life, as poverty cannot be measured merely by using income as conventionally understood. Sen’s book has been widely praised as the first book in the history of human thought that combines development and freedom. This book presents the findings that Sen’s ideas are in many respects nearly identical to those proposed earlier by Taha in many of his books and lectures during the period beginning in the early 1950s and continuing into the 1970s. For Taha, the ultimate goal and purpose of any development is the free human being. He states that it is necessary to put the individuals and their freedom at the forefront, otherwise economic development will be doomed, defeated, and is certain to suffer failure, because people are the true wealth that deserves attention. He believes that “in order to ensure the success of development... it is necessary to have freedom,” and this is what Sen has expressed by saying: “Freedom is central to the process of development.” Sen’s saying “Responsibility requires freedom,” is similar to Taha’s statement “Freedom is responsibility.” Sen also argues that: “Individual freedom is quintessentially a social product,” which is exactly what Taha meant, when he said, “Society is an instrument for individual freedom.” The similarity is also evident in their vision on education and its role in increasing productivity and advancing capability. It is, according to Sen, capability enhancement, while Taha defined education as “the acquisition of capability by a living being”. In comparing the thought of these two intellectuals, this book provides numerous examples of similarities and intersections between their ideas, despite the difference between them in terms of intellectual and cultural reference, premise, and approach. While Taha starts from the Qur’an, at the level of the verses of the origins (the Meccan verses), Sen describes himself as “non-religious”. The book considers the compatibility between them as a meeting between great minds, which provides an opportunity for the acquaintance of cultures, conciliation of ideas, and building human partnerships, in addition to opening the door to the question about the science of the Qur’an, which was put forward by Mahmoud Muhammad Taha.The book consists of eight chapters, an introduction, and a conclusion, as well as a list of sources, references and media indexes.
