Baraka and Thermodynamics

Based on fieldwork with Egyptian workers in the Dubai metropolitan area, I seek to understand the tension between a search for moral and economic stability and processes of growth and mobility that destabilise the foundations and shape of a viable life. In conversation with a welder who articulated to me his idea of proper Islamic economy based on charity, divine blessing and organic growth, I argue that there is a productive tension between the idea of non-destructive thriving expressed in the Islamic concept of baraka (divine blessing) and hydrocarbon-based capitalist growth. Both require the miraculous possibility of an exception from the second law of thermodynamics. This calls for a critical rethinking of whether growth-based economies can have the sustaining and sustainable capacity that a Muslim economic cosmology associates with the baraka based on lawful income. Capitalism may not be divinely blessed, but divine blessing today materialises through capitalism.