PasarMalam and PasarPaghi: Grassroots Application of Islamic Ontological Methodology

Abstract

Pasar Malam (Night bazar) and Pasar Paghi (Morning bazar) are grassroots microenterprises in Malaysia and Indonesia. They combine traditional approach with the scope of modernizing to develop beyond restrained bounds. This chapter recognizes the potential for further organized ways of developing the grassroots enterprises through participatory development of enabling social choices. These opportunities are explained to expand from grassroots to institutional levels, technological appropriateness, and cooperative financing. All are taken up within the sustainability of life-fulfillment regimes of wellbeing and dynamic basic-needs regime of development. In Islamic nomenclature the wellbeing criterion is referred to as maslaha. It denotes the conceptual and quantitative measure of degrees of complementarities between the variables representing choices in the formal evaluative function. This study generalizes the resulting empirical model of wellbeing to strategy and policy implications of a generalized example of the grassroots.