ISLAMS GIFTS TO THE WORLD [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Islam and Economics (1)

Islam and Economics (2)

The Persian Reader's Digest (No. 35, Year
25) corroborated this, saying. The average number
of corpses in Tehran mortuaries on any one day of last
year was 6 - fewer of course on religious holy days and
more on some other days. Last week's anniversary (Dey
13th) of Ali's martyrdom was total peace - a proof of the
persistent strength of religious conviction, and of the
calm and sanity society attains on days when sale of
alcohol is banned and amusement houses are closed.
Such is the result of Muslims practising their religion's
laws for 24 hours. Could a single Western city report, if
not 24 hours, even 60 minutes, without an accident, a
theft or a murder? When will mankind attain the adult
maturity to learn the simple lesson from which so easily
comes the peace, the quiet, the unity that all want? It
is plain serendipity for us for, in the poet's words,

I round the globe in search of Heaven did
roam:

Returned, and found my Heaven was here at home.

Islam
and Economics (1)

Man has always had to wrestle with the task of
exploiting nature's resources to extract his livelihood
therefrom. In the primitive centuries, as Aristotle said,
life organised itself socially to make it possible
to live: and continued, to make it possible to live
well. In the last four centuries a science of
economics has been deduced from the statutes
regulating human relations and the exchange of goods
which developed through this social organisation. Faced
with the vast expansion of a technology and affluence,
this science has broken into two opposing
camps.

On the one side Capitalism or free
enterprise believes that nature should take its
course in economics, so that an enlightened self-interest
causes the genius of some finally to level out to the
benefit of all. This is the doctrine for which the
Western bloc stands.

On the other side Communism holds that the
means of production must be controlled by a proletariat
state, so that a just and equal sharing of all the
benefits of human endeavour is imposed on society.

The rivalry for absolute power between these two
ideologies hangs over the modern world with a menace like
the sword of Damocles.

We must ask Marxists whether their classless
society can be ensured by the single measure of
making the means of production joint property and
abolishing a moneyed class, when in fact a diversity of
classes exists arising from other than economic causes.
While in Soviet Socialist Republics no bourgeois
propertied class exists, other classes distinguished by
occupational and environmental differences do exist: e.g.

factory-workers, agriculturalists, civil servants,
clerks, party officials and numberless others. Do
physician and nurse receive equal pay? Or navy and
engineer?

There are yet other differences amongst people which
exist in reality- Lenin's reality in which we have
to orient ourselves. People differ in age, sex,
inclinations, tastes, physical strength, appearance,
reasoning powers, ideas and outlooks.

A Soviet economist recently wrote
(Economics Vol. 2, p.216): It is
impracticable to impose absolute equality right across
the board. If we were to pay professors, thinkers,
politicians and inventors exactly the same as manual
workers, the only end-result would be the abolition of
all incentives to brainwork of any kind.

Capitalism claims that only by private enterprise and
personal property can an economy be achieved such that
the standard of living of all classes constantly rises
and the difference between rich and poor constantly
diminishes. Against this claim must be set the report of
an enquiry arranged by Walter Reuther, President of the
U.S.A. United Auto Workers Union, in his capacity as
chairman of the American Society to Combat
Hunger. This committee affirms that ten million
Americans suffer from undernourishment; and asks the
president of the republic to declare a state of emergency
in 256 cities, situated in 20 of the states, where the
danger is most grave. As causes of this undernourishment,
the committee cited the aftermath of World War II coupled
with a number of defects in America's internal economy
The Secretary of Agriculture took extreme measures to
purchase from abroad and commandeer from within all
foodstuffs he could lay hands on to fill the gap (UP).

We are bound to ask, therefore, how far any regime,
whatever its claims, has succeeded in equalising the
classes, eliminating differences and building a sound and
just society?

Both Socialist and Capitalist regimes base their
systems on theories which are reverenced without any
regard to moral and spiritual values. The aim of each is
to increase affluence, and nothing more.

Islam's philosophy reverences the whole man in his
world setting. It orders society's material behaviour and
benefits, while at the same time legislating for moral
virtues, spiritual perfections, and a higher standard of
living. By this it means, not simply the material, but
the mental, the spiritual, the moral, the altruistic, the
philanthropic standards which enable all men to live each
for all and all for each.

Western law supports property-rights and gives
preference to those of capitalists over those of workers.
Soviet law, in their own words, exists to strip the
individual of all property rights and to extirpate
capital as a personal possession, giving preference to
the workers' group throughout. Both systems are grounded
in human reasoning and judgment.

But Islam's law is grounded in Divine Revelation. Its
legislation is not a human expedient. It does not set
class against class; but helps each group to respect the
excellence of other groups. Dictated by the Lord of all
creatures for the general good and for the good of all,
it permits no class to lord it over others nor allows
injustice to break in. A ruler is in it only an ordinary
person with a particular set of duties, himself under
law, wielding power solely to ensure that the Divine
commandments are obeyed in society. Since confidence
reigns that God's Law is sovereign, peace and quiet
obtain.

Islam on the one hand opposes Capitalism's doctrine
that the rights of property-ownership lie outside the
limits of state control, and its permitting free
enterprise to exercise aggression and tyranny of
the stronger over the weaker in an exaltation of the
rights of the individual to the detriment of the rights
of society as a whole: and, on the other hand, does
regard the sanctity of property as a fundamental.

Prosperity is the stone on which independence and
freedom are built within a social order. The common good
must be the regulating principle governing personal
ownership of property. Islam therefore equally opposes
the Communist total rejection of private enterprise and
property, which entrusts the key of bounty to the state,
reducing the individual to so subordinate a position that
he is left with no intrinsic value in himself as a
person, being regarded as a state tool - a stomach for
the state to fill and thereafter exploit, as a farmer
does his horses and cattle.

Communists hold that private property is not natural
to man. They aver, without advancing evidence to support
the thesis, that the first communities of primitive man
held all things in common in cooperation, love and
brotherhood, neither did any man say that aught that he
had was his own. The human community started
as communist with everything in common and parted to each
as his need required. The claim to personal ownership of
anything, they contend, only developed by slow degrees
until it reached the terrifying excesses it manifests in
today's world.

Their utopian Golden Age is, alas, a
pipe-dream : for the facts show that personal ownership
is not a result of the development of acquisitive
tendencies in a particular environment. Property is
coeval with the appearance of man on earth: it is as
germane to human nature as all the other innate urges,
and no more to be denied than they are. Modern economists
say that the universal sense of ownership of property,
which is found in every tribe on earth and in every
epoch, can only be explained if it is a primal instinct.
Man wants to be the sole master of the goods that
minister to his needs, in order to feel truly free and
independent. Further, a man feels that goods which owe
their existence to the hard work of his hands are in a
way an extension of himself, deserving of the same
respect as he demands for the integrity of his
personality. Finally, he feels the inner urge to build up
a store to ensure his future and that of his family,
developing thereby a thrift and economy which make him
lay up a provision against a rainy day: This store he
thereafter guards jealously as his own. The
community's wealth grows with the increase in private
property and productivity, for a social unit subsists by
the industry of its individual members. The incentive to
hard work lies in its rewards in personal ownership and
in increased ease of living. Wherefore society must
concede to the individual the right to own what his toil
has created, since society's own welfare is itself a
product of that toil.

Islam, with its practical and realistic approach to
man as he is, recognises the importance of the urge to
own as a creative factor for all social progress; and
therefore legislates to secure a man possession of all
that his hand has won for him by proper and lawful means,
regarding his productivity as the guarantee of his right
to ownership.

Islam rejects the contention that oppression,
exploitation and violence are inevitable concomitants of
private ownership; for they only appear where the
legislative power is held by the richest class, and by
them, as in Western lands, directed solely to the
protection of their own interests. Since Islamic Law
derives solely from the supreme overarching Authority of
God, it is wholly impartial : so no law can be devised by
it with the aim of protecting the rich or injuring the
poor. From its inception, Islam has recognised private
property, but always only under such conditions that
violence and oppression are ruled out of court. Islam
holds that it is wrong to wrest factories out of the
hands of those who founded them and who, by patient
endurance of hardship and toil, built them up to give
labour to many, goods to society, and, of course, also
profit to themselves. For Islam holds that such resort to
violence in removing the means of production from the
hands of men of initiative is injurious to social
security and to respect for the rights of the individual.
It discourages the spirit of invention and initiative and
enterprise. Nonetheless the government can and should so
control the administration of great industries and the
establishment of factories that social justice, equity in
profit, public benefits and the government's own finances
are properly cared for.

In sum, Islamic economics gives joint primacy to both
individual and community. It equably balances the
interests and rights of these two elements by
guaranteeing a free economy while safeguarding the
freedom of the individual member and the benefit of the
whole community simultaneously by certain reasonable and
necessary regulations on private ownership. The urge for
such ownership it recognises as innate, and therefore
germane to human nature, so that the only limits which
may be imposed upon it are those dictated by the general
interests of the whole society, which of course contains
the best interests of each single member. Islam regards
the instinct to possess as an incentive divinely
implanted to inspire men to hard work for the improvement
of the means of livelihood and of their increased
production: yet regulates the expression of this
incentive with conditions that obviate violence,
oppression, exploitation, extortion and other forms of
misuse of freedom. These conditions safeguard the
interests of society and are limits on individual
independence in no way injurious to liberty, since both
communal living and individual freedom must impose those
limits on behaviour which will guarantee the survival of
both individual and community. and must therefore outlaw
profiteering, embezzlement, malversation, hoarding,
miserliness, avarice, usury, forcible seizure of other
people's property and all similar criminal and
anti-social methods of amassing capital.

Islam
and Economics (2)

Economic historians tell us that at its inception the
capitalist system was simple and beneficent : but that
the habit of granting loans at interest step by step grew
to its present harmful excess. With this came the
bankrupting of small concerns and their amalgamation into
huge complex companies and financial structures. Islam
labels such usury 'sin, as it does also the
crises of boom and slump inseparable from the system.

Islam has legislated for a payment of
Zakat (the Poor Rate) of 20% on capital gains
by the rich for the support of the indigent. This helps
to level out differences, to draw economic extremes
closer together and to curb excessive piling up of
wealth. Another Islamic regulation with the same aim and
same results is the government's right to tax wealth for
national finances, since Islam holds that God has put His
good gifts into this world for the benefit of all, as may
be seen by the forests, reedbeds, pastures, desert lands,
mountain ranges, mines.

Estates, too, become public either through the
intestacy of a deceased owner or because they are paid as
fines in restitution; so that they are as much the
property of all as God meant all things to be. Islam's
testamentary laws also curb undue accumulation of
property in the hands of one family from generation to
generation.

The conditions, therefore, by which Islam limits its
respect for the rights of private ownership, are those
which are dictated by the need to assure that the
individual's privileges never menace the wellbeing of the
Islamic community. Therefore, in emergency or disorder,
the just Islamic government can employ the legal powers
put at its disposal both to avert dangers which threaten
the future and also so to administer society as to meet
the needs of the Muslim masses, any time it sees fit.

A country's land may not fall into the possession of a
small handful of proprietors. Indigence and malnutrition
of the masses may not be ignored. These points are fixed
principles, frankly and firmly, faithfully and
forcefully, propounded by Islam. The Faith condemns the
injurious intrusion of modem capitalist practices into
the Muslim world and bans the greed and avarice which
lead to enslavement, war and imperialism.

In the Qur'an it is written (Sura
59-Al-Heshr-The Gathering of
Troops verse 7 in part): The dispositions we
have revealed for the distribution of property . are
ordained that capital may not merely circulate round the
group of capitalists amongst you.

In addition to the legal enactments which ensure the
correct use of finances and resources by punishing