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Ever since the industrial
revolution stunned the world more than two centuries ago, the discipline of
economics has grown in import. It has become a specialized field attracting
the attention of several minds. Alive to the situation, Muslim scholarship
set about to frame and formulate the economic teachings of Islam in a more
lucid and concrete manner. In particular, the last half-century has
witnessed a phenomenal amount of work being done in this regard. Without
taking anything away from this endeavor, it can be said that this effort
could have been more fruitful and productive had it not been marred by a
grave flaw: the belief that Islam provides a complete economic system and
the only thing needed is its implementation in favorable circumstances.
In spite of a tremendous
amount of work and dedication, unfortunately, Muslim scholarship today
appears in shambles because of this flaw. It has been unable to come to
grips with this challenge, which still spitefully stares at them. This grave
flaw, it seems, can only be overcome if the approach to the whole issue is
completely reviewed in the light of the Qur’ān and Sunnah.
It needs to be appreciated
that man has been blessed with the faculty of intellect and reason and has
also been blessed with innate guidance regarding good and evil. In the
affairs of life, his intellect and the innate guidance are generally enough
to guide him and show him the way. It is only at certain crossroads that he
needs divine guidance to select the right way. Consequently, in all such
affairs a detailed system of directives has not been divinely revealed to
guide mankind: only a broad outline has been given in the form of a set of
rules and regulations which must be adhered to. Bearing this in mind,
intellect and reason must evolve a system suited to the requirements and
needs of a society. Since these requirements vary with time and place, the
resulting systems will also vary accordingly. However, these systems shall
be based on the same set of rules and regulations. In other words, the law,
which is a set of rules and regulations is divine and, therefore, eternal,
but the system evolved upon this law is a human inference and, therefore,
flexible. This flexibility, obviously, has been left to accommodate changing
circumstances and evolutionary developments of human societies.
Therefore, instead of
extracting an economic system from the Qur’ān and Sunnah which, of course,
does not exist, all out efforts should be made by Muslim scholars to derive
the economic law of Islam. The task of formulating a system on its basis
should be left to the economists and to those who understand the intricacies
of this field.
O
Working on the pattern
outlined above, Javed Ahmad Ghamidi has attempted to derive the economic law
of Islam from the Qur’ān and Sunnah. He has shown that this law consists of
seven basic principles and each of these principles is based on specific
verses of the Qur’ān. During the course of his research, he has revived the
true concept of Zakāh and shown that the issue of ‘ِرَبوا
اْلفَضْلِ’ (ribā al-fadl: interest in transactions concluded on the
spot) is a case of misinterpretation and has arisen in our Fiqh because the
narrators have mixed up the words of certain Āhadīth. He has also derived
that the establishment of a public sector in a country is an essential
ingredient of this economic law. His research on the law of inheritance
merits separate mention keeping in view its profound nature. Approaching the
whole issue through the universal principles of language and working
abinitio on their basis, he has come up with what can be termed as a
prodigious piece of research. He has demonstrated that if a person has a
flair for relishing the finer aspects of a language, the verses of the
Qur’ān unfold their meaning to him. There is absolutely no need to employ
the ‘Doctrine of Increase’ (‘awl) to proportionately decrease the shares if
the law of inheritance is understood on this basis. All the shares can be
perfectly distributed. Similarly, the correct meaning of ‘َكلالة’
(kalālah) can be ascertained very easily if this approach is adopted.
This effort is by no means
the final one. However, being an original piece of research, both in
approach and content, it deserves a serious reading from all those who want
to understand the economic message of Islam. It needs to be weighed in the
scales of reason and revelation and not in those of conventionality.
For the benefit of the
English reader, in the following pages, I have attempted to translate
Ghamidi’s research article from Urdu.
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