by an inequitable tax burden on the general public and since criticism drew severe punishment from despotic rulers, the pious ʿulamā’ and the Sufis became extremely bitter and started avoiding the royal courts. As the public was generally under the sway of these pious individuals, the prevailing tension ruptured the solidarity between the government and the people, making the government weaker and unable to successfully face a number of challenges. It also had an adverse impact on the development of fiqh, as will be seen in Chapter 6.
The hope of realizing a balance between the material and the spiritual receded even further into the background after the onslaught of Western consumer culture on the Muslim world after World War II. This has further accentuated the divergence between Islamic norms and the prevailing life-style. Conspicuous consumption has continuously risen even among the middle classes where it did not exist before, leading to an accentuation of corruption and unfair means of earning. It has also become one of the important causes of low savings and the inability to adequately invest on the basis of domestic savings. Therefore, most Muslim countries suffer from high macroeconomic imbalances and debt-servicing burdens along with relatively lower rates of growth. As in the past, protests are being raised against this phenomenon from religious scholars and the conscientious élite. However, instead of looking at these protests cool-headedly in the light of Islamic values, the paucity of the Muslim world’s resources, and the need to increase savings and investments to accelerate growth without macroeconomic imbalances, the Western news media dub the protesters as anti-modernist and fundamentalist. It is perhaps not realized that what the Muslim world needs is not that modernization which is associated with hedonism and permissiveness but rather that which brings democracy, education, and technology. If the prevailing trend continues, the consequences will be accentuated imbalances and other socio-economic problems.
Positivism in the conventional economics sense of being “entirely neutral between ends” or “independent of any particular ethical position or normative judgements” also does not seem to have any trace in Muslim intellectual thinking. This was but natural. Since all resources at the disposal of human beings belonged to God, human beings were only trustees. They were accountable to Him for using them in accordance with the terms and conditions of the trust, which were defined by the Sharīʿah. There was, accordingly, absolutely no room for value-neutrality. It would, in fact, be impudent for the agent (human being) to be neutral with respect to the terms and conditions set by the Principal (God). Scholars have, therefore, recognized throughout history, without any exception, the verdict of the Qur’ān and the Sunnah about resources being a trust from God and human accountability before Him. Abū Yūsuf (d. 182/798), for example, states in his letter to the Caliph Hārūn al-Rashīd (d. 193/809) that “you have not been created in vain and will not be left unaccounted for. God will question you about everything you have and what you have done with it.”17
If resources are a trust from God and human beings are accountable before Him, then there is no other option but to use them with justice. The Qur’ān and the Sunnah have both placed tremendous emphasis on justice, making it one of the central objectives of the Sharīʿah. Brotherhood, another central objective of the Sharīʿah, would be meaningless jargon if it were not reinforced by justice in the allocation and distribution of God-given resources. According to the Qur’ān, the establishment of justice is one of the primary purposes for which God has sent His Prophets (al-Qur’ān, 57: 25). The Qur’ān places justice nearest to righteousness or taqwā (al-Qur’ān, 5: 8), in terms of its importance in the Islamic faith. Righteousness is naturally the most important because it serves as a springboard for all rightful action, including justice. The Prophet, peace and blessings of God be on him, equated the absence of justice with “absolute darkness” and warned: “Beware of injustice for injustice will lead to absolute darkness on the Day of Judgement.”18 This is inevitable because injustice undermines brotherhood and solidarity, accentuates conflict, tensions and crime, aggravates human problems, and, thus, ultimately leads to nothing but bleakness in this world, and misery in the Hereafter.
All leading jurists throughout Muslim history have therefore, without exception, held justice to be an indispensable ingredient of the maqāṣid. For example, Abū Yūsuf elaborated on justice in his letter to the Caliph Hārūn al-Rashīd by saying that: “Rendering justice to those wronged and eradicating injustice, raises tax revenue, accelerates development of the country, and brings blessings in addition to reward in the Hereafter.”19 Al-Māwardī argued that comprehensive justice “inculcates mutual love and affection, obedience to the law, development of the country, expansion of wealth, growth of progeny, and security of the sovereign”, and that “there is nothing that destroys the world and the conscience of the people faster than injustice”.20
Ibn Taymiyyah (d. 728/1328) considered justice to be an essential outcome of Tawḥīd or belief in One God:21 “Everything good is a component of justice and everything bad is a component of injustice and oppression. Hence, justice towards everything and everyone is an imperative for everyone and injustice is prohibited to everything and everyone. Injustice is absolutely not permissible irrespective of whether it is to a Muslim or a non-Muslim or even to an unjust person.”22 He zealously upheld the adages prevailing in his time that: “God upholds the just state even if it is unbelieving, but does not uphold the unjust state even if it is Islamic”, and that “the world can survive with justice and unbelief, but not with injustice and Islam”.23
Ibn Khaldūn unequivocally stated that it is not possible for a country to develop without justice,24 something that has now belatedly been recognized by the pundits of development economics after a long flirtation with injustice.25 He went to the extent of emphasizing that “oppression brings an end to development and the end of development becomes reflected in the breakdown and destruction of the state,”26 and that “a decline in prosperity is the necessary and inevitable result of injustice and transgression”.27 Furthermore, “oppression does not consist merely in taking away wealth and property from its owner without cause or compensation. Oppression has rather a wider connotation. Anyone who seizes the property of others, forces them to work for him against their will, makes unjust claims on them, or imposes on them burdens not sanctioned by the Sharīʿah, is an oppressor”.28
Since achieving a proper material reward for one’s labour and entrepreneurship in the form of wages and profit is necessary not only to fulfil the imperative of justice but also to realize efficiency, all authors have recognized its importance. Ibn Khaldūn emphasized that the “confiscation of people’s pecuniary reward reduces the incentive for earning and acquisition” and “a loss of incentive leads to abstinence from effort and enterprise”. He further stated that “if confiscation is great and widespread in all sectors of the economy, there will be a general abstinence from earning because of the total loss of incentive”.29 This idea permeates the thinking of practically all writers and has led to condemnation of the confiscation of property, price controls under normal conditions, and excessive taxation. In spite of this, emphasis on incentives, the serving of self-interest, profit-earning and individual freedom in their conventional economics sense do not appear in the Islamic literature. In this sense, they simply do not fit into the Islamic paradigm.
Among relatively modern writers, Shaykh Muhammad ʿAbduh (d. 1323/1905) considered ẓulm or injustice to be the most hideous evil (aqbaḥ al-munkar) within the framework of Islamic values.30 Sayyid Quṭb (d. 1385/1966), Sayyid Mawdudi (d. 1399/1979), and Bāqir al-Saḍr (d. 1400/1980), whose writings have become an integral part of the ongoing Islamic resurgence, were highly critical of the prevailing socio-economic and political systems in the Muslim world because of the absence of justice. Sayyid Qutb viewed justice as “a comprehensive and indispensable constituent of all aspects of human life” within the framework of Islamic teachings, in his book