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The Million Dollar Questions |
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Islam, Murabaha and Fixed Deposits |
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| Islam has declared war on the moneylender who demands interest. It did so in the very last divine revelation (al-Baqarah, 2:279) to come down in the Holy Qur'an. Here is that last revelation:
"O ye who believe! Fear Allah, and give up what remains of your demand for usury (i.e., the interest due on a fixed deposit, or on any other loan on interest), if ye are indeed believers." If ye do it not (i.e. if you persist in your claim or demand for the interest due to you), then take notice of (a declaration of) war from Allah and His Messenger: but if ye turn away (from such claim or demand), then you are entitled to the return of your capital sum (placed in the fixed deposit or otherwise lent); do not enter into (such) unjust transactions, nor allow yourselves to be subjected to such.
If (you forgo the interest due to you and then find) the debtor in a difficulty (in respect of returning the capital sum that was lent to him on interest), grant him time till it is easy for him to repay. But if ye remit it by way of charity, that is best for you if ye only knew.
And (in this matter in particular, i.e., lending money on interest) fear the Day when ye shall be brought back to Allah. Then shall every soul be paid what it earned, and none shall be dealt with unjustly.' (Qur'an, al-Baqarah, 2:278-281)
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How out-of-control speculation is destroying real wealth |
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The capitalist economy has a potentially fatal ignorance of two subjects. One is the nature of money. The other is the nature of life. This ignorance leads us to trade away life for money, which is a bad bargain indeed.
The real nature of money is obscured by the vocabulary of finance, which is doublespeak. We use the term "investors" for speculators, whose gambling destabilizes global financial markets. We use the terms "money," "capital," "assets," and "wealth" interchangeably--leaving no simple means to differentiate money from real wealth. Money is a number. Real wealth is in food, fertile land, buildings, or other things that sustain us. Lacking language to see this difference, we accept the speculators' claim to "create wealth," when they expropriate it.
If in the 1980s we witnessed capitalism's triumph over communism, in the new millennium we may witness capitalism's triumph over life. For in the vocabulary of capitalism, the destruction of life to make money is progress.
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Corporate Colonialism
"Globalization of the economy is a new kind of corporate colonialism visited upon poor countries and the poor in rich countries." - Vandana Shiva - Environmental Activist from India
ECONOMIC GLOBALIZATION involves arguably the most fundamental re-design of the planet's political and economic arrangements since at least the Industrial Revolution. Yet the profound implications of these fundamental changes have barely been exposed to serious public scrutiny or debate. Despite the scale of the global reordering, neither our elected officials nor our educational institutions nor the mass media have made a credible effort to describe what is being formulated or to explain its root philosophies.
The occasional descriptions or predictions about the global economy that are found in the media usually come from the leading advocates and beneficiaries of this new order: corporate leaders, their allies in government, and a newly powerful centralized global trade bureaucracy. The visions they offer us are unfailingly positive, even utopian: Globalization will be a panacea for our ills.
Shockingly enough, the euphoria they express is based on their freedom to deploy, at a global level through the new global free-trade rules, and through deregulation and economic restructuring regimes large-scale versions of the economic theories, strategies and policies that have proven spectacularly unsuccessful over the past several decades wherever they've been applied. In fact, these are the very ideas that have brought us to the grim situation of the moment: the spreading disintegration of the social order and the increase of poverty, landlessness, homelessness, violence, alienation and, deep within the hearts of many people, extreme anxiety about the future. Equally important, these are the practices that have led us to the near breakdown of the natural world, as evidenced by such symptoms as global climate change, ozone depletion, massive species loss, and near maximum levels of air, soil and water pollution.
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