By: Imad A. Ahmad.
Minaret of Freedom Institute, 4323 Rosedale Avenue
Bethesda, Maryland 20814, (301) 656-4717
5. CONCLUSIONS
Those who, of their own free will and without any compulsion act according to the Book (Qu'rân) and the News (Hadîth) wear the turban of freedom (Khwaja-i-Jahan Mahmud Gawan quoted by Sherwani 1959).
We conclude by showing the implications for comprehensive development of Muslim countries in the modern era. A proper mindset for understanding what economic policy can and cannot do is aided by always remembering that bay`ah is a contract between the rulers and the people. Ibn Khaldun (Ibid., p. 429) notes that the scholar "Mâlik pronounced the legal decision that a declaration obtained by compulsion was invalid..." for which he was persecuted. We can sense his distaste when he notes that in his own day the shaking the leader's hand had been replaced by "greeting kings by kissing the earth (in front of them), or their hand, their foot, or the lower hem of their garment" (Ibid.).
The list of the proper functions of government is a short one: (Ibid., v. II, p. 3):
1) "defend and protect the community from its enemies."
2) "enforce restraining laws among the people, in order to prevent mutual hostility and attacks upon property. This includes improving the safety of the roads."
3) "cause the people to act in their own best interests, and ... supervise such general matters involving their livelihood and mutual dealings as foodstuffs and weights and measures, in order to prevent cheating."
4) oversee the mint to prevent fraud in currency.
5) Exercise political leadership.
Items 2-5 are distinctly economic in purpose. It is interesting that item 4 permits private minting which was in fact the early Muslim practice. Ibn Khaldun comments (Ibid., p. 55): "The government paid no attention to the matter. As a result, the frauds practiced with dinars and dirhams eventually became very serious" in the year 74 A. H. or 75 A. H. Thus in 76 (695-696 C. E.) Abd-al-Malik standardized the dirham with the emblem "God is one, God is the samad."
F. A. Hayek (1967) attributed to David Hume the "invention" that in its positive aims government was entitled to "no power of coercion and was subject to the same general and inflexible rules which aim at an overall order by creating its negative conditions: peace, liberty, and justice." Centuries before Hume was born, however, the applicability of sharî`ah to government was a seminal concept in Islam. The claim that Islamic society was governed more by situation ethics (see, e.g., Talbi 1981) than by the Qur'an and sunnah contains some truth, but is misleading. Muslim society strayed away from these principles gradually. Initially by constraints on land distribution and expansion of taxation, later in government interference in the economy, and finally in the loss of respect for private property and individual liberty. But until the thirteenth century, Muslim scholars, largely independent of the government, continued to develop a fiqh grounded in the Qur'an and sunnah as they understood it (Ahmad 1993a, 1994). It was only with the closing of the door to ijtihâd that actual practice substituted for the standards of the divine law. Islamic society paid the price for it.
Muslim scholars who interpret early Muslim practice as a precedent for whatever intervention in which a modern state wishes to engage do so only by ignoring the clear text of the Qur'an and dropping the context of the Prophet's advisory in the farewell pilgrimage. The best hope for an Islamic renaissance is to return to the fundamentals of Islam, i.e., the Qur'an and the principles exemplified by the practice of the Prophet. They do the ummah a disservice. Muslim nations eager for economic development should neither imitate the majoritarian policies of developed countries entering into the declining phases of their economic success nor should they retain authoritarian policies which account for their current stagnation. Rather, they should emulate the policies which permitted industrial development to occur in the first place. And what nascent society would be better to emulate than the Islamic society at the outset of its golden era? The implications for economic policy are clear:
1) Define and defend the property rights of the people, which should be as expansive as possible;
2) Issue a currency fully backed by hard monetary commodities;
3) Restrict public revenues to sources authorized by the sharî'ah and practiced by the khalifah rashidûn (zakât, jizyah, sadaqa, khums, and justifiable user fees including kharâj and `ushr) and limit them to the lawful limits;
4) End all government interference with economy apart from the prohibition of the initiation of coercion, fraud or other harâm activities.
The implicit limitations on the size and scope of government (as well as its decentralization) can also be a mechanism for the elimination of corruption which is another major problem for economic growth.
