al-Iqtisad fi al-Fikr al-Islami (Economics in Islamic Thought)

Al-Iqtisad fi al-Fikr al-Islami is volume 4 of Ahmad Shalabi's Mawsu'at al-Hadara al-Islamiyya; the museum's copy is the tenth edition, 1993, from Maktabat al-Nahda al-Misriyya, Cairo. ¹ In his list of works the author notes that most of the material of his books on world economic systems and on socialism went into this volume. ²

Part one is on Islam and Muslims facing the economic problem, including the aim of Islamic thought in its economic system; part two on Islam's economic principles: recognition of individual property and of inequality in it, wealth as God's wealth and private property as a social function, providing for the poor, zakat on industrial production, property rents and the professions, price-fixing, and comparison with communism, capitalism and Western socialism. ³ Part three is on modern economic questions: riba and the wisdom of its prohibition, banks, silent partnership, loans, pledges, salam and instalment sale, investment certificates, forms of partnership and fixing profit, Islamic banks, companies and shares, the stock exchange, insurance and lottery tickets. ^{4 5} Part four is on the history of economics in Islam: the treasury, its origin and revenues, zakat and its present threshold, and zakat and taxes. ⁵

Shalabi says his interest in economics began with what he studied at al-Azhar and Dar al-Ulum and then with the economic studies required while preparing his Cambridge doctorate; he wrote al-Siyasa wa-l-Iqtisad fi al-Tafkir al-Islami, and later, when socialism was made a university subject in the 1960s, a book on socialism that he calls a critical scholarly study, which he says he meant as a response to the spread of communism among students. ^{6 7} He holds that banks began with business free of legal objection and then turned to riba, and that Islamic studies of modern questions were few and many of them closer to preaching than to careful study. ⁶

Shalabi argues that forbidden riba is tied to loans and that the return on investment certificates and savings deposits is permissible; he holds that disagreement where there is no text is natural and that Islam "is not run by academies", the deeply learned individual having the right to independent reasoning. ^{4 8 9} This is his view; the question has its own entry setting out the positions: the return on investment certificates.