ISLAM

Interest-based Western economies are collapsing:

Time to understand why Islam strictly forbids usury

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Economies

* IMF came to rescue of many countries with loans

* Muslims have started ‘monkeying’ the western values blindly

* Only way to control the deficit are to raise taxes or to cut government spending

* The only true producer of wealth is labour

* Money is man made out of nothing

* When you take a bank loan you pay twice

* Islam has increasingly been attacked by financial interests

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After the South-Asian economic tigers turned into paupers after the meltdown, it was realized that their economic model was no longer the one that needs to be emulated. The capital borrowed by these economies (at an interest, of course!) to fire up their economic engine was without any or little circumspection. But when the bubble bursted, the currency plunged, many banks went bankrupt and so did the people into hard times.

The good old International Monetary Fund (IMF) came to rescue of many countries with loans with a high interest tag and sell out of the nations to hungry multi-nationals, euphemistically called as ‘opening the economy’. Muslim majority countries like Malaysia and Indonesia suddenly turned towards the God and Qur’an for guidance. But still they are yet to realize that the economic mess which they are in, is their own doing. By following the interest based Western economies in their actions, they brought themselves into hardships.

It is true that Muslims have started ‘monkeying’ the Western values blindly in almost everything. This comes with the rejection of Islamic values which are considered to be ‘old’ and hence should be ‘discarded’. The so-called ‘Freedom’, ‘Human Rights’, ‘Democracy’ and ‘Women’s Rights’ in Europe is nothing short of a joke.

Change of democracy

Just think how the standards in a democracy change: Couple of decades or so ago, homosexuality was looked down-upon in many ‘democratic’ countries. Some people realized that the homosexuals were not getting a good deal in the society.

Therefore, the virtues of Sodom were sung, movies were made to promote their cause (notably, the Oscar winning Philadephia!. In a gist, the values of a democratic society changes when a number of people decide to take a change (after all, democracy is by the people!). They can decide to support a dictator of a country one day and demonize him the other day.

Economic hardship

It is also well-known that ‘Freedom’, ‘Human Rights’, ‘Democracy’ and ‘Women’s Rights’ take a back-seat when the economic interests are more important than anything else. Indonesia was one such example and now Algeria is a prime example of the Western hypocrisy. To the West, democracy did not matter when democratically elected party of Islamists won; the elections were cancelled. Afterall, the Western companies have to get the lucrative business of newly discovered oil and gas reserves in Algeria.

Has anyone ever wondered why a third world country remains a third world with a perpetual budget deficit even after IMF has ‘helped’ them out of their economic problems?

At times of economic hardship, when every good idea fails, just because “the money can’t be found”, when a decline in services is explained with the need “to reduce the deficit”, when business can’t afford new investment because of the “high cost of borrowing”, when mortgage rates have gone up so much that it becomes difficult to maintain a decent living standard, many small savers still think that high interest rates mean at least that they get the most out of their savings. The truth is, they pay more than they get.

The Qur’an

According to most movements the only ways to control the deficit are to raise taxes or to cut government spending. However, considering that the deficit continues to grow simply because of the exorbitant amounts of compound interest added to the original debt, one of the most effective ways to reduce the deficit would be to reduce interest rates.

In fact, at zero interest, the debt would not grow at all, and the large amounts of money spent in servicing the debt could be used to pay it off. Now consider what the Qur’an has to say on the subject of usury, that is lending money at interest:

Those who devour usury will not stand except as stands one whom the devil by his touch has driven to madness. That is because they say: Trade is like usury: but Allah has permitted trade and forbidden usury.... Allah will deprive usury of all blessing, but will give increase for deeds of charity, for He loves not any ungrateful sinner.... O you who believe fear Allah and give up what remains of your demand for usury, if you are indeed believers. If you do it not, take notice of war from Allah and His messenger, but if you repent you shall have your capital sums; deal not unjustly, and you shall not be dealt with unjustly. And if the debtor is in difficulty, grant him time till it is easy for him to repay. But if you remit it by way of charity, that is best for you if you only knew. [Surah al Baqarah, verse 275-280].

How urgently is this message needed in a world where the “debt crisis” threatens to destroy and annihilate our civilization, were open warfare is increasingly the consequence of the anxiety and suffering that spring from third world debt. Politicians have seldom looked at money-lending at interest as the cause of widespread poverty in the midst of plenty, because whilst this practice was once forbidden by Judaism, Christianity and Islam alike, it has become universally accepted in the modern world of secularism. It has been argued that money is a “producer good” and that the lender should receive a share of the extra wealth that these goods produce.

Yet this is illogical on several points. The only true producer of wealth (i.e. goods and services) is Labour when it is applied to either Land or Capital. Unlike Land, Money is infinite when not artificially restricted, which it often is. Money is man-made out of nothing and at tiny real cost. This credit creation confers enormous economic power and influence on those usually private institutions who have secured for themselves monopoly rights in this money issue.

Truth

Private banks create money out of nothing is a fact too little known amongst the public. Our national debt stands at hundreds of billion pounds, and that of other industrialized countries is of similar magnitude. Have you ever asked yourself who is that fabulous lender who always seems to have all the money which the government does not have? Whom does the nation owe the national debt?

The truth is that when banks create money (as cheque-money or blips on computer screens) they lend what they have not got to reap where they did not sow. Their loans are not backed by any real wealth on their behalf.

Nor do they lend out depositors’ money (or when did the bank last tell you that you can’t take out money from your account, because it has been lent to someone else?). When you give your house or business as guarantee for their money, this money is not backed by gold, silver or tangible wealth. It is an empty promise except for the fact that the government, with the Central Bank as lender of the last resort, is ready to bail out the banks should a run on their money occur.

An increasing part of local and national government taxation today is raised for the purpose of servicing the interest payments on local and national government debt. So whether you personally borrow or not, you pay the interest on that fictitious money.

Likewise, when you take a bank loan, you pay at least twice: you give a guarantee of real wealth in case of default, and you pay a penalty (as interest) for accepting money as a loan which costs the lender nothing and did not exist until it was created as a loan to you. Heads you lose, tails you lose again...

As should be evident by now, to base an economy on interest is a pretty stupid way of servicing a nation’s need to produce, consume and trade. It results in the evils of inflation, unemployment, decline of services, trading war, and finally, shooting-wars. Using interest rates as a means to control the problems of a nation’s economy is futile, as these problems were created by interest in the first place.

Only when a government creates its own money supply free of charge to the nation to facilitate production, consumption and trade, instead of authorizing private banks to create the nation’s money and then holding the nation at ransom by breaking its back under the ensuing interest debt, only when we get back to a system where the usurer is not being rewarded for taking advantage of others’ difficulties, will we achieve real prosperity.

Islam, often laughed at for sticking to its principles and not “moving with the times”, has never given in to the demands of the money-lenders to change its tough stance on interest. Naturally, Islam has increasingly been attacked by the financial interests behind today’s media and politics. Looking at the evidence with an open mind, however, it should not take you long to realise that Islam makes sense, and interest doesn’t.

Courtesy- UK Islamic Mission Da’wah Centre, Birmingham,

Origins of prejudicing the Western mind against Islam

Muhammad Asad

Western mind against Islam

* Weiss was born in Austria in 1900.
* At the age of 22 made his first visit to the middle east.
* Crusades were the strongest collective impression on a civilization.
* The traumatic experience of the Crusades gave Europe its cultural awareness.
* Many wars have been waged between nations and forgotten.

Muhammad Asad, Leopold Weiss, was born in Livow, Austria (later Poland) in 1900, and at the age of 22 made his first visit to the Middle East. After his conversion to Islam he travelled and worked throughout the Muslim world, from North Africa to as far East as Afghanistan. After years of devoted study he became one of the leading Muslim scholars of our age.

Following is an excerpt from the introduction to his book “The Road to Mecca” in which he outlines a discussion about the root causes of bias against Islam and the Muslim world in the West with a non-Muslim friend. He describes his friend as “an American friend of mine - a man of considerable intellectual attainments and a scholarly bent of mind.” Although he wrote this in 1954, you can decide if it is still valid today.

When it comes to Islam - Western equanimity is almost invariably disturbed by an emotional bias. Is it perhaps, I sometimes wonder, because the values of Islam are close enough to those of the West to constitute a potential challenge to many Western concepts of spiritual and social life?’

Theory

And I went on to tell him [non-Muslim friend of Muhammad Asad] of a theory which I had conceived some years ago - a theory that might perhaps help one to understand better the deep-seated prejudice against Islam so often to be found in Western literature and contemporary thought. ‘To find a truly convincing explanation of this prejudice I said, ‘one has to look far backward into history and try to comprehend the psychological background of the earliest relations between the Western and the Muslim worlds. What Occidentals think and feel about Islam today is rooted in impressions that were born during the Crusades.’

‘The Crusades!’ exclaimed my friend. ‘You don’t mean to say that what happened nearly a thousand years ago could still have an effect on people of the twentieth century?’

‘But it does! I know it sounds incredible; but don’t you remember the incredulity which greeted the early discoveries of the psychoanalysts when they tried to show that much of the emotional life of a mature person and most of those seemingly unaccountable leanings, tastes and prejudices comprised in the term “idiosyncrasies”- can be traced back to the experiences of his most formative age, his early childhood? Well, are nations and civilizations anything but collective individuals? Their development also is bound up with the experiences of their early childhood.

As with children, those experiences may have been pleasant or unpleasant; they may have been perfectly rational or, alternatively, due to the child’s naive misinterpretation of an event: the moulding effect of every such experience depends primarily on its original intensity. The century immediately preceding the Crusades, that is, the end of the first millennium of the Christian era, might well be described as the early childhood of Western civilization . . .’

I proceeded to remind my friend - himself an historian - that this had been the age when, for the first time since the dark centuries that followed the breakup of Imperial Rome, Europe was beginning to see its own cultural way. Independently of the almost forgotten Roman heritage, new literatures were just then coming into existence in the European vernaculars; inspired by the religious experience of Western Christianity, fine arts were slowly awakening from the lethargy caused by the warlike migrations of the Goths, Huns and Avars; out of the crude conditions of the early Middle Ages, a new cultural world was emerging. It was at that critical, extremely sensitive stage of its development that Europe received its most formidable shock - in modern parlance, a ‘trauma’ - in the shape of the Crusades.

Crusades

The Crusades were the strongest collective impression on a civilization that had just begun to be conscious of itself. Historically speaking, they represented Europe’s earliest - and entirely successful - attempt to view itself under the aspect of cultural unity. Nothing that Europe has experienced before or after could compare with the enthusiasm which the First Crusade brought into being. A wave of intoxication swept over the Continent, an elation which for the first time overstepped the barriers between states and tribes and classes.

Before then, there had been Franks and Saxons and Germans, Burgundians and Sicilians, Normans and Lombards - a medley of tribes and races with scarcely anything in common but the fact that most of their feudal kingdoms and principalities were remnants of the Roman Empire and that all of them professed the Christian faith: but in the Crusades, and through them, the religious bond was elevated to a new plane, a cause common to all Europeans alike - the politico-religious concept of ‘Christendom’, which in its turn gave birth to the cultural concept of ‘Europe’.

The traumatic experience of the Crusades gave Europe its cultural awareness and its unity; but this same experience was destined henceforth also to provide the false colour in which Islam was to appear to Western eyes. Not simply because the Crusades meant war and bloodshed. So many wars have been waged between nations and subsequently forgotten, and so many animosities which in their time seemed ineradicable have later turned into friendships.

It was at the time of the Crusades that the ludicrous notion that slam was a religion of crude sensualism and brutal violence, of an observance of ritual instead of a purification of the heart entered the Western mind and remained there; and it was then that the name of the Prophet Muhammad - the same Muhammad who had insisted that his own followers respect the prophets of other religions-was contemptuously transformed by Europeans into ‘Mahound’.

Way to Islam

The age when the spirit of independent inquiry could raise its head was as yet far distant in Europe; it was easy for the powers-that-were to sow the dark seeds of hatred for a religion and civilization that was so different from the religion and civilization of the West. Thus it was no accident that the fiery Chanson da Roland, which describes the legendary victory of Christendom over the Muslim ‘heathen’ in southern France, was composed not at the time of those battles but three centuries later-to wit, shortly before the First Crusade - immediately to become a kind of ‘national anthem’ of Europe, and it is no accident, either, that this warlike epic marks the beginning of a European literature, as distinct from the earlier, localized literatures: for hostility toward Islam stood over the cradle of European civilization.

It would seem an irony of history that the age-old Western resentment against Islam, which was religious in origin, should still persist subconsciously at a time when religion has lost most of its hold on the imagination of Western man. This, however is not really surprising. We know that a person may completely lose the religious beliefs imparted to him in his childhood while, nevertheless, some particular emotion connected with those beliefs remains, irrationally, in force throughout his later life ‘-and this,’ I concluded, ‘is precisely what happened to that collective personality, Western civilization.

The shadow of the Crusades hovers over the West to this day; and all its reaction toward Islam and the Muslim world bear distinct traces of that die-hard ghost ...’.

My friend remained silent for a long time. I can still see his tall, lanky figure pacing up and down the room, his hands in his coat pockets, shaking his head as if puzzled, and finally saying: ‘There may be something in what you say . .. indeed, there may be, although I am not in a position to judge your “theory” offhand ... But in any case, in the light of what you yourself have just told me, don’t you realize that your life, which to you seems so very simple and uncomplicated, must appear very strange and unusual to Westerners? Could you not perhaps share some of your own experiences with them? Why don’t you write your autobiography? I am sure it would make fascinating reading!’.

Laughingly I replied: ‘Well, I might perhaps let myself be persuaded to leave the Foreign Service and write such a book. After all, writing is my original profession.

In the following weeks and months my joking response imperceptibly lost the aspect of a joke. I began to think seriously about setting down the story of my life and thus helping, in however small a measure, to lift the heavy veil which separates Islam and its culture from the Occidental mind. My way to Islam had been in many respects unique: I had not become a Muslim because I had lived for a long time among Muslims - on the contrary, I decided to live among them because I had embraced Islam.

Might I not, by communicating my very personal experiences to Western readers, contribute more to a mutual understanding between the Islamic and Western worlds than I could by continuing in a diplomatic position which might be filled equally well by other countrymen of mine? After all, any intelligent man could be Pakistan’s Minister to the United Nations - but how many men were able to talk to Westerners about Islam as I could? I was a Muslim - but I was also of Western origin: and thus I could speak the intellectual languages of both Islam and the West. . . And so, toward the end of 1952, I resigned from the Pakistan Foreign Service and started to write this book. Whether it is as ‘fascinating reading’ as my American friend anticipated, I cannot say. I could do no more than try to retrace from memory - with the help of only a few old notes, disjointed diary entries and some of the newspaper articles I had written at the time-the tangled lines of a development that stretched over many years and over vast expanses of geographical space.

Courtesy IslamiCity

Power of seeking forgiveness

This story about seeking forgiveness ( Istighfar) is from the life of Imam Ahmed Bin Hanbal, who is considered as a renowned scholar of Islam and a famous theologian. Imam Ahmed is also considered to be the founder of the Hanbali School of Fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence) and often referred to as the “Sheikh ul-Islam” or the “Imam of Ahl al-Sunnah.”

During his old age, while Imam Ahmed was traveling, he stopped by a town. After the prayers, he wanted to stay for the night in the masjid yard because he didn’t know anyone in the town. Owing to his humility, he hadn’t introduced himself to anyone thinking that if he did, he would be welcomed by many people.

Failing to recognize Ahmed bin Hanbal, the caretaker of the mosque refused to let him stay in the mosque. As Imam Ahmed was quite old, the caretaker had to drag him out of the mosque. On seeing this, a baker from a nearby place felt pity for this man (Imam Ahmed) and offered to be the host to him for the night. During his stay with the baker, Imam Ahmed observed that the baker would constantly recite Istighfar (seek forgiveness from Allah).

Imam Ahmed asked the baker if the constant practice of saying Istighfar had any effect on him. The baker responded by telling Imam Ahmed that Allah had accepted all of his duas (supplications), except one. When he asked him what dua was it that hadn’t been accepted, the baker replied that he had been asking Allah to provide him the privilege to meet the famous scholar Imam Ahmed bin Hanbal. On this, Imam Ahmed bin Hanbal said that Allah had not only listened to his dua but had dragged him onto his (the baker’s) doorsteps. (Summarized from Al Jumuah magazine, vol 19, issue 7).

This story is a reminder of the power of seeking forgiveness frequently. Let’s remember that the prophet used to seek forgiveness frequently during the day.

Tafseer Al-Qurtubi states:

A man complained to Al-Hasan about a drought, and he said to him: “Pray to Allah for forgiveness.”Another man complained to him of poverty and he said to him: “Pray to Allah to forgive you.”Another man said to him: “Pray to Allah to bless me with a child.” He said: “Pray to Allah for forgiveness.”Another complained to him that his garden was dry. He said to him: “Pray to Allah for forgiveness.”

He was asked about it and he said: “This is not my personal opinion, for Allah says in Surah Nooh (interpretation of the meaning): ‘Ask forgiveness from your Lord, verily, He is Oft Forgiving; He will send rain to you in abundance. And give you increase in wealth and children, and bestow on you gardens and bestow on you rivers.” Tafseer Al-Qurtubi)

Compiled by Latheef Farook
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