Read more

A great deal of modern Muslims’ misunderstandings of money as a subject stem from the fact that when Europeans were dealing with Muslims, during the long centuries of confrontation, trade and imperialism, they introduced their own paper money on the false premise that it was simply fulus. The convoluted history of European money and its infestation with usury, and its long transition from being a receipt for gold or silver deposited for safekeeping with a goldsmith to being an entity invented out of nothing by wealthy private bankers who then charge interest for its use, is probably too long a detour for this essay, and is beginning to be sufficiently well known to be dispensed with. Suffice it to say, that modern money encapsulates within itself enough usury to sink an ummah (which it did), and should definitely not be confused with fulus.

We come now to the students of Shaykh Dr. Abdalqadir as-Sufi, whose long and determined propagation of the (by now better understood) critique of modern money has gained them well deserved affirmation and recognition amongst the few, but amongst the many made them somewhat suspect and, in some quarters, deeply unpopular. That was until the ongoing global financial catastrophe of 2008-2010 in the light of which they began to appear somewhat prescient and more widely appreciated. However, it would now appear that they have re-opened the door to suspicion by calling for the issuance of Islamic paper money, referring to it as fulus, which the great majority of Muslims still understand as money. “Subhanallah! Weren’t they against paper money, and didn’t they publish fatwas against it, declaring it haram?”

Therefore, given the crucial importance of what is at stake, it is imperative at this point that we clarify the matter as best we can.

The Muslims since the time of the Prophet, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, and his Companions, may Allah be pleased with them all, used three things in the main for currency: the gold dinar, the silver dirham and fulus, these latter originally being small copper coins of no higher denomination than half a silver dirham. This can be seen in any work of fiqh or history, and is documented in the admirably thorough Mawsu‘ah Fiqhiyyah – Fiqh Encyclopaedia” published as a massive forty-five volume set from Kuwait.

“The employment by the Prophet, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, and his Companions of Roman dinars and Persian dirhams on which there were images of their kings, and they had no other currency except for fulus.”

The values of the gold dinar and silver dirhams depended on their weight and the purity of their precious metals. The value of the fulus, on the contrary, did not depend on the value of the copper, but rather on the number printed on their faces. They were merely tokens for the small transactions for which even small silver coins would be too valuable.

This is a matter that is beyond controversy. The works of fiqh of the madhhabs deal with it in detail, down to whether or not it is assessed for zakat, and whether or not zakat can be paid with it.

When launching the currency, Shaykh Dr. Abdalqadir as-Sufi said, “At a meeting I had with Shaykh Mahmud Effendi of Turkey, the head of the Naqshabandi order, may Allah give him health and a long time with us and protection, Shaykh Mahmud Effendi said, ‘This (the dinar and dirham) is the currency of the Muslims, but you must have the fulus, for two reasons: there is no zakat on fulus because it is not a precious metal, and the widow must be able to buy her bread, a loaf of bread, with an untaxed currency that allows her to be halal in all her transactions.’”

So this is a vital part of Muslim commerce, for Muslim culture very naturally centres around the needs of the poor, contrary to capitalism which caters to the priorities of an oligarchical banking plutocracy, with the disingenuous assertion that wealth will ‘trickle down’ and ultimately reach the poor, which it demonstrably doesn’t do. Capitalism obscenely enriches a very few and reduces the global population to penury and debt-slavehood. The fulus represent the currency that is in daily use in countless transactions by all segments of the society for small everyday items, but of course, it represents the dominant currency of the poor, and as the Shari’a would have it, will in most circumstances be exempt from assessment for zakat.

Now, critics of modern money, rail against the retention by private banks, hidden behind names such as The Federal Reserve resonant with the sense of their being national institutions, of the power to invent new credit out of nothing and insist that such a right belongs only to the state. This is an echo of an earlier much more fundamental duty of the sovereign to authorise the minting of currency according to known purities of the precious metals and known weights and dimensions, stamping his name and, sometimes, his image on the coins in verification of that process and in acknowledgement of his responsibility in this regard. This was the case in the east and the west, in Christian lands and in the lands of Islam.

These monetarist reformers, however, being enthralled by the power of credit creation and the consumer society it has spawned, are reluctant to see this power to create money by fiat abolished; they want it retained by the state. They fail to see that the implications of this power are equally devastating no matter whose the hand that wields it. However, they are correct in identifying the ruling authority as responsible for the issuing of currency, but this should be in the sense of the authentication of the currency’s actual value, not the licence to create it at will out of thin air.

But what about the fulus? For here we have something of no intrinsic value, but rather something whose value is determined by the numbers minted or printed on it. As we said, its issuance belongs to governance and to no one else. Its value, however, is very limited; it is small change, and thus its effect on the economy ought, in the regular run of things, to be minimal. We note with caution that Muslim rulers at various points did wreak some havoc by an over-abundant supply of fulus.

Some confusion has arisen over the fact of the traditional minting of fulus as copper coins and this recent printing of fulus as paper; ought we not to follow the traditional mode? We were fortunate recently in Norwich to hear a remarkable discourse by Dr Muhammad Ghanem on “The Islamic Concept of Money,” which is also the title of his PhD thesis. Apart from being devastatingly forthright in asserting that modern paper currency is the very essence of usury, he also made very clear that while the usage by the Prophet, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, and his Companions of gold dinars and silver dirhams means that it is inconceivable that any Muslim ruler should ever prevent the usage of gold and silver as currency (even though all so-called ‘Islamic’ polities do in fact outlaw their use), it does not mean that we are obliged only to use them and no other currency.

The same principle applies to fulus; the fact of their historical use as copper does not preclude their being printed on paper. This is a specific application of a general principle; the fact that something was not done in the time of the salaf does not mean that it is not allowed to do it, nor does it mean that when it was done in their time in a specific way, that other ways of doing things are thus prohibited. Only a specific prohibition means that something is prohibited.

So, there is no reason for fulus not to be printed on paper, and very good reasons today why it should be, given the general acceptance of paper money by the global population. Interestingly, whereas with the dominant usury-based finance, minted coins are small change and paper is reserved for the larger denominations, with our Islamic currency the process is reversed and the gold dinar and silver dirham represent the larger denominations and paper currency represents the small change. This is really as it should be, because the global usury-driven finance system is based on a currency that is in every sense a walking debt, moreover a debt that is growing exponentially in a completely unstoppable way.

Now, the proposition that someone is muflis or bankrupt if they only have ‘money’ and have no gold or silver has become self-evident to a much greater number of people than could have been hoped for even a decade ago. It is time for the Muslims to restore a genuine currency with its gold dinar and silver dirham, which have proven to be non-inflationary over millennia, and the vital fulus for the small change that is used for the huge majority of daily transactions.

This perspective is of course utterly unacceptable to us, since, as Thomas Kuhn showed, the modern scientific outlook is in his terminology ‘a paradigm’ which was preceded by the Aristotelian ‘paradigm’ and may thus clearly be succeeded by yet another. Thus it is impossible that we should tie the meanings of the Qur’an to what is simply a paradigm.

It might help if we look at one example which is widely touted as definitive proof of the scientific authenticity of the Qur’an: the ayah 47 in Surat adh-Dhariyat which many people take as predicting the twentieth-century discovery that the universe is expanding.

In the Bewley translation this meaning is expressed as:

As for heaven – We built it with great power
and gave it its vast expanse.

This is clearly not the meaning that those give the ayah who consider that it might have to do with the expanding universe. Note also that the Bewley translation is the most careful of the translations in following the orthodox tafs?r literature and the meanings of the Arabic language.

It is absolutely impermissible for anyone to interpret the Qur’an simply according to their own opinion or even according to the opinions of others even if those others are legion, native Arab speakers, and doctors in universities. Rather, there is a process for tafsir and there are conditions for doing it, which are best outlined in the introduction which Ibn Juzayy al-Kalbi makes to his tafsir at-Tashil li ‘ulum at-tanzil. (Available as a PDF here.)

Without going into the science of tafsir exhaustively, let us note that the least requirement of it is that any explanation be consistent with what is possible in the Arabic language, but here we mean the classical Arabic language, and not as spoken today by Arabs, since it is clear that Arabic has altered considerably in its usages. This is not a new condition to place on the person making tafsir. It has always been one of the requirements of tafsir that it should be consistent with the classical language and thus we have the scholarship of the Arabic-Arabic dictionaries and of the tafsir scholars.

In Surat adh-Dhariyat, the key term musi’un is the masculine plural of the active participle of the fourth form of the verb wasi’a. The modern person thinks of wasi’a as simply ‘to be vast’, and that thus the fourth form of the verb awsa’a would necessarily have the sense of ‘to make [something] vast’. Note here that even in modern Arabic, it does not give the sense ‘to make vaster’ or ‘to expand’, which may be a subconscious confusion with the comparative form awsa’u ‘vaster’.

However, in classical Arabic, the senses of the verb are utterly different from what we would be led to expect by a modern dictionary such as Hans Wehr’s A Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic, which although an Arabic-German dictionary is well known in English because of its translation by Cowan and there is no doubt about its excellence within its domain. However, it is in no sense reliable for translation of any classical work and does not make any such claim, and it is certainly no proof, or indeed of very much use, in translation of Qur’an.

So our point of departure as English speaking Arabic students for the classical language must be E. W. Lane’s Arabic-English Lexicon. But we must understand what this book is before we proceed. Lane’s Lexicon is simply Lane’s extremely careful translation of the entries from the classical dictionaries of Arabic which the Muslims drew up in order to have access to the classical language, in particular to understand the Qur’an, the hadith literature and the classical works of poetry. Lane put little of his own understanding in his book. So it is our point of departure but if we are serious we must have recourse to the Arabic-Arabic dictionaries and the lexicographical understandings of the Qur’anic commentators.

The Bewleys translate the ayat thus: ‘As for heaven – We built it with great power and gave it its vast expanse.’ It is clear from this translation that the meaning they have taken is to give heaven its vastness or great expanse, something that is evident to the human senses and has been from the beginning of time to all people whether educated or not. Thus they have translated it in a sense that is immediately obvious to any people at any time in history and not just to people who have a degree in cosmology.

A part of our problem with giving the meaning to the ayah of expanding the universe is that this is something utterly concealed from our senses and only available to our intellects through a most abstract process, whereas the ‘vast expanse’ of the universe is something evident to anyone who has ever been out of the city and under an open sky at night.

The idea of the expanding universe is a theoretical mathematical idea which can never be seen and theoretically is deduced from Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity and practically from Hubble’s observations of the red-shift.

However, what is most striking in our dictionary sources is that most of the meanings of wasi’a and awsa’a have no sense of physical vastness but indeed of encompassing in knowledge, or being endowed with sufficient and ample wealth, etc., as you can see from the numerous examples below.

Please note that almost all of the commentators see the only other usage of this word (in its singular form) in the Qur’an in Surat al-Baqarah 236 ‘from the musi’ [wealthy person] according to his capacity’ as a decisive proof of its meaning in this ayah in adh-Dhariyat.

IBN KATHIR

Sees the ayah as meaning, ‘We encompassed [wasi'na] its extremities or made them vast [wassa'na], and We raised it without any pillars until it became independent [or possibly 'raised itself'] as it is.’

AL-JALALAYN

Jalal ad-Din al-Mahalli said, ‘the man awsa’a’ means ‘he became possessor of ample wealth and strength.’

AR-RAGHIB AL-ASBAHANI SAID IN MUFRADAT ALFADH AL-QUR’AN

‘We are musi’un’ Adh-Dhariyat: 47 indicates something similar to His saying, ‘The One who gave everything its creation and then guided.’ (Ta-Ha: 50) ‘So-and-so awsa’a‘ if he has wealth and becomes possessor of ample provision…

AL-QURTUBI

Ibn ‘Abbas said it – Musi’un – means ‘able/powerful’.

Some say [that 'We are Musi'un' means], ‘We are possessors of ample wealth, and in its creation [the heaven's] and the creation of other than it, nothing of that which We wish is hard for Us.’

Some say, ‘We give provision abundantly to Our creation.’ Also [narrated] from Ibn ‘Abbas.

Al-Hasan said [that 'We are Musi'un' means], ‘We are capable.’

He also said [it means], ‘We give provision abundantly by the rain.’

Ad-Dahhak said [it means], ‘We enrich you’ his proof being [the ayah] 236 in Surat al-Baqarah ‘from the musi’ [wealthy person] according to his capacity’.

Al-Qutbi said [it means], ‘Abundantly generous to Our creation.’

And the [above previous two] meanings are close.

Some said [it means], ‘We made between the two of them [possibly a mistake, and should read 'between it…'] and the earth ample space/ample provision.’

Al-Jawhari said, ‘The man awsa’a i.e. he became the possessor of ample provision and wealth, an example of which is “As for heaven – We built it with great power and We are Musi’un” (Surat adh-Dhariyat: 47) i.e. [We are] Wealthy and Powerfully capable’ so that his statement comprises all of the statements.

AT-TABARI

In His saying, ‘We are Musi’un‘, He is saying, ‘Possessor of vast capacity/power/wealth for its creation and the creation of what We wish to create, and powerfully capable to do it,’ and an example of it is His saying in Surat al-Baqarah 236 ‘from the musi’i [wealthy person] according to his capacity’.

Ibn Zayd said about that: Yunus narrated to me saying, ‘Ibn Wahb informed us saying, “Ibn Zayd said concerning His words ‘We are Musi’un‘ [that it means] ‘I make it vast and expansive,’ or ‘I make its means of subsistence ample and abundant’ [see the meaning in Lane's Lexiconwherein awsa'ahu and wassa'ahu mean He (Allah) made his means of subsistence ample and abundant], majestic is His majesty.

IBN JUZAYY AL-KALBI

Concerning ‘We are Musi’un‘ there are three statements:

first that it means Capable/Powerful, which is from wus’ or capacity, and an example of which is ‘from the musi’ [wealthy person] according to his capacity’ (Surat al-Baqarah 236) meaning the person who has the strength to spend;

and the other is ‘We made the heaven vast’ or ‘We made between it and the earth vastness [possibly wealth or abundant provision];

and the third is ‘We expanded provisions by means of the rain from the sky.’

That concludes what the classical commentators and Arabic linguists have said. As you can see, the sense given the ayat in the majority of the above cases has nothing even remotely to do with space, and where it does have it is in the sense of making heaven spacious and vast, but not with the sense of expanding it and making it more vast and more expansive. That is absolutely clear from all of the tafsirs and dictionaries which I have consulted and quoted. Therefore, there is certainly no evidence to warrant introducing this commentary for this ayah.

The sense of wasi’a and wasa’a being ‘wide and spacious’ is only a part of the story, since many of the meanings of the Arabic are much more subtle than this and do not have a spatial sense at all, but relate to ample provision or knowledge or capability. The fourth form of the verb –awsa’a – may well be the causative form of the verb, but then in this very restricted case of the physical meaning of first form of the verb – wasi’a – meaning being wide and spacious, the fourth form has the sense of causing the thing [in this case heaven] to be wide and spacious, and not the sense of making it expand. Therefore, I differ with those who automatically extend the meaning to ‘to extend or expand’. This is not correct, in my view.

The ayah does not rule out the expansion of the universe, but it certainly does not say unequivocally that the universe is expanding and nothing that I have seen in the works I have confirm that meaning, and after a very thorough and exhaustive research I cannot see that any of the above tafsirs say this and I have not found a single classical scholar of Islam who even hints at this meaning being a possible meaning of awsa’aor a possible meaning of the tafsir of this ayat.

Yet this very widespread view of this ayah is only the tip of an iceberg: that literature that thinks that somehow ‘science’ proves the Qur’an to be true, ignoring the very serious philosophical dilemmas and contradictions within science. What can one say about people, i.e. scientists, who have still not confronted the near century-old discovery that matter is both particle and wave, that the results of experiment are affected by the observation of the observer and depend on what the experiment is set up to explore?

Please note that in the aforegoing I take no objection intrinsically to the thought that the Qur’an might indicate some scientific truths. My own background is in maths and physics, and I grew up with a particular love for both cosmology and the world of sub-atomic particles. Indeed, there are a number of ayat in the Qur’an which are of some interest to me in this respect, such as:

Do those who are kafir not see
that the heavens and the earth were sewn together
and then We unstitched them
and that We made from water every living thing? (Surat al-Anbiya: 30)

and:

Glory be to Him who created all the pairs:
from what the earth produces
and from themselves
and from things unknown to them. (Surah Yasin: 35)

But that is a topic for another day, insha’Allah.

“His existence has a conclusive proof: The need of everything that is in-time for a Maker.”

Note here that no account whatsoever is taken of the intricacy of the thing or things, in this case the cosmos. It is the mere fact of its existence that matters. This thought is supported by the famous question of the philosopher Leibnitz which Martin Heidegger quotes in his Introduction to Metaphysics, “Why is there something rather than nothing at all?” a question he regards as the very first in philosophy. It is well worth the reader stopping and reflecting on this question.¹
Thus right away, the argument from design is abandoned. Indeed, in Muslim thought it simply never entered into the equation. The real issue is that something cannot come out of nothing of its own volition since it did not exist and thus had no volition. A void that had the potential for quantum fluctuations out of which matter emerges is not a real void. For a materialist, out of nothing, nothing can emerge. For Allah everything is possible.
The Shaykh proceeds:

If beings had originated by themselves, equality and preponderance would be united.

The Shaykh considers the possibility that things could somehow engender themselves, or the cosmos simply pop into being out of nothing. Quite interestingly, he considers it calmly and coolly, not as a religious intellect confronted and disturbed by rational argument. Rather he considers it rationally, and says, “If beings had originated by themselves”. Then he says that if that had been the case, two matters would have been united, and the image he uses is that of the scales. At-tasawi – equality – indicates when both pans of the scales are equal and level, and ar-rujhan – preponderance – indicates when one pan of the scales outweighs the other. And he is saying that these two cases would be united and concludes at the beginning of the next verse:

And that is impossible.

So he assigns a fifty-fifty probability to the emergence of the cosmos out of nothing, which is being generous, i.e. he is willing to consider it as merely a flip of the coin whether there is something or nothing, an equal probability of either. But then he says that the reality is that there is something, the cosmos exists, and thus it is not fifty-fifty, and these two are contradictory. The scales are not both balanced and imbalanced. The fact that the cosmos exists indicates that there is some factor which renders the chance not fifty-fifty, but one hundred to none.
So this is the crux of Muslim thinking on the proof of the creation of the universe. But what about the complexity and intricacy of the cosmos? The argument of the scholars of this science proceeds, once the impossibility of the universe simply emerging spontaneously from nothing is clear, to argue that the intricacy does not prove the existence of Allah, but demonstrates His knowledge and wisdom, in the same way that the painting can be studied for insight into the painter, or the musical composition for knowledge of the composer.
Thus the argument from design falls because it telescopes two arguments into one, which damages both, but if they are separated as Muslim scholars have done, then a new picture emerges.
There is a point though in having some sympathy with Richard Dawkins and atheist scientists. The whole history of the West is its emergence from under the dead dogmatic hand of the church, which espoused a religious doctrine that was simply absurd and insulting to the intellect, a dead hand which simply consigned its opponents to the flames. Scientists have by-and-large never shaken off the stamp of this long history of oppression, and although that battle is long over and scientists themselves have become a dogmatic and doctrinaire body labelling almost anything fresh, new and interesting as ‘heresy’, yet they earnestly rehearse the long story of christian oppression.
It would be a great mistake in this context, in reaction to scientists’ atheism to embrace the doctrines of the christians, because they are simply unacceptable to us, no matter how attractive they might appear initially. It is no use for us to wrestle with them, for example, using christian creationist arguments, since they are often simply wrong.
Let us hold close to the thread of our argument, and return to Dawkins. If he is evangelical then what is he evangelical for? What does he believe? Arguably in the middle ages, the church was simply a profession, and when priests fought heretics they were professionals defending their livelihoods. The church was big business. It may be for that reason that the Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, is said to have remarked that there is no priesthood in Islam. So what church is Dawkins defending? Who pays him and for whom does he work? Well, this is an interesting question with a no less interesting answer. Dawkins is Charles Simonyi Professor of Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, a seat endowed by Simonyi who was a software architect within Microsoft until starting his own company in 2001.
You may not immediately see the significance of this. What, you may ask, has working for the popularisation of science got to do with a major software company, and why should it matter? Let us take this thread further back and indeed right to the beginning.
Consider Galileo, arguably the beginning point of our specifically modern view of physics, the man whose encounter with the church many modern scientists, not the least of them Richard Dawkins, relive in their imaginations. Galileo’s patrons were the Medicis, the Italian banking family that played a very major part in the renaissance², since they also bank-rolled Michaelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci among a host of other luminaries. The Medicis were catholics from Florence but they were usurers. Banking was recognised in christian dogma of the time as the mortal wrong action of usury, even though the Vatican engaged in it, and, in fact, founded one of the very first banks anywhere in the world. Nevertheless, in the meeting of the Vatican and the Medicis – they were at times the Pope’s own bankers and for one memorable papacy supplied the incumbent – you see the coming into existence of a new dialectic, the commercial secular worldliness that amounts to agnosticism or atheism – although taking a historical detour through protestantism – both abetting and then finally at war with the tyrannical and admittedly hypocritical catholic church.
Next stop on our tour would have to be Isaac Newton. Newton is falsely thought of by Muslims as a unitarian, and thus somehow Islam-friendly. This is not a view that makes the real significance of Newton amenable to us. Although Newton was theologically (and most importantly ‘privately’) a unitarian, he concealed this all his life, since it would simply have stopped his progress in the world. This is not a zone for personal opinion. Our ulama’ have often considered carefully when taqiyyah – dissimulation – is permissible. There are situations in which it is possible to dissimulate, i.e. not to own up to the truth, when to do so would prove life-threatening. When it comes to association of partners with Allah (shirk) at that point dissimulation and concealing one’s belief are not acceptable, and certainly not for the purposes of career advancement. Newton lived at a time when monarchs coerced their citizens into endorsing the Creed, which contains a specific statement of trinitarianism.
The prospect grows more complex in Newton’s case because he lived through the time in English history called ‘the Glorious Revolution’. This event saw a dynasty – the Stewarts – removed from the throne, and a King and Queen ensconced on it who were to prove amenable to a new force emerging from the shadows on to centre stage of history, but this new force was the same as that already encountered in the story of Galileo: banking. But now banking arrives in the form of the Bank of England, the National bank, which was in fact then and until after the second world war a private bank. This bank began the issuance of paper money, which introduces the entire modern monetarist epoch, and was the entity owed the national debt, and that was something completely new. Previously kings had their debts, which they paid off. But now the debt was national, and owed by the people from generation to generation along with the accumulated interest-generated debt.
Newton’s job in this new order, upon acceptance of which he left his scientific work entirely, was first as Warden of the Mint, and then finally its Master. It sounds very commendable in this setting because he was personally responsible for the minting of gold, silver and copper coins. But he did something very important: in 1717 he set the price of gold at £4 4s 11¹/₂d per troy ounce. That sounds an eminently sensible thing to do, to set the price of gold, but the question is, “What was the price of the gold to be paid in?” It was to be paid in the new paper money. What Newton did was to set a price for the new specie of money, to give value to paper in terms of the old value which was universally recognised (and is in many parts of the world today, such as the Arab countries, India and most of the Muslim lands). So Newton used his eminence as a scientist to validate the modern monetary system.
Now, you see this very straight line that we can draw from Galileo through Newton right up to Dawkins: the mysterious connection between usury-capitalism and science. You can also see that Dawkins’ missionary zeal has more than doctrinal significance. Like Newton before him, he validates usury capitalism, if only by his silence on it, because if he does not defeat and disprove God, then every revealed religion we know has declared usury haram and this is a major obstacle for them. His atheism serves a very useful function indeed to some extremely practical and worldly people.
The argument is not simply a theological one, although the importance of clear tawhid as the foundation of the din is admitted by everyone. As Ibn ‘Ashir said, may Allah be merciful to him:

The first obligation on him who is given responsibility | if he has the ability to search (and reflect) is to know

Allah and the Messengers with the attributes | for which He has erected signs.

Now this is the entire point of departure for the din: recognition (ma’rifah) of Allah and His Messengers: knowledge of Allah’s attributes among which are al-ghina – absolute independence, freedom from need, and total wealth, and qudrah – power, capability, the ability to do that which He wills or leave undone whatever He wishes, e.g. He could have left the world uncreated so that there was nothing.
The entire zone of the dunya, of worldliness, revolves around the mistaken thought that such attributes might be attainable by human beings independently of the Creator. In extremes it leads to the desire for all wealth and all power. The person who knows deep in his being that his Lord is All-Wealthy and All-Powerful is not the same as this other.
Figures such as the Medicis and the mediaeval German bankers the Fuggers were vastly wealthier and had more real power than any king of their time. They ushered in the era of dominance by the power of money with political processes remaining simply as theatre to mask the true realities of power. Thus, the British Empire was really the Bank of England Empire, and the Empire’s greatest conquest, India, was a project of the East India Company which had its own armies and administration. The mantle of all of these has passed to a relatively small cabal of financiers and corporate figures.
It is thus that Dawkins has placed his knowledge at the disposal of people who do not acknowledge the wealth, power, knowledge, will and compassion of God, but seek massive wealth and power for themselves. Dawkins is ultimately a priest in a new religion, and this is something that even freethinkers have always puzzled about in him. It is the new religion of global capitalism. Opposite it is the pure teaching of tawhid embedded in the practice of of Islam, pivotal to which is the knowledge of the mu’amalat, the ordinary practices of trade and buying and selling, a relearning of which by us – as traders and men of commerce, employers and employees, shoppers, buyers and sellers, as well as our scholars – will lead to the decoding and dismantling of the capitalist killing machine. For just as the authentic grasping of tawhid is the genuine foundation of the entire din, yet strangely enough this clarity of commercial transactions in the market is itself the indispensable base without which none of the rest of the din will make any sense or be acceptable to Allah. Thus to grasp the mu’amalat is to be on the royal road to the restoration of justice.
More germane to our topic however, given the significance of the relationship between finance/commerce and science, is our question, “What would the sciences look like if they sprang from the soil of a society which had non-usurious and just commercial transactions?” If we do not answer that question here, we do know that it is the Muslims who are obliged to take a lead in creating such a society and thus in bringing about the renewal of the sciences.

Notes

1 Moreover, there is the principle of sufficient reason as formulated by Leibniz: “no fact can be real or existing and no statement true unless it has a sufficient reason why it should be thus and not otherwise” (Leibniz, 198). This principle is often stated as “everything that begins to exist has a cause of its existence” or “every event has a cause.” The entire edifice of science rests on this axiomatic understanding and yet an increasingly vocal group would have us believe that the universe itself is the only exception to this rule.
2 See Strathearn, The Medicis: Godfathers of the Renaissance, in which he compellingly shows that the renaissance was very much a banking event.

Al-Laknawi thinks that the narration of Muhammad is weightier and better than the narration of Yahya, and he seeks to prove that as follows:

First, that Yahya al-Andalusi only heard the Muwatta completely from one of the pupils of Imam Malik, but as for Malik himself he did not hear it from him completely but there remained a portion of it [which he had not heard]. As for Muhammad, he heard it from him in its totality, and it is well known that hearing the totality without intermediary from someone such as this Shaykh is weightier than hearing it through an intermediary.

Second, that Yahya al-Andalusi attended Malik in the year of his death and was present when he was made ready [for burial] but Muhammad stayed close to him for three years of his life, and it is well known that the narration of someone who has had a great deal of close companionship is stronger than the narration of someone who has had little.

Third, that the Muwatta of Yahya comprises hadith narrated by way of Malik and from no-one else, and the Muwatta of Muhammad, as well as comprising that, comprises traditions narrated from other shaykhs, and it is well known that that which comprises additional [hadith] is better than that devoid of that benefit.

Fourth, that the Muwatta of Yahya comprises many mentions of fiqh cases and ijtihads of Imam Malik with which he was pleased, and many notices in which there is only mention of his ijtihad and his derivations of rulings without the narration of traditions, contrary to the Muwatta of Muhammad, because there is no section in it without a narration in conformity with the title of the chapter – whether a tradition stopping short at a Companion or one ascribed to the Prophet @ – and it is well known that a book which comprises hadith without admixture of theoretical matters (ra’y) is better than one which is mixed up with theoretical matters.

Fifth, and this is in relation to the Hanafis in particular, that the Muwatta of Malik comprises many ijtihad decisions of Malik contrary to the views of Abu Hanifah and his people and hadith which Abu Hanifah and his followers did not hold to, claiming that they are abrogated or that there is consensus contrary to them, or there is an obvious break in the isnad, or that other hadith are weightier, and so on of those aspects which seem obvious to them, so that the person investigating it would become confused and that would propel the ordinary person to cast aspersions on them [the narrators] or on it [the book], in distinction from the Muwatta of Muhammad which comprises mention of the hadith which they [Hanafis] act by after mentioning those which they do not act by, as is clearly not hidden from anyone who studies the matter: raising the hands, reciting behind the imam and other matters. This is useful for the ordinary person and for the elite. As for the ordinary person he is protected from having a bad opinion. As for others, then by criticism of the ?ad?th of the two parties, the hidden preponderance will become evident.

I have some important observations on the words of al-Laknawi, may Allah show him mercy, acknowledging my own incapacity and shortcomings, aspiring to reward and the support of the Truth:

First, his statement that Yahya narrated the totality of the Muwatta from an intermediary, but that Muhammad heard it in its totality without intermediary, and that the hearing of the totality without intermediary is weightier than hearing it through an intermediary.

The situation is that Yahya heard the Muwatta from Malik without intermediary. Yes, there are some hadith which he does not narrate directly from him without intermediary. We ought to note that the reason for his not narrating these hadith directly from Malik is his doubt about that and his certainty of having heard them through this intermediary because he heard the Muwatta in its entirety from Ziyad and then travelled to Malik and heard it in its entirety from him, except for some hadith which he doubted as to whether or not he had heard them or not.

We have previously expanded on this issue during the discussion of the narration of Yahya.

Thus it is clear:

First, that Yahya heard the Muwatta from Malik apart from the chapters on i’tikaf which he narrated from Ziyad from Malik.

Second, that he did not really miss hearing these hadith, but it is probable that he heard them from him [Malik]. However, his doubt about that, along with the existence of a certain path of transmission which he had, made him take the path of certainty and avoid the path about which there was some doubt. And it is well known that doubt renders both parties equal.

Thus we say, strength does not lie in narrating the book in its entirety and weakness does not lie in missing some part of it. Strength only lies in the narrator’s hearing, along with attentive wakefulness in that which he narrates, the soundness of his principles (usul) and his safeguarding them, his being concerned to check them and receive them and the establishment of his having heard them.

So the words of al-Laknawi are inappropriate, and his counter argument does not occur in the correct place, particularly after it is clear to us that Yahya did not give up the narration of these hadith [directly from Malik] except because he had a doubt about having heard them [directly] from Malik. Thus it is clear to us the strong investigation of Yahya, his scrupulousness, and his scrupulous caution concerning the narration of the Muwatta.

This route which al-Laknawi took in showing preference to the narration of Muhammad over that of Yahya is in  reality the cause for its [Yahya’s narration] being considered weightier, and it is testimony to its merit, the exalted nature of its affair, and the extra trustworthiness and the perfection of its establishment in his reception of it and his discharge of it, along with the fact that even if he had narrated it directly from Malik without intermediary no one could have denied him, and there would have been no harm because his having heard it was so well known and because of the fact that he was unqualifiedly one of his companions without any conditions.

Also because of the fact that he was not certain that he could not narrate these hadith, but on the contrary he had a doubt about that, and the difference between the two states is obvious.

Second, his statement that Yahya only attended Malik in the year of Malik’s death, whereas Muhammad associated closely with him for three years and that the narration which is a result of long association is stronger than the narration which is a result of short association.

This is correct, because Muhammad ibn al-Hasan associated closely with the Imam for three years.

As for Yahya, he only attended him in the year of his death and thus only associated with him some months. However, if Muhammad is distinguished by long association, then Yahya is distinguished by another matter which in the scales of acceptability is weightier and is more appropriate to reckon with. That is the fact that Yahya is the last narrator of the Muwatta from Malik. By that his narration becomes the last one to be read out to the Imam, who died after that, so that then no great change of any major importance took place in the ijtihad of the Imam in the sections on differences of opinion, because the Imam, may Allah show mercy to him, was greatly given to ijtihad and to pondering over the Muwatta. At every moment he added things into it and removed things from it according to people’s condition and their judgements, as I have indicated previously.

For this reason, the narration of Yahya is the closest of all the narrations to having the consent of its author, the most trustworthy of them in connection with its author, and the closest of them in time to the choices he made, as well as being the last of them to be read back to the Imam, and it is well known that the ‘ulama consider the last reading from a direct hearing to be the weightiest, and it has its scientific value in their view. Apart from the Muwatta, the Sunan of Abu Dawud testifies to that, because there are many textual copies of it whose narrators transmit from Abu Dawud: al-Lu’lu’i, Ibn Dassah, ar-Ramli, Ibn al-A’rabi, and al-’Abdi. However, the copy of al-Lu’lu’i – who is Abu Ali Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn ‘Amr al-Basri – is the copy which is widespread in the lands of the east and is well known as THE Sunan of Abu Dawud when that is used unqualifiedly. His narration is one of the soundest narrations because it is one of the last which Abu Dawud dictated and upon which he died. Shaykh Mahmud Khattab as-Subki said, “And on it we depend in writing this commentary.”

Third, his statement that the Muwatta of Yahya comprises hadith narrated from Malik alone. As for the Muwatta of Muhammad it comprises extra narrations from other shaykhs, and that the one which comprises additional material is better than that which is void of this benefit.

I say: the book is Malik’s book for he is the author of the original, and all of those who narrated from him mention what they heard from him word for word and in his wording, without increase or decrease because they are trustworthy narrators. Safeguarding the necessary text is from his words, “So let him convey it as he heard it,” and is of the principles of the shari’ah.

So these additional extras which Muhammad narrated from people other than Malik in the Muwatta have no value in raising the level of of the Muwatta in relation to hearing directly from Malik because the Muwatta is the Muwatta of Malik and not the Muwatta of Muhammad, as we have made clear in the first investigation of this section.

Fourth, look at his preceding statement in the fourth proof and the answer to it, that we should first of all ask the people of this affair: is this book the Muwatta of Malik which Muhammad narrated or is it the Muwatta of Muhammad alone? meaning, that he is the author of it and that Malik is only one of his shaykhs from whom he narrates?

Then if you say the former, i.e.  that the book is the Muwatta of Malik and that Muhammad merely narrated it from him, then Muhammad’s hearing of it has a shortcoming in relation to that of Yahya which is because the author of the book himself when he himself speaks about the contents of his book the Muwatta says about it:

“The hadith of the Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, and the verdicts of the Companions and Followers, and my own views – and I have spoken about my own view and about ijtihad and about that which I reached the people of knowledge in our city being based upon and I did not go out from their collectivity to anyone else.”

The fact that the narration of Muhammad is void of these views about which Malik spoke saying that they are one of the principles of his book, and one of his most important materials is reckoned as a shortcoming and something which doubtless holds it back from the rank of the narration of Yahya.

If you say the second, i.e. that the book is the book of Muhammad and that the Muwatta is his Muwatta and that Malik has nothing more to do with it apart from the fact that he is one of the shaykhs of the compiler, then we say: the comparison of their relative merits then is incorrect and it has no value whatsoever in the scale of reckoning. That is because Malik made clear his preconditions and his technical usages and his methodology which he would follow in his book, and that is mention of the hadith and the verdicts of the Companions and the Followers, and theoretical understanding – as we saw previously – and the fact that the book of Muhammad is void of theoretical understanding [of Malik] but comprises hadith and traditions which are more noble does not increase its standing and does not decrease the narration of Yahya for two reasons:

First, that Yahya was a transmitter who narrated exactly as he had heard.

Second, that this is the technical usage of Malik and there is no contesting a technical usage.

If you refuse anything but to compare the relative merits based on this issue, then you are not comparing relative merits of the narration of Yahya and the Muwatta of Muhammad, but you are comparing the relative merits of the Muwatta of Muhammad and the Muwatta of Malik since this is an aspersion cast on the technical usage of the author of the book who is Malik and not Yahya, and does any sane person say this? Where does Malik stand in relation to his pupil Muhammad?

As for the fact that the narration of Yahya – or the Muwatta of Yahya as it is expressed metaphorically but not literally – has many sections in which there is only mention of Malik’s ijtihad and his derivation of rulings without narration of any traditions, contrary to the Muwatta of Muhammad in which no section is void of narration of a tradition, then this is also not considered a correct aspect for comparison of their relative merits, since the Muwatta is the Muwatta of Malik and he has chosen as his technical usage to mention in it three basic matters as we saw previously. Thus, if he mixes two of them in a chapter or suffices himself with two of them or one of them, then he has not gone away from his technical usage and his methodology. This is one aspect. The second aspect is that it was thus that Yahya received it and heard it and narrated it just as he heard it so that the criticism is not of him but of Malik.

Fifth, the response to the fifth proof is one of the proofs of the comparison of the relative merits:

which is that the book of Muhammad, since it has a special concern with the Hanafi madhhab, yet the Muwatta is greater than this, since the Muwatta is the book of hadith, traditions and theoretical understanding (ra’y) and practice (‘amal), and it is more universal than being concerned with a specific madhhab or cultivating a particular manner of acting (ma’khadh) even the madhhab of the author himself – the Maliki madhhab – and for that reason we see that al-Layth ibn Sa’d claimed that Malik in his madhhab gave up acting by seventy sunnahs which he narrated in his Muwatta. Similarly, it is narrated from Ibn Hazm in his book Maratib ad-diyanah, but Allah has made it easy by His gracious favour for whoever answers all of that.

So what have we to do with the Hanafis and the proofs of the Hanafis? Because the book is one of the sources of Islam and one of the references for the shari’ah. (From Anwar al-Masalik ila Riwayat Muwatta’ Malik, by Shaykh Muhammad ibn ‘Alawi al-Maliki, may Allah have mercy on him, translated by Abdassamad Clarke)

Mukhtasar al-Quduri

The Mukhtasar of al-Quduri

]]> http://www.bogvaerker.dk/wordpress/?feed=rss2&p=545 30 http://www.bogvaerker.dk/wordpress/?p=542 http://www.bogvaerker.dk/wordpress/?p=542#comments Mon, 01 Mar 2010 21:18:34 +0000 admin http://www.bogvaerker.dk/wordpress/?p=542

The Norwich Conference 2010 - paving the way for the post-banking economy

For further details and breaking news visit: The Norwich Conference

Shari’ah – Islamic Law

What, we might ask, is the significance of the publication of a weighty tome such as this on the shari’ah of Islam at this time, in this language and in these countries? We assume the reader’s understanding that the legal systems built up by Europeans over centuries incorporating basic liberties such as habeus corpus have been dismantled and are being replaced increasingly by the most totalitarian structures, which informed commentators see as perilously close to fascism. It was perhaps inevitable that something built on the frail foundations of human thought could be thus perverted, but was nonetheless terribly shocking to those who saw the accelerated process during their own lifetimes and recognised it for what it was.

It seems there is no going back. Once the framework of liberties has been demolished, there would appear to be no way to restore it. Its demolition had long preceded the more draconian manifestations. The classically trained Conservative MP Enoch Powell recognised that apparently minor legislation such as speeding fines had in essence abolished the whole basis of British law, for common law (also the basis of US law), depended on someone reporting an offence to an officer of the law who took statements and gathered evidence, later to be presented before a judge and twelve peers of the accused in a jury, the accused being represented by defence counsel and able to challenge the evidence or bring evidence of his own. Then the jury, having considered the case for the prosecution and the case for the defence, passed judgement, and the judge, weighing the case and the judgement carefully, passed sentence. However, in speeding and parking fines a single person sums up in his person the arresting officer, prosecution – the counsel for the defence having been abolished – judge, jury, and executioner of the sentence, thus effectively ending a legal system that had endured from before the time of King John and which had been erected on the basis of foundations such as the Magna Carta. We have not even begun to talk about the legislation for the ‘terrorist threat’.

Now, the world simultaneously slips into a lawless chaos, in which unbridled corporate greed is paralleled by organised crime, street thugs and hoodlums, both unchecked in any effective sense by government and police, along with the rise of a totalitarian control of the citizenry unparalleled in world history and of such dimensions as neither Hitler nor Stalin could have aspired to. The two poles of political motion, a conservatism that protected the aristocratic and arguably benign rule of monarchy and a socialism that campaigned for the rights of the poor and the workers, have been replaced by ‘centrist’ parties which, without exception, kow-tow to banking and financial powers, leaving democratic voters with no alternative whatsoever. This is the end of the European inspired dream of a just order based on rational thought and the will of the people, all of them. This totalitarian order now extends from the Amazonian jungles to the mountains of Afghanistan, and is close to realisation of its most cherished aim: the world state.

Lest anyone think that the world state will be our salvation, let them reflect on the fact that our European and American states, which feel themselves so civilised, and are so smug about the apparent peace and lack of warfare on home soil, in reality grew out of horrendous civil wars, after which they resolved never again to fight on their own turf, achieving this by the simple expedient of being continually involved in wars elsewhere. The English civil war led rapidly to the Glorious Revolution, establishment of the Bank of England and the birth of the British Empire out of the barrel of the gun trained on the hapless Chinese, Indians and Africans et al. The US civil war equally led to the century and more in which the US was continuously at war somewhere on the earth, that country’s economy largely based also on weapons manufacture, leading to the remark of Lewis Lapham, editor of Harper’s, to the effect that most recent US wars have been advertising, because the economy largely depends on arms exports.

Thus, human aggression has not been tamed in Judaeo-Christian society but merely unleashed elsewhere in the world in series of genocidal wars against the poorer peoples of the earth. The world state will not be a placid and peaceful middle class suburb, but something akin to the dystopic visions of our artists and thinkers: a high-tech élite in highly policed towers surrounded by disenfranchised and criminalised underclasses of almost sub-humans. The war will no longer be ‘out there’ but increasingly, as we witness today, right in the cities: permanent civil war, although it will never be identified as such. “Only a god can save us now,” in the words of the great German philosopher Martin Heidegger in his one and only newspaper interview.

Only a god can save us now, since it is precisely the lack of belief in a god that drives the nihilism of the age. But Heidegger deliberately chose the indefinite form ‘a god’, since there is no hope that the Judaeo-Christian God will do so, his demise having been seen so clearsightedly by Nietzshe.

When in the meeting a group of us had with former Home Secretary Charles Clarke we suggested that the key to terrorism is nihilism we overestimated his education. If he had understood Dostoyevsky he would have known that the origins of the all-too-obvious nihilism of the anarchist suicide bombers lay in their parents’ middle-class, middle-aged atheist materialism and failure of moral courage, and he would have seen that the young suicide bombers who so terrified him were the children of a society with no belief left in anything except living for the moment, that ‘living’ being a suicidal rush to extinction with the aid of every single unhygienic sexual practice and toxic substance available.

Only a god can save us and it is only the shariah that can replace the monstrous distortion that is modern law, yet the suggestion that the shariah as ‘a system’ can save us is utterly fatuous, for indeed in the hands of a totalitarian state, even the shariah, which is an embodiment of mercy, can be turned into a tool of tyranny and oppression.

To understand this, we must understand something of the term ‘guidance’, which has two aspects: first, explaining and making clear what is right and what is wrong. In that sense, this book is a manifestation of that first type of guidance, since it is an explanation of what is right and wrong as shown by the last revelation of the Divine to all mankind by means of the Messenger Muhammad, may Allah bless him and grant him peace. However, the second guidance is precisely the one that is needed at this point, and without it the shariah will be ineffective.

It is good to point out to the alcoholic that his addiction is killing him, but it is often superfluous since he is exactly the person who knows it better than anyone else. The wisdom and the guidance lies in showing him how to disengage from his suicidal habit. For this a deep knowledge of the human self is required. Unfortunately modern man is burdened with a ghastly materialistic view of the human self that inevitably traps him in an addiction that is so extreme that it amounts to an addiction to his own destruction. How else to explain the apparently unstoppable devastation of the biosphere and of every form of human conviviality that we experience almost daily?

For this benign science of the human self there is a precondition, which is that the human being wants it and asks for it, and only a god can help us, but since the God of the Judaeo-Christian age is dead, that anthropomorphic deity, whose theological contradictions weighed him down, not only must we turn to a god, but to One Who is beyond our existing conceptions of Him, and we must ask for the wisdom that will allow us not to hurtle to our own destruction, and will allow us to benefit from this first guidance, this clear manifestation of what is right and what is wrong that is the shariah of Islam.

And because things don’t just fall down from heaven but have their pathways in this world and on this earth, we must ask to meet the people who have this guidance, who embody it and who can pass it on, having received it in transmission over the generations from the best of mankind, the last Messenger from the Lord of the Worlds, Muhammad, may Allah bless him and grant him peace.

Shari’ah – Islamic Law is published by Ta-Ha Publishers Ltd., London, UK

MO: How did you convert to Islam? Tell us the story

Shaykh Dr Abdalqadir as-Sufi came to Edinburgh in 1973 with a group of people who had accepted Islam at his hands in order to call people to Islam. I had been studying there and attended a meeting he organised. I met the Shaykh and he invited me to spend some time with him and his people while they were in Edinburgh, which I did. Then I accompanied him down to London and spent some weeks in the community, performing the prayers and taking part in all the community activities. They performed all the prayers together and ate together. After that I became a Muslim.

MO: You are a part of the Murabitun Movement. What are they?

Properly speaking Murabitun is not the name of a movement because Imam Malik, may Allah be merciful to him, did not accept any name other than Muslim. Murabitun denotes the people of ribat, which means a number of things, including a man’s going to the frontiers in order to stand guard and protect the Muslims and the lands of Islam, and it also denotes those who remain steadfast in the front-line of the battle. So I don’t know if I could claim such a rank, and prefer to call myself one of the Muslims in the communities initiated by Shaykh Dr Abdalqadir as-Sufi.

MO: Do you consider Sufism to be an integral part of Orthodox Islam?

My opinion is not so important in that. We go back to what the ulama say about such things. In that sense tasawwuf is the science of Ihsan as mentioned in the famous hadith of Jibril, peace be upon him, when the Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, said words whose meaning is, “Ihsan is that you worship Allah as if you see Him, for if you do not see Him, He sees you.” There is a huge literature on this subject and if you go back before the colonial era and rise of the movement of Muhammad ibn Abdalwahhab in the Najd and the appearance of Muhammad Abduh and Jamal ad-Din al-Afghani, although there is a domain of legitimate difference about some aspects of this matter, you do not find the current controversy about Sufism. And if you go back to the very earliest community before the appearance of the tariqahs, you find no difference at all about figures such as Imam Junayd, Sahl ibn Abdullah at-Tustari and Hasan al-Basri, may Allah be merciful to them all. So yes Sufism is an integral part of the deen of Islam.

MO: Why is Sufism important?

Since most of the Muslims consider the intention the first part of action because of his words, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, “Actions are only by intentions”, and the intention is formed in the heart, then clearly the purity of the heart is of fundamental importance. And this is no easy matter. It is much easier to talk about than to do. The heart gets encrusted by ‘things’ and purifying it is serious work, and if people do not even have the concept of doing that then their Islam becomes a hard and rigid external matter concealing a host of inner ills.

However, that is only a negative aspect, i.e. the purification of the heart of the ills that are clearly destructive in this world and the next world, proof of whose importance is clear to everyone in the Book and the Sunnah.

The other thing is the tremendous potential of the purified heart in terms of direct knowledge of Allah, which is called in Arabic ma’rifah, which is considered by the scholars of ‘aqidah to be of fundamental importance before every other obligation of the deen and which, by purification of the heart, can be deepened to become something truly vast, as is befitting of the Lord of the Universe, so that the people of knowledge of the salaf, as of the later generations, will refer respectfully to someone as being “one of the ‘arifun” i.e. one of the people with a direct knowledge of Allah not dependent on intellectual proof or texts. And how can we question such a concept when Allah declares His granting of direct knowledge to His slave Khadir in Surat al-Kahf?

“They found a slave of Ours whom We had granted mercy from Us

and whom We had also given knowledge direct from Us.”

MO: Some critics say that Sufism is a quietist, apolitical form of Islam. Would you agree?

Only people who know nothing about history can say that. There isn’t a single jihad in the 18th and 19th centuries, genuine jihads against the colonialists and defending the Muslims, that was not led by Sufis. Even Indian movements such as the Deobandi school are steeped in Sufism along with a very rigorous adherence to the shariah. On the other hand, the movement that originated in the Najd only fought and killed other Muslims in its rebellion against the legitimate Ottoman caliphate, breaking the unity of Islam in the process.

But, the problem here is that,  in the first place, Sufism is not a form of Islam. Sufism, as a name for the science of Ihsan, is one of the three dimensions of the deen along with Islam and Iman without which someone’s deen is not complete. Many scholars hold that it is a fard ‘ayn, i.e. an individual obligation on every single man and woman. Therefore one cannot be a ‘Sufi’ as such, or even a ‘Sufi Muslim’.

The great scholar ash-Shahrastani in his work al-Milal wa’n-nihal, in which he devoted himself to detailing who the 73 sects mentioned in the prophetic hadith are and what they believe, did not mention Sufis as one of these sects and indeed did not mention the madhhabs, the legal schools. That was because they were an unquestioned part of the fabric of the deen both for him and for the age for which he was writing. They would have regarded it as idiotic to consider the legal schools or the Sufi tariqahs as sects.

MO: You have expressed the view that paper money should be abolished and replaced with gold and silver coins. Why is that?

Perhaps abolition is not the correct way to look at it. As with the British pound note, paper money is a ‘promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of so-many pounds’. Therefore paper money is not itself money. It is an IOU. The IOU is not allowable for use in many transactions, most importantly zakat. An IOU cannot be used in transactions between people except under very strict conditions that are governed by the fiqh of the legal schools.

However, the situation is much worse than that. The human race has handed the right to a group of quite shady people to simply write numbers on bits of paper and then lend them to us at interest. The scale of it is so immense that, if we take strange financial deceptions such as derivatives into account, the amounts that are written on bits of paper hugely outweigh the actual wealth of the entire planet. That is clearly such a monstrous situation that it cannot last. But the people who understand this the best are those who invented and who use the system, because, while it lasts, they are buying up anything of any real value that they can lay their hands on. We experience that as the steep rise in the prices of the basic commodities that we need to live: food, petrol, land, etc.

On the other hand, we know from the famous hadith in Sahih al-Bukhari about the man who was asked to buy a sheep for the Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, for one dinar, which was their ordinary price, but was able to buy two then sell one for a dinar and return with a sheep and the original dinar intact, that this same selfsame dinar today would still buy a sheep almost anywhere on the earth, and sometimes two. There is similar evidence of the purchasing power of an ordinary Roman gold coin. Thus gold and silver have not suffered any inflation at all in two thousand years.

Paper money and electronic credit have an insane potential for astonishing and rapid expansion and enrichment, and people are loathe to give that up, even if the downside is famine, depression and intolerable enslaving lifestyles for billions of people.

But we do not suggest that anyone has to abolish paper money or legislate the use of gold and silver; we say that people have to be allowed freedom to use whatever they want, except for usurious instruments. When people are free to choose they have always chosen gold and silver.

The argument is even more compelling for us because of the fact of zakat being an act of worship and not social welfare, even if it has genuine social repercussions. As an act of worship it has to be done the way the first communities and all the generations of Islam have done it, and it was always paid with gold and silver when paid on savings and on goods held for trade. The same thing that has Muslims all over the earth, in the revitalised Islam we see everywhere, taking such care over the performance of their wudu’ and the exact performance of their prayers will, when applied to zakat, mean that the Muslims will put real money back into circulation and that is the thing that will drive the criminal banking system to destruction and that will benefit non-Muslims as much as Muslims.

MO: Do you consider Western civilization to be in a state of crisis?

Yes, but since we are now living in the era of the world state, the global culture of finance and industry that originated in Europe, that crisis is global. The Chinese character for crisis is made of two characters: one for danger and the other for opportunity. In many ways, the crisis in Europe and in America has much potential in it. There are many new green shoots of growth. One reading of our history, and one has to remember that history is many different strands all intertwined, would show the striving of Western people to come out from under the dead hand of the tyranny of the Church and the forms of autocratic and arbitrary governance that it endorsed. Here we must make a clear distinction between Christianity as the beliefs and practices of ordinary people and the political organisation that is the Church. Religiously, philosophically and politically European and Western man has been striving for freedom and justice and for the truth. The last shackle that holds him today is that of the financial system and that is the worst shackle of all.

MO: Do you think Islam should change with the times?

Islam and its parameters are defined by the Book and by the Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace. There is a genuine way in which some of the ulama try to not make things too difficult for the Muslims and to adapt to the circumstances of the age. But many of these adaptations are from the principle of darurah, pressing necessity, whose prime example is the man in the desert who is starving to death and can only find food that is not lawful to eat. In that case, not only is what is ordinarily not lawful permissible for him to eat, but it is obligatory for him to eat. But this license depends on our understanding that it is only when he is striving with all his might to get out of the desert and return to where he can eat the halal. If he decides to set up house in the desert and go into business selling unlawful food, he is clearly making a joke of Islam.

There is a dynamic in some of the legal schools that allows them to really get to terms with new ages in history and different cultures in which the deen takes root without compromising in any way. That is inbuilt in Islam, this ability to confront the new without reaction and to absorb what is healthy and wholesome and reject what is unwholesome. Shaykh Dr. Abdalqadir as-Sufi summed it up by saying that Islam is not a culture but a filter for culture.

MO: Do you think there is a European Islamic culture emerging?

We know from history that wherever Islam has taken root it takes on the colour of the culture that is there. Thus the Chinese Muslim is Chinese and Muslim in the same way that the African Muslim is African and Muslim. We know for sure that if Islam does not find its European-ness it will not take root and will not survive here. But this is not in our hands; these are forces that only Allah has power over. Our role in it is to be authentic and honest and true to ourselves. It is impossible for us to be Moroccans or Arabs or Pakistanis. Even now the young people who are second and third generation descendants of immigrants are amazingly European and yet huge numbers of them have a very coherent Islam too. The worst thing that can happen is this dialectic that gets set up about “Islam and the West” – they are not two terms in opposition – even if for no other reason than that strategically going head to head with an enemy doesn’t even make sense, and in my view the West is not an enemy to Islam. We have a situation in which there is far more good will from ordinary people towards Islam and Muslims than we realise, but most of us live – far too much for our own good – in a mental space that is created by the media, and the media is part of the triumvirate of power that Shaykh Dr. Abdalqadir as-Sufi has defined: finance, the political class and media. The media are a part of an occupying force that is trying to prevent life and freedom. If you talk to people, you get a very different story. It is in those meetings between Muslims and ordinary people here in these lands that a new European Islamic culture is emerging as we speak.

MO: Which composer do you prefer – Beethoven or Wagner?

Your question assumes much: first, that we have already decided that music is lawful for us to listen to, which huge numbers of Muslims, with some right, don’t believe. My perspective on this is that because of the political, intellectual and spiritual tyranny of the church and the autocracies it endorsed, European man was not allowed to say the truth, particularly the truth of tawhid. But the truth must be said. It is intolerable to man that it not be said, and so in these lands it was the musicians and the poets who found ways  and who found a language in which the truth could speak, because music is a language, but it is a language that takes into account feelings and the states of the human heart. Human language as sets of statements and propositions devoid of feeling is a relatively trivial matter. You can name Bach as one of the discoverers of this language, and Beethoven was one of the people who was most articulate in this abstract language of instrumental music and who used it to express the longing of the human heart for freedom and for the Divine. Beethoven was a deeply spiritual man. Wagner took that amazing gift and combined it with another entire strand of culture: drama and the use of the spoken word to produce something else. But in that their gaze was on the Divine and on the potential of free human beings and of a future free society.

As to my favourite, I think that is almost impossible to answer.

MO: Why should somebody convert to Islam? Give us some reasons.

People find the traces of the Divine in many different ways. For some people it is in intellectual terms. They find the argument compelling. For some it is aesthetic. Some fall in love with a Muslim and the eye of love shows them the truth of Islam. Some recognise something in the social setting and a society they can enter. This last is the most compelling argument because societal structures are breaking down and being replaced by the most appalling culture of surveillance and tyrannical control. A demonstrable human society embodying the highest human qualities and courtesy and humour is the strongest invitation to Islam. When we understand that, it becomes incumbent on us as Muslims to forget missionary types of activity and to embark on creating something real. In that sense we have the saying of Imam Malik that: the Sunnah is the ship of Noah; whoever embarks on it is saved. This is a very tangible and physical image and obviously refers to something more than the relatively trivial things that we sometimes reduce the Sunnah to. Again in a phrase from Shaykh Dr. Abdalqadir as-Sufi, we need an ‘emergency-kit Islam’, something that will not get washed away in the tremendous floods that are ahead of us. And we have to have the generosity to help as many people on board as we can, for the tremendous nature of the Islam of Muhammad, the Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, is this character of rescuing everyone except for a small group of the most intransigent. It is that generosity and largeness of heart that is needed.

Last question: Can you describe the concept of community in the murabitun perspective?

Perhaps it is easier to describe the reality of community with us. Shaykh Dr. Abdalqadir as-Sufi has been almost alone in his da‘wah on insisting on his people staying together, establishing the deen together, working together – both in the way of Allah and in businesses and professions – and living together. That has reached the point that our second generation is established and among them are young people with professions and trades, imams and hafidhs of Qur’an and scholars, teachers of the next generation, and they have their families and our third generation is already growing up. So this is the first time this has happened in European history, and of course it is happening with other communities elsewhere in huge numbers too.

Throughout history, people have been accepting Islam in Europe, but it has never lasted, sometimes for quite sinister reasons such as the Inquisition’s torturing people to leave the deen and often killing them. But sometimes the deen just did not ‘take’, because there is a difference between being a Muslim and establishing the deen, just as there is a difference between praying and establishing the prayer. So now there are growing numbers of communities of Shaykh Dr. Abdalqadir as-Sufi both in Europe and the West and in Muslim lands and places like South Africa. They are not established on a concept so much as they have grown organically out of the needs of the people to retain their Islam and to establish it, and out of their mutual affection for each other and pleasure in each other’s company. But of course they are underpinned by the necessary knowledge of the Book and the Sunnah and the fiqh.

Heinmot Tooyalaket (Chief Joseph) of the Nez Percés

…

In a short time a group of commissioners arrived to begin organization of a new Indian agency in the valley. One of them mentioned the advantages of schools for Joseph’s people. Joseph replied that the Nez Percés did not want the white man’s schools.

“Why do you not want schools?” the commissioner asked.

“They will teach us to have churches,” Joseph answered.

“Do you not want churches?”

“No, we do not want churches.”

“Why do you not want churches?”

“They will teach us to quarrel about God,” Joseph replied. “We do not want to learn that. We may quarrel with men sometimes about things on this earth, but we never quarrel about God. We do not want to learn that.”3

3 U.S. Commissioner of Indian Affairs. Annual Report, 1873, p.527