What
is Riba?
Riba is usury.
Usury is now commonly understood as the lending of money at illegally high
rates of interest. But this deliberate corruption of terminology took place in
Europe in order to permit the ‘money lender’ (now called banker) to bypass the Christian
church and its objection to all forms of usury. R. W. Tawney wrote a classic book
in 1935 entitled “Religion and the
Rise of Capitalism” in which he described the prolonged Euro-Christian
opposition to Riba. William Shakespeare also did the same in his classic
play, “The Merchant of Venice”.
Riba in Islam
(as in medieval Christianity) is the lending of money on interest, regardless
of the rate of interest. When a ‘money lender’ lends money on interest, then money
by itself, independent of any labor or effort or the assumption of any risk by
the investor, increases over time. The increase is realized by deception
through the exploitation of labor, goods and property. This becomes clear when
attention is directed to that which Allah has unambiguously declared in the Qur’an:
“ . . . man is entitled to nothing except that for which he
labored.”
(Qur’an, al-Najm, 53:39)
Thus the Qur’an rejects the claim that money can
increase over time!
One of the ways through which that exploitation takes place
is the consequent decrease in the value of wages, of goods and of property over
time, something that Allah has specifically prohibited in several verses of
the Qur’an. The Prophet Shu’aib constantly warned his people of
the wickedness of their economic life:
“…. do not deprive people of what is rightfully theirs by
diminishing the value of their things (such as their labor, merchandise,
property etc).”
(Qur’an, al-’Araf, 7:85; Hud, 11:85; al-Shu’ara‘, 26:183; etc.)
Perhaps the secularized champions of organized labor, who
dismiss the Qur’an as a book of guidance, would now begin to understand
the reason why the labor force is daily being transformed into jackasses who sweat on behalf of the
rich, and the banks which they own.
Muslims must also understand that Riba is at work
when wealth is sucked from the masses through legalized fraud involved in the
use of artificial paper money. This money replaced the money that was the Sunnah
of every Prophet of Allah Most High i.e., gold and silver and other precious
metals. Artificial paper, plastic and electronic money (i.e., secular
money) has no intrinsic value. Rather the value of the money is assigned to it
and then it constantly loses value over
time, as the system was designed to make it happen. Banks are the major
actors at work in forcing a decrease in the value of money, and banks make the
most profit when such occurs. As money loses value, the value of everything is
decreased. Prices rise, and wages lose value. Labor is then imprisoned in slave
wages.
to be continued....
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