These experiences have generated much soul searching and rethinking among Islamic economists and within the broader Islamist movement as web. In fact, the 1990s saw growing support for reforms considered heretical just a few decades earlier, when modernists objected to the zakat systems on the draw ing board. The most prominent dissenter was Fazlur Rahman (1919 88), a Pakistani scholar who, starting in the 1960s, argued that to become an effective economic instrument a modern zakat system should be based on universal economic principles and accommodate prevailing economic realities.16 Accordingly, he wanted the sources of revenue to include commodities and occupations unknown in early Islam and rates and expenditure categories to be adjusted in the light of changing social needs. These proposals drew vociferous objections from Islamists committed, at least in principle, to the immutability of the Islamic social order. In 1969 Rahman was forced to flee Pakistan under death threats, and he became a professor at the University of Chicago, where he served until the end of his life. Ironically, even though each of the subsequently instituted zakat systems was presented as a replica of the seventh century system, all involved unacknowledged, and often also unique, innovations. For example, bank deposits were made 'zakatable’ once a year in Pakistan, but not in Malaysia; and in Pakistan officials of the zakat admin istration were paid out of government funds, in Malaysia out of zakat receipts, in accordance with early Islamic practice.
By the dawn of the twenty first century, it had become commonplace to encounter proposals for collecting zakat from a broader class of people than mentioned in traditional sources, for updating rates and for monitoring zakat officials. In fact, a sizeble minority was proposing that from the standpoint of poverty alleviation zakat funds were better used for education and training than for financing immediate consumption. Each of these proposals departs from the specifics of what is considered the zakat system implemented in Arabia, during the first few decades of Islam.
However, potentially the most significant reform proposal is one embraced by only a small minority. Going beyond what Fazlur Rahman contemplated, it
16 Fazlur Rahman, 'Islam and the problem of economic justice’, Pakistan Economist, 14 (24 August 1974), especially pp. 27 34.
Concerns the definition of the community within which income and wealth transfers are to take place. Under Muhiammad’s helmsmanship there was a single, and in principle undivided, Muslim community. Leaders of the poorest predominantly Muslim countries, such as Yemen, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sudan, Somalia and Tanzania, are beginning to ask, usually privately, why zakdt transfers should now be constrained by political boundaries. The early Islamic pattern should require, they are arguing, oil wealth to be shared not only with the poor of prosperous oil producers but, more broadly, with those of the entire Islamic world. Why, one might ask, did it take so long for an international zakdt system to become a subject of discussion? After all, the poorer Muslim countries have always had strong incentives to demand large cross country transfers. The most widely disseminated publications on zakdt, and all major zakdt conferences, have been financed largely, if not wholly, by Saudi Arabia, which has been averse to automatic annual transfers based on need. Like other aid donors, Saudi Arabia prefers to have a say in the selection of its aid recipients.
For all the talk about reviving an ancient system, modern Islamic redistrib ution appears responsive, then, to social pressures and changing conditions. Islamic banking, too, is a recent creation. Pre modern Islam featured no banks in the modern sense, let alone 'Islamic’ banks. There were elaborate rules to regulate financial transactions among individuals, including a law of partner ships, an inheritance law and a law of sale. However, no laws emerged to govern organisations capable of pooling the resources of thousands of people and designed to live indefinitely, like today’s Islamic banks. Legally an Islamic bank is a corporation, which is a concept that entered legal systems of the Islamic world only in the late nineteenth century, through Western influences.
Given the commitment of Islamic economics to early Islamic precedents, it may come as a surprise that the corporate character of an Islamic bank is not an issue in Islamist discourse. Evidently the corporate form has become such an integral part of Muslim life that its foreign origins are hardly recognised, let alone questioned and debated. The same can be said about a huge array of other modern concepts, institutions and practices that Islamic economics accepts by default. Looking at Islamic economics as a whole, it is striking how it focuses on a few issues, most prominently Islamic banking and Islamic redistribution, leaving vast domains essentially untouched. Although publica tions presenting an ostensibly Islamic viewpoint exist in most fields of eco nomics, little else has been written that stands out, symbolism aside, as recognisably Islamic.
World History
