The image of the usurious Jew is a repellent one from the Middle Ages, redolent with the anti-Jewish prejudices of the Christians of the time, but, in fact, the story is much older than that, and had, by the Middle Ages, become almost redundant.
The originators of usury were the ancient so-called ‘founding civilisations’ of Sumer and Babylon, and from them some of the Children of Israel took the practice, in spite of the prohibition by their own Prophetic revelations and their repeated denunciations reiterated in the Noble Qur’an.
The Reformation marks a watershed when the Christians no longer saw the point in paying interest to this nation they despised, and entered into the market with great alacrity and avidity, but initially trying to cap interest rates, which had been in the hundreds, to Calvin’s ‘reasonable’ 4%, a cap very quickly dispensed with. Their unique contribution was that usury, which had been a mortal sin, was posited as a Christian virtue, and we got the ‘Christian’ banking houses of the Barclays and the Lloyds etc.
Thus Christians and Jews forged the modern world, and fatefully they both lured (the Ottomans) and coerced (the Mughals), in other words the Muslims, to join in.
Now it takes a great deal of obstinacy or rather credulity (belief) not to see that modernity is the destruction not only of the biosphere, which is bad enough, but of humanness itself. And the very engine of that destruction is monetarism, meaning the institution of fiat, digital and paper moneys rather than gold and silver, and not simply the charging of interest. (Interest, of course, created the ‘interest’ in the project.)
Where well-meaning Muslims get it wrong is to think that the Islamic understanding (fiqh) of transactions can simply be translated over into modern terms, substituting fiat currencies for the dinar and dirham, shops and supermarkets for open free markets, distribution channels for trade, and monopolistic corporations for free guilds of traders and the professions.
Fiqh-understanding applies not only to trade or even to Islam but also to Iman – the understanding of what can be known and said about Allah and His Messengers, and the affairs of the unseen, and to Ihsan – the understanding of the inner being manifested in the good character and the qualities of futuwwa known as tasawwuf or tazkiya-purification of the self. Naturally recovery must entail a proper understanding of all three dimensions of the Deen: Islam, Iman and Ihsan, and not merely be an economic or political programme.
Recovery of the Islamic understanding (fiqh) of trade and commerce must pole-vault over the digression of modernism, that fatefully began with Mahmud II and the Tanzimat and with Muhammad Abduh and his ilk, and reconnect to the classical understanding when Muslim law was actually sustained in practice all over the world.
In a non-Madhhab sense, the understanding encapsulated in the Muwatta, which documents the trade of Madina of the first three generations to a far greater degree than any of the other classical works such as Bukhari and Muslim, is an inestimable resource for us.
Drawing a line from that beginning to the point where our line ceased to be straight – which brought down an unparalleled degradation on us and the human species, for Muslims are a middle nation and witnesses to all humanity – is the task before us in practice and in knowledge.