Reading turath in Ahmed Sadiq Saad’s texts

Editorial note: 

Nasr first delivered this essay in early May 1990 at a conference commemorating the Marxist thinker Ahmed Sadiq Saad (1919-1988) and his contributions to the left in Egypt since his early days in the Communist movement of the 1940s. The essay was later reproduced in two separate publications: the first appeared in 1992 as part of the conference proceedings and the second was printed in Volume 9, Issue 87 of the journal, Adab wa Naqd (Literature and Criticism), also in 1992. The two versions are identical, except for a slight addition made to the title of the essay in Adab wa Naqd where the interplay between the reading of turath and the turath of reading is further emphasized. Thus, the title “The reading of turath in the writings of Ahmed Sadiq Saad” in the conference proceedings becomes “The reading of turath and the turath of reading (in the Writings of Ahmed Sadiq Saad).”

                  In re-publishing the essay here, with an English translation, we are in turn commemorating the one-year anniversary of the passing of our friend, colleague and comrade Waad Ahmed by continuing the conversations and blossoming companionship that she had started with Nasr and this text in particular.

Toward this end, we have also included the notes Waad took in the margins of her copy of The Problematics of Social Formation and Popular Patterns of Thought in Egypt: Studies and Discussions from the Conference/Symposium dedicated to Ahmed Sadiq Saad 3-5 May 1990 and preserved the passages she underlined. Waad’s comments will appear with an asterisk (*) in the margins of the following text, while other editorial notes will be indicated with a virgule (|).

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It’s necessary in the beginning to differentiate between two types of engaging with turath|. The first is the traditional way, which is predicated on a reliance (istinad) on turath and the use of it as a comprehensive referential framework. The second is through an intentional reading, one that is self-aware as a reading within a specific discursive framework. Naturally, each reading has a conception of turath that is the opposite of the other. There is no need to describe the traditional engagement at length. It suffices to say that it conceives of turath first as “religious tradition” and that it thinks of what is a diverse religious and multi-directional tradition as unidirectional.. Unlike the intentional reading, the traditional reading merely repeats ideas and historical concepts by describing them as immortal, immutable truths. And it seems that the appeal to turath — in the narrow aforementioned sense — is clear in the use of old language and an attachment to historical terminology to express contemporary concepts and modern truths. It is common in works that adopt the idea of “Islamic economics” to see terms such as imaar, khilafa, riba, rikaz, zakat, sadaqa, barakah, etc, and, perhaps, here, it would be useful to mention the basic tenets of an Islamic economic system as proposed by some, so that the appeal to turath through the reliance on historical concepts and old terminology is made clear. This system is premised on a number of general rules which include the following:

1- That governance and servitude belong to God alone.

2- That money belongs to God and we have been entrusted to oversee it by Him.

3- That the two parts of Islamic Sharia have an organic and objective link to one another (Ibadat and Muamalat).

4- That the standard for judging a person according to his social position is Taqwa.

5- That it is the mission of humans to worship God in the broad sense, which also includes Muamalat.

6- That the purpose of being on earth is to develop it, and this includes multiplying money.

7- That Islamic economic activity is mainly based on barakah, which is a natural consequence of following God’s sharia.

8- That responsibility is clearly defined in this system (1).

In an economic system based on barakah as one of its main rules, there is no point to any “reading” of turath in any sense of the word, even a biased reading with an agenda. An economic system based on such a concept ignores the reality of the present as well as the reality of turath, turning economic discourse into a moralizing discourse that mimics the rhetoric of religious sermons. And when economic discourse is turned into a moralizing one, it can easily allow for an exploitative economic system in which the poor are only protected by the morality and conscientiousness of the rich. And this system would sharpen all its weapons to defend private property and leave prices to the mechanisms of the market and the law of supply and demand. There will always be those who call for a ban on price controls in any context and instead, advocate for leaving the rent pricing of real estate and agricultural land open to the mechanisms of the free market. It is a cruel, exploitative capitalism that had disappeared from its original strongholds and was replaced by regulation and sometimes direct intervention, that is now being allowed to return under the guise of Islam and a reliance on its turath.

(1)

But the intentional reading, being self-aware, protects itself from the pitfalls of this old language at any level. It realizes that turath is an expression of historically-bounded truths, a response to objective social conditions that are no longer present. If some concepts and historical values are still present in some capacity in the culture of the collective and its behavioral patterns and practices, that is because the current socioeconomic reality represents an extension of the reality that produced the turath. It is an extension that is not equivalent to the past, nor is it a repetition, but it is also not totally separate from it either. The presence of some turath concepts and their values represent a continuity, just as the absence of others represents a separation between past and present. Thus, the relationship between the past and the present is defined through an absence and presence dialectic, and the turath that the present conjures is an organic part of its own culture. Understanding turath as an expression of historically-bounded truths inevitably leads to understanding turath’s diversity and rejecting the notion that it is homogenous, as the historical reality that produced it was rich with variegated and antagonistic social powers. As a result, the nature of turath that manifests in the present social reality varies according to the different social powers of that reality that interact and antagonize one another. What’s more significant is that the intentional reading of turath does not stop at the limits of Islamic turath but understands turath in its historical depth, with its multitude of sources, its diversity and continuity.

Ahmed Sadiq Saad’s work belongs to this camp of intentional reading, which we will delve into in this text. It is necessary to offer a disclaimer before we begin, namely that the intentional reading, given that it is still a reading, is not entirely immune to the pitfalls of a utilitarian “reliance” on turath. And a reliance on turath is still a reliance on turath, even if progressive tendencies are reclaimed within it. The difference between the reliance on turath in the intentional reading and the traditional Salafi engagement comes down to the former’s awareness of itself as a reading which is rooted in its recognition of turath’s multiplicity. The Salafi reliance on turath is deceptive and unethical from the viewpoint of scientific knowledge. It is an implicit, ideological reliance, whereas, in the case of the intentional reading, the fact that it is an ideological reliance is acknowledged. But Ahmed Sadiq Saad’s reading is free to a large extent, if not completely, of the ills of ideological reliance and invites us to transcend a utilitarian position and produce a scientific awareness of turath:

“As for the progressive, democratic schools — including the majority of the Marxist movement — in Arab countries, we can say that the majority have an exploitative relationship with Islamic thought, meaning they take what they think is “positive” and leave out what they think is “negative,” which breaks up this thought in a reductive manner that does not correspond to its reality” (2).

Therefore, it is clear that the divergent approaches do not only differ in their understanding of turath, but also in their awareness of it, insofar as they pick and choose what supports their positions while leaving out that which does not. What they are really doing is engaging in a critical interpretation of turath, even if they do not explicitly say this. But subjecting turath to critique and sorting out what is related to past conditions from what can relate to the present must be done with transparency so that a particular knowledge of turath can be produced that can provide people with concepts that correspond with contemporary issues and thereby help them mobilize the power of these concepts to face challenges. Such a critique can thus play a significant role in tanmiya|. (3)

The starting point that provided Ahmed Sadiq Saad with the framework of his intentional reading of turath is one of a twofold nature. If awareness of the significance of the role of turath in shaping the present and the role of the present in reformulating turath can be traced to the enlightenment discourse of the Nahda, then the events of the Islamic revolution in Iran and the success of the jurists (fuqaha) in mobilizing people to take power and expel the shah have brought the idea of turath to the forefront of every Muslim intellectual broadly and every Arab intellectual in particular. The assassination of the former Egyptian president by Islamic Jihadists had a prominent role in making Islamic turath the main preoccupation for the Egyptian intellectual especially. Ahmed Sadiq Saad’s starting point is a general preoccupation with turath on the one hand, while on the other, he has a particular economic preoccupation, specifically with the issue of tanmiya.

Ahmed Sadiq Saad begins from a common saying among many intellectuals that has it that Arab culture in general, and Egyptian culture in particular, suffers from a duality that splits it into two cultures, or more accurately two strands: an Eastern strand that is “the most widespread among the popular swaths of society, fused with Islam both religiously and intellectually. This strand has characteristics and roots can be traced to pre-Arab civilizations in the region, which proves an uninterrupted historical and intellectual continuity with the present and emphasizes the doctrinal difference between Eastern and Western Christianity, among other things”(4). The second strand is a Western secular one that is more common among intellectuals: “Secularism is the main culture of authority and its disciplinarian, educational and media apparatuses (despite the Islamic and Eastern hues with which they attempt to imbue their actions before the public)” (5). This cultural divide does not only run along a class dichotomy that divides society into people and regime: “In Egyptian society, there is a vertical divide alongside a class divide, and the same division exists among Egyptian intellectuals. Among those who have adopted Western culture and those who retained Eastern culture or reverted to it, and some who have mixed the two, Islamic beliefs and Eastern traditions are still strong and deeply rooted in the vast majority of intellectuals, including those who have been secularized and Westernized” (6).

Disregarding our agreement or disagreement with the conception of Egyptian Arab culture and its division into two — a Western secular strand and an Islamic Eastern strand — it presents the conflict and alludes to the solution at once. There is no answer to this schism other than merging the two strands. Even if colonialism and foreign influence had founded “a contradiction between the two cultures, which is the central point of the issue of turath and modernity” (7) then “the main problem here is in merging these two Arab intellectual strands, which we do not think is impossible despite the apparent difficulty. There have been some efforts from each side in wanting to understand and engage with the other. If the Arab intellectual wishes to remain in an emancipatory, progressive role and to explore the Western route toward progress, then they must work on breaking the obstacle between the two strands, ridding themselves of previous molds” (8).

Here, we can see that the main starting point in engaging with turath for Ahmed Sadiq Saad and many others is the search for identity and finding the Arab route toward progress and tanmiya. But the error that this starting point commits is in the main assumptions on which it is built. It is odd that these faulty assumptions are the same ones used by those who proffer the motto “Islam is the solution.” For Sadiq Saad, the primary wrong assumption is the illusion of contradiction between secularism and Eastern culture, or between secularism and Islam for the Salafis. The second wrong assumption comes as a result of the first, namely assuming a mechanical link between secularism and Western culture, which then implies that Eastern culture necessarily is a religious and spiritual culture. This second assumption does not make sense unless we accept the reductive Salafi account of secularism, which defines it as “the separation of religion and state.” However, the most dangerous and most common assumption, which is also wrong, is to say that secularism was formed in our Egyptian or Arab reality and culture and that it now can match in force and popularity the traditional Salafi strand. Even more dangerous is the delusion that the regime has adopted secularism, even when it dons a religious mask for public approval. The truth is that this conception of political power — in Egypt especially — is the Salafi conception, which is a precursor to Salafi thought, and therefore it is ideological par excellence.

In my analysis — which applies to both the left and the right and the assumptions that come with each of those positions and with their struggle against one another — the impact of the shock that the Iranian revolution imparted has not yet worn off for many intellectuals. It seemed for many at the time that Islam could become a revolutionary ideology capable of mobilizing people and removing a corrupt regime understood to be secular. With that emerged the illusion that Islam and secularism are at odds and the prevalence of the discourse around the search for identity, which the Salafis found in Islam and some leftists found in merging the two. This reading is also reflected in Sadiq Saad’s view that the Shah’s regime was a socioeconomic model for Western modernization and that the religious revolution was a real popular revolution. From here, he says that progress does not equal modernity per se, nor does “backwardness” equal traditional culture:

“This does not mean that the ‘modernized’ cultural side is always aligned with tanmiya and progress and that the ‘traditional’ cultural side always represents the intellectual weaponry of regression and neocolonialism. There are many events and phenomena that show that the opposite has happened and can still happen. In many countries subject to colonialism, the modern culture that came with European education was a factor in erasing people’s heterogenous identities, whereas traditional schools where holy books were taught were the epicenters of fortification against cultural invasion (North African countries are a prime example of this).”

In Saad’s view, the socioeconomic and moral “modernization” policies of the shah were a boon to the imperial oil and arms monopolies, whereas the religious popular movement played the largest part in the revolution that defeated Washington’s arrogance (9).

(2)

If Sadiq Saad’s rhetoric resembles — at the level of searching for identity — Salafi discourse, as well as some the discourse of former leftists, it is different when it comes to tanmiya and corrects their basic tenets. Tanmiya is Sadiq Saad’s second area of concern in discussing the issue of turath, a concern that makes his reading of turath intentional, as defined above. This concern is interrogated through questions about the failure of tanmiya projects in the Arab world in general and in Egypt in particular. It is evident that Sadiq Saad does not think that any tanmiya project can be separated from a prior sociopolitical choice made by the parties responsible for planning and for implementing the tanmiya. Each party must be considered equally (10). This constructed process is carried out in a sociopolitical and cultural reality that represents turath — in the broad sense that we will get into shortly — as a part of its living fabric. Turath is not just a remnant of the past, but has a living continuity in the present. From here, it has an effect — positive or negative — on tanmiya plans:

“Because turath lives in individuals and groups and peoples as part of the present (...) the execution of the plan depends on the intellectual leanings of the frameworks and rules while individuals working within these frameworks and rules have hopes and ambitions in the back of their minds, even if they do not express them and may not realize them themselves. Turath shaped the minds and hearts of all these people, and it serves as a strong behavioral motivator” (11).

The turath which Sadiq Saad is discussing is not Islamic turath alone. The latter conception of turath is the conception found in religious discourse and former leftist discourse simultaneously. Whereas turath as Ahmed Sadiq Saad understands it is:

“A group of historical experiences that society has gained in all aspects of life and activity. And there is a written turath and another that is unwritten (either oral or lived reality), and Islam acknowledges this coexistence when it enjoins good and forbids evil.

Though the larger part of Egyptian turath and its general character is Islamic, it is not only religious and not expressed by Islam alone. There are traditions and aspects of the Egyptian psyche that are inherited from Pharaonic, Greek and Roman times. Some of them are also religiously or intellectually influenced by Coptic Christianity in both its religious and intellectual dimensions. And some are taken from the experiences of the nation over the last century in particular, which includes a nationalist and socialist branch” (12).

In this comprehensive definition, we notice how binaries such as “I” and the “other,” new and inherited, East and West, etc., recede. Nationalist and socialist thought have become part of our turath and are no longer foreign, imported concepts as religious rhetoric says they are. A conception of turath that extends back to Pharaonic history and moves forward to encompass even socialism and nationalism, that merges the written and oral, the explicit and implicit in customs, traditions and behaviors, such a conception has the capacity to break down the illusion of a link between secularism and the West and between the East and religious spirituality:

“The reality is that there is no civilization that lacks systems of production, distribution and consumption alongside systems for thought, managing affairs, meditation, worship and spiritual transcendence. Therefore, there is no civilization that does not have in its intellectual tradition a rational side whose presence may increase or diminish but remains so long as there is agriculture, architecture, war, sciences — even primitive forms of astronomy, medicine, etc. — alongside philosophy and theology. All civilizations are simultaneously spiritual and materialist. But what can be said is that the spiritual or moral side could be more or less prominent in this or that civilization or in this or that era” (13).

In addition to the way in which conceiving of turath from the perspective of tanmiya corrects the relationship of “I” to “the other” and West to East, such a conception also refutes the stagnant image of turath, which makes the relationship of the past to the present one of discrete juxtaposition rather than dynamic dialectic. Turath, from the perspective of the previous corrective definition, is in a state of constant dynamic engagement with reality, which adds to it and takes from it according to its need. Turath can also be an organic part of the present, which carries out additive and subtractive functions upon turath. It is the interplay of these functions that refutes the concept of the past’s relationship to the present as static in favor of an ever evolving dialectic:

“Turath is an evolving thing. It includes the effects of societal changes and problems. In each time and in every era, there is something added to it and taken from it. The use of Ijma’ among mujtahideen around a case or ruling allowed for change in response to the evolving reality and therefore be able to add the new or push aside the old” (14).

“Turath in its totality has a relative social particularity — not merely a religious one — that has changed over time. The coming generations may find themselves in contrasting social and material conditions period after period — and the covariance may lead to progression or regression — while people glean contrasting elements from turath in their knowledge and awareness of it” (15).

Therefore, the issue of tanmiya is not separate from the issue of turath, for as long as tanmiya means moving society forward — which is the real definition of comprehensive tanmiya — it is natural for the planner(s) to take into account the nature of that society and its level of change, the nature of its culture and the level of awareness of its people and the groups that the plan is targeting, without whom the plan cannot be realized. In other words, the success of any tanmiya plan depends on people’s participation and the extent to which they are persuaded that the plan works for their benefit. Based on this concept of participation:

“Turath becomes a conduit between the planner and the people. We may note different tanmiya plans that appeal to turath as a foundation, or to other foundations it claims to uphold, stirring in citizens a feeling of unity and connection (nationalism, sectarianism, humanism, or classism) while silencing opposition and seeking the largest possible consensus for the project” (16).

Thus, turath becomes part of a sociopolitical struggle that determines for different groups in one society the choice of tanmiya closest to achieving their aims. The group that successfully convinces other groups of the national and societal importance of its project succeeds by being intellectually aware of the living turath and by being able to produce a discourse that achieves consensus. It goes without saying that this struggle between groups to propose tanmiya projects can only happen in a real democratic political climate, where each group has an intellectual platform and political organization. This means that the failure of Egypt’s tanmiya projects can be traced back to a lack of a democratic climate, which also explains why planners cannot produce a discourse that can convince people of its goals. This is why attempts to modernize Egyptian society have failed or were defeated:

“It is my belief that the negative fate [of these plans] is owed to their political orientation, in that Egypt’s tanmiya projects did not do what is necessary to convince a broad segment of Egyptians that tanmiya was for their sake and not the sake of the elites or the minority. “Persuasion” is thus a third element that should be combined with tanmiya and turath so that a plan can be realized. This entails the need to rely on turath itself in order to develop toward a new, progressive turath” (17).

But how does a specific group convince people of the credibility of its tanmiya project? This question brings us straight to the heart of the processes of appealing to turath and the way different groups deploy it. Turath helps these processes — by virtue of its duality and richness — realize themselves. When it comes to Islamic turath, for example, we find that it is multifaceted and can therefore be used by different social forces: “to strengthen their positions through religious arguments” (18). Equally, popular culture can be used in its comprehensive meaning toward progress and tanmiya and, simultaneously, in the opposite direction toward regression and underdevelopment. The duality inherent in popular culture can help contradicting forces in a social reality formulate their positions on either side of the duality. It is like Islamic turath in that it is adaptable whether structurally or implicitly:

“National culture in itself is a dualistic concept. There are the positive aspects of popular revolutionary turath in the struggle against internal despotism and foreign influence, as well as the negatives of dependency and excessive confidence in men with regressive thought. This is true, no doubt, and represents a problem that I do not claim to have a simple solution for” (19).

Thus, the problematic — of tanmiya and turath — manifests in a high degree of complexity and tension between either side. For tanmiya to succeed, popular participation is necessary in creating and implementing it; for that to happen, a discourse to convince people must be produced on the basis of turath components that represent foundational and essential elements in their culture. But turath is not composed of a single current; it instead contains a duality that the conflicting parties use in order to achieve their respective interests. This means that people’s turath — and their culture — can be used against their interests. If regressive, exploitative forces deceive people and forge their awareness based on regressive elements in turath and culture, the reliance of progressive currents on rational elements within turath does not present a solution as much as it complicates the problem. To rely on turath with an ideological foundation is to utilize it in a utilitarian, pragmatic way. Since the rational and progressive elements in turath and culture have usually been marginalized compared to their regressive, often more dominant counterparts, the result — because of the ideological struggle over how turath was instrumentalized — will often be decided in favor of the stronger elements and the forces that back them. From this angle, it appears that what Sadiq Saad is proposing as a solution is an intentional reading of both turath and reality together. He does not fall into the necessity of adopting and reviving rational elements within turath as the proponents of “leftist Islam” have. Instead, he clearly adopts what he refers to as “producing a scientific awareness of turath, sifting out what is historical and connected to the reality and conditions that produced it and separating that which has the capacity for continuity and adoption at present. It is worth noting that this process of scientific awareness and ensuing filtering and sorting does not happen on the level of meditative, theoretical thought but necessarily — as Sadiq Saad insists — takes place through “practical use in daily, diligent struggle” (20).

Tanmiya in the comprehensive sense involves a twofold process: awareness of turath, that is, subjecting it to critique and sorting what is linked to past conditions from what can be linked to the present. If turath is merely something that exists in the present, it is only a part of it and not the present in its entirety. Producing a specific knowledge of turath that can give people modern concepts of a nationalist nature is necessary to help them mobilize against challenges.

But there is the other side of this process, which is that tanmiya cannot be successful, as in capable of mobilizing people, unless its thought takes a patriotic (nationalist) form and it adopts turath in its contemporary formation (21).

In such a deep understanding of the relationship between tanmiya and turath in their comprehensive forms, turath does not become merely a tool to push — or obstruct — tanmiya but rather, something that interacts with it, alters it and reformulates it. In other words, the realization of tanmiya leads to social developments, through which turath itself develops, as it is a part of the contemporary reality. The complexity of the dialectic of the aforementioned relationship between turath and reality is reflected in the relationship between turath and tanmiya, starting from the planning process itself. If the question is raised regarding how this relationship can be planned in a contemporary way, we should accept an implicit acknowledgement of the mutual effect of the two components on each other: the social condition and the prevalent turath. This would mean that tanmiya was carried out based on a premeditated sociopolitical choice by planners and those who will implement (and the choice may be different between them). But this same choice is a result of a complex interaction of multiple components. This includes the effect of turath and the way it has come to be known within a given social circle, as well as the awareness of this circle of its interests and its readiness and capacity to defend them, etc, in addition to the surrounding conditions. The results which tanmiya may produce ( positive and negative) affect these interests and the sociopolitical formation of these circles, as it also impacts the effect of turath on itself (22). 

Finally, turath is not merely an external, linguistic form that lays the ground for a tanmiya plan in order to convince people of its importance and to use its culture to adopt it. If this were the case, we would circle back to a utilitarian usage of turath and popular culture. The cultural form is inseparable from the substance it carries, and the material side of culture cannot be separate from its intellectual side. Therefore, in its instrumentalization of turath, any real tanmiya plan must not separate between form and substance on the one hand, and between the material and the intellectual on the other. If it does, then, in reality, it is doing nothing more than considering reality with all its components, including culture with its two sides, material and intellectual:

Popular mobilization for the sake of tanmiya must be done in cultural terms understood by the people, which is to say by using national popular culture. But we must be careful not to understand this as meaning to use culture only as a form but also to inevitably adopt some elements from its substance. Because this culture is the byproduct of a long process of turath’s articulation, an articulation that is composed of long standing efforts and interactions among nature and humans through repeated processes that has produced current societies in developing countries, we cannot separate between material culture — on the level of current technical, physical and mental skills — and immaterial culture, with its linguistic and artistic forms, its beliefs, myths, habits and traditions, etc., whose sum produces the nations which currently make up the Third World (23).

On the importance of turath and its vitality when it comes to tanmiya, it is not the only factor that guarantees success or causes failure. There are other highly complex factors, and turath is only one of them. This is, of course, assuming that one factor can exist purely in isolation from the others. Sadiq Saad confirms this truth in his analysis of India’s tanmiya in relation to its cultural turath:

“What helped or obstructed tanmiya is not cultural turath per se (...) rather, it is the sum of more than one element. An element can be defined as what remains of intellectual turath and what emerges from the material and social history of India, in terms of both nature and society, meaning the things sometimes described as traditional and backwards. Another element is the struggle between different forces within the old formation and the new one and the struggle between both of these formations. There is also a third element made up of external forces outside of India (...) and here, it suffices to point to the heavy defensive burdens after the wars with China and Pakistan and the effect the global arms race has had on a large percentage of the money marked for tanmiya investments” (24).

(3)

Given the importance of turath and its complex relationship with tanmiya, the study of turath economic concepts becomes urgent and important. And Sadiq Saad’s study, as important as it is in and of itself, aims to test the soundness of turath economic concepts put forward by proponents of “Islamic economics,” whether in academic circles or in financial companies, banks and the “Islamic” investment centers of Qatari, Arab or international backgrounds (25). From this perspective, Sadiq Saad’s reading of Kitab al-Kharaj (Book of Taxation) by al-Qadi Abu Yusuf ibn Yaqub’s (d.798), one of the founders of the Hanafi school of fiqh, aims to uncover economic concepts. And Sadiq Saad understands — with piercing insight — that the concepts that one jurist or another poses are called Islamic concepts in relation to the thinker being Muslim rather than the concept being representative of the doctrine itself. Describing some thinkers as “Islamic” is merely a description of the affiliations they have to specific cultures or civilizations:

“By Islamic thinkers, we mean the researchers and scientists who left behind valuable work and attributed their economic ideas to Islamic fiqh. We do not aim to find out whether this affiliation is right or wrong or to which extent, because it is not our aim to derive economic values and principles from Islam — as a religion or doctrine — but to describe the analyses and conceptions of economic phenomena by these thinkers and their opinion on what should take place” (26).

Searching for Islamic economic concepts in the aforementioned sense is what separates an intentional reading from the ideological reliance that we find with proponents of Islamic economics. These proponents do not differentiate between concepts of a human interpretive (ijtihad) nature — bound to a place and time — and Islam as a religion with doctrines and texts that are immutable and do not speak but are made to speak by the human mind. They are also not proposing concepts they believe have historicity or relativity. Instead, they believe these reflect “Islam” itself. In addition to the important distinction in Sadiq Saad’s reading of turath in fiqh, his reading is also distinguished by knowing what its aims are. It has its own questions, which arise from the problem of the current reality and the present. Without these questions, which set parameters and goals for the reading, the act of reading may turn into a search for nothing in a forest. The reader/researcher becomes like a woodcutter in the night who does not know what to cut. Sadiq Saad’s reading begins from well-defined hypotheses and aims to check their soundness or lack thereof. This means that the reading does not force its own concepts onto turath as much as it tries to investigate. It is a hermeneutical reading, not an ideological one. Sadiq Saad understands clearly that the time in which he is reading is different from the time at which the text was written, not only in the historical sense but also in the epistemological sense, which is made clear through the expression of economic concepts. In the framework of a religious culture:

“The expressions in this case wear a mask of moral rules and prohibitions or naseeha so that the recipient can receive their recompense in this world or the other as a reward from an approving heaven. As for the arguments and reasons which are set forth, they are usually of two kinds:

The first is a legal logic, in the sense of implementing sacred laws (which may come from a king and his supreme power, drawn from the divine will which has prepared a place for this king in its structuring of the universe).

The second is a mythical logic in which events are given a power of persuasion for having happened. This results in having to trace the steps of the ancients and to act in accordance with the experience they derived from their actions” (27).

Sadiq Saad’s reading starts from three main hypotheses, each of which contains sub-hypotheses. The first hypothesis asserts that the historical societies in which Islamic thinkers lived were — for the most part — pre-capitalist societies approximately until the end of the 18th century. The second hypothesis — which is in fact a particular form of the first, and which can amend it — is that the societies that included Islamic thinkers were Eastern societies that differed from pre-capitalist European societies. The most salient of the differences is that the general intellectual framework for activities in societies with Islamic thinkers was Islam, not only as a religious doctrine (the relationship between humans and God) but as a general thought system whose influence extended to all forms of expression and modes of knowledge of these activities. The third hypothesis concerns the reading of economic concepts and consists of two parts. The first part is that thought generally reflects lived reality. Therefore, the concepts which the reading will elucidate are an indicator as to how this reality came to be, as well as a prompt to focus on its components and phenomena. The second part of this hypothesis is that cognitive reflection is not direct and straightforward (like the reflection of an image in a flat mirror), but that there is influence, mixing and alterations — or a change to the reality of the image. This is not only because of the brain’s particularity but also because the mind carries within it the result of social upbringing, previous turath, intellectual interests and self-interests, etc. Therefore, we should not take these sought-after concepts as a certified copy of objective truths that exist in the field of economics. We need to go back and examine them once more (28).

The truth is that the first hypothesis is the only one which can be said to be provable or disprovable, and it is the one which Sadiq Saad’s reading has proven (29). The other two are not hypotheses based in reality. The second is a description of a historical truth that does not need to be proven, even if the particularities of its phenomena and features need to be discovered through the intentional, meditative, self-aware reading which has been achieved in the study we are now examining:

“One of the distinguishing features that Abu Yusuf describes is that producers and resources are ‘limited’ to the ruling class, and the ruling class is an owner by virtue of being a participant. This is not a slavery-based or feudal system. The ethnic, clan and religious divisions become the social, economic and political divisions. Finally, powers — including a broad economic authority — are concentrated in the hands of the religious leader (the imam or caliph)” (30).

The third hypothesis — with its two parts — is in fact nothing more than a crucial scientific law in the theory of knowledge. Sadiq Saad’s analysis succeeded in large measure in discovering reality as it was reflected — sometimes directly and indirectly most times — in Kitab al-Kharaj, but more importantly, it uncovered the hidden ideology in Abu Yusuf’s work through the economic concepts he proposed:

“It is a given from the outset that Abu Yusuf belongs to the idealist school of philosophy. But this philosophy is relevant to our perspective, as it is related to the seemingly dominant role of non-economic factors in economic mechanisms. The idealist reification of some natural elements, such as land and water, or of some unknown factors such as pricing, can be traced to — even if partially — the limits of scientific knowledge of the time and man’s primitive control over nature. This idealism also represents — in some ways — the victories of Arab Muslims and the prosperity of Abbasid rule in the writer’s time” (31).

But one of the most important dimensions overlooked by the analysis, because of its absence from the scope of the reading, is the influence of Abu Yusuf’s ideology, in addition to the general idealist ideology which other Islamic thinkers share. The jurists — and especially Abu Hanifa, Abu Yusuf’s mentor — were extremely averse to working in the institutions of the caliphs and the sultans. It was said of Abu Hanifa especially: “he was wanted for the judiciary twice, once in the Umayyad era, by Bin Hubeira who worked for Marwan II, last of the Bani Umayya in Iraq, but he refused, so he was whipped. It is also said that he wanted him for Bayt al-Mal, but he refused, so he was beaten. Another time in the Abbasid era: Abu Jafaar sent him from Kufa to Baghdad. He wanted him in the judiciary, then imprisoned him, and he died in prison” (32). As for Abu Yusuf, he managed the judiciary for three caliphs: “Mahdi, then Hadi, then Harun al-Rashid. And in the days of Rashid, he was qadi al-qudat and was highly favored” (33). It is certain that Abu Yusuf’s affiliation with caliphs made him adopt the ideology of power with all its invocations of texts and traditions. Because of this, his fiqh was affiliated with the fiqh of Ahl al-Hadith and diverged from Ahl al-Ray. Abu Yusuf became more reliant on Hadith than his mentor, who was more reliant on Ray, Ijtihad and Qiyas (34).

Perhaps this reliance on the ideology of power could explain many of the concepts present in the book, and it may also explain the absence of some concepts — especially the concepts of “resource scarcity,” “market” and “growth” — from Abu Yusuf’s intellectual framework. Sadiq Saad observed that “human labor” did not appear as an economic resource — after water and land — except in special cases:

“If a person irrigates a barren land with water he brings and which wasn't there (by digging a well or canal or by carrying it) (...) it is work which has the qualities of ingenuity and invention. An appreciation of this kind of labor could be shown, for example, by reducing the tax (sadaqa) paid on the land a Muslim is working in such a case” (35).

Despite Sadiq Saad’s surprise at Abu Yusuf’s position, which he describes as an inconsistency, because humans too — like water and land — are God’s creations and are also an economic resource following idealist logic. If Saad Sadiq is surprised at this, it is because he did not pay attention to the ideology of power’s position toward human labor — which is a theological issue with social significance — if compared to divine ability. While some intellectual forces with social progressive leanings such as the Mutazilah defended human ability and emphasized human freedom as a necessary condition for whether a person deserved reward or punishment, as well as necessary to establish “divine justice,” other forces supported exploitative political power that adopted “coercion,” taking away human freedom and exploiting labor. Because this “coercion” justifies injustice by considering it a divine fate, it is natural that power would adopt it and defend its proponents. This factor in the ideology of power also explains the marginal role of human labor in the economic system of Abu Yusuf. It also explains Abu Yusuf’s commitment to the issue of pricing, tracing it to divine will (36). It is a position at odds with the Mutazilah, who traced it back to the law of supply and demand, even if they differentiated between, on the one hand, God being the reason why a commodity might be scarce, thus leading to its price rising, as is the case with crop pestilence, and on the other, high prices caused by the greed of merchants who hide non-perishable commodities (37).

The ideology of power — which no doubt was adopted by Abu Yusuf — can explain the absence of some concepts of which Sadiq Saad’s reading was aware. The first of these concepts is “resource scarcity.” Sadiq Saad realized the ideological reason behind its absence, but he passed it over and traced it back to the general idealist system of thought:

“Perhaps it has to do with the belief of rulers of that time that resources were within reach and that their main source — water — was inexhaustible within the two rivers. But we believe that the main reason was the author’s belief that resources were abundant — not scarce — so long as they came from the creator” (38).

The feeling of resource abundance and the lack of scarcity comes from the affiliation with the class which owns all resources and into whose vaults all the excise taxes go: tithe taxes, kharaj, jizya and sadaqa taxes. One of the things recounted about Abu Yusuf which reveals his heightened sensitivity to money is that he grew up poor and his sheikh was responsible for his affairs, but when the opportunity came, he did not hesitate. One of his quotes on this matter: “There are blessings: Islam, without which no blessing can be had; barakah, without which no blessing can be good; and money, without which one cannot live” (39).

It is natural from the viewpoint of the ideology of power that there be no conception of “progress,” let alone economic “progress.” The main preoccupation of power — any power — is stability and resilience. Every change carries the germ of evil, worry and fitna. In light of concepts that derive their legitimacy from the past and, by extension, the legitimacy of the present, thinking about the future becomes a kind of mining in the unknown. The caliph is the center of the present, and the past is his support, to which he can turn for safety and protection. Any change — or progress — can only mean a destruction of the system and a destabilization of order (40). Therefore, it is natural for the caliph to be the one “playing the sole unifying economic role, firstly through extracting payments, which is a factor in moving production relations forward and secondly, through gifts and salary dispensations, which is a process of distributing excess with an effect on transactions. In addition, there are economic responsibilities that power must attend to in the fields of irrigation and roads” (41). In light of this, the role of the “market” disappears — despite its presence in economic life at the time — which means laws disappear. The power, represented by the caliph, is the law and a manifestation of divine will. It is, in the end, everything. Ahmed Sadiq Saad’s reading, for all its importance and pioneering analysis, would have been able to provide an account of what it couldn’t explain in Abu Yusuf’s book had it taken into account the ideology of the author. But this does not take away from the achievement of the reading. And perhaps it will lead the way to more readings that can account for our economic turath, so long as they do not differentiate between economic thought and other types of thought, for turath is one integral whole whose constituent parts can explain one another, especially Arab Islamic turath. Reading a book such as Kitab al-Kharaj, for example, must be done within the framework provided by the “science of fiqh.” This science cannot be understood properly unless we understand its entangled relations to all Islamic sciences, be they Aql or Naql. The reading we have discussed is a seminal, self-aware reading that lays the groundwork for other readings to explore economic concepts in our turath on a true scientific basis in order to pull the rug from underneath both those who trifle with it and those who exploit it for profit.

Citations and comments:

(1) Abdul Hamid al-Ghazali: Hawla Jawhar al-Nizam al-Iqtisadi al-Islami, part of the book: al-Din wa al-Iqtisad, Edited by Murad Wahba, Sina Publishing, Cairo, 1990, page 41.

(2) Dirasat fi al-mafahim al-iqtisadiyah liday al-mufkirin al-Islamiyyin, “Kitab al-Kharaj” by Abu Yusuf, Dar al-Farabi (Beirut), Dar al-Thaqafa al-Jadeeda (Cairo), 1988, introduction, page 8.

(3) Bayn al-Tanmia wa al-Turath, part of the book: al-Din wa al-Iqtisad, aforementioned, page 122. By the same author, also look at: Studies in Organic Culture, Dar al-Farabi, Beirut, 1988, page 86.

(4) Dirasat fi al-Thaqafa al-’Udwiya, page 15.

(5) Ibid, page 38.

(6) Ibid, page 38-39.

(7) Ibid, page 38.

(8) Ibid, page 29.

(9) Ibid, page 97.

(10) Ibid, page 80.

(11) Bayn al-Tanmiya wa al-Turath, page 113.

(12) Ibid, page 118.

(13) Dirasat fi al-Thaqafa al-’Udwiya, page 75.

(14) Bayn al-Tanmiya wa al-Turath, page 119.

(15) Dirasat fi al-Thaqafa al-’Udwiya, page 79-80.

(16) Bayn al-Tanmiya wa al-Turath, page 116.

(17) Ibid, page 124-125.

(18) Ibid, page 119.

(19) Dirasat fi al-Thaqafa al-’Udwiya, page 106.

(20) Ibid, same page.

(21) Ibid, page 86.

(22) Ibid, page 80.

(23) Ibid, page 73-74.

(24) Ibid, page 73-74

(25) Dirasat fi al-Mafahim al-Iqtisadiya, Introduction, page 9.

(26) Ibid, page 15.

(27) Ibid, page 19.

(28) Ibid, page 16-, 21 with paraphrasing.

(29) Ibid, page 82-83.

(30) Ibid, page 83.

(31) Ibid, page 85.

(32) Ahmed Amin: Duha al-Islam, al-Nahda al-Masriya, 1979, Section 2, page 183. Ahmed Sadiq Saad observed the aversion of the committed intellectual to be involved in daily formal work in general. This aversion came from the influence of turath along with a hint of a morality:

“It seems that many Egyptian intellectuals are averse to collective, organized social and political work. Even if such work is the practical application of the ideas they hold on to. In doing this, they are following in a long turath tradition of some strands of Islamic as well as popular Egyptian thought, where this type of work is thought to inevitably lead to an abandonment of principles. (Studies in Organic Culture, p 33-34).

(33) Ahmed Amin: Duha al-Islam, Section 2, page 198.

(34) Ibid, page 199-200.

(35) Dirasat fi al-Mafahim al-Iqtisadiya, page 38, and page 40-41.

(36) Ibid, page 76-77.

(37) Hasan Hanafi, Min al-Aqida ila al-Thawra, Dar al-Tanweer, Beirut, 1988, Section 3, page 333-334.

(38) Dirasat fi al-Mafahim al-Iqtisadiya, page 40.

(39) Ahmed Amin: Duha al-Islam, Section 2, page 199.

(40) Dirasat fi al-Mafahim al-Iqtisadiya, page 41-42.

(41) Ibid, page 48.