90 chapter two
economic problem. This is the case even if these problems coincided
with the time of Revelation, let alone being the product of a soci-
ety fourteen centuries after the birth of the religion. Even in con-
temporary legislations, no law can be perceived as able to do that.
Laws are passed with a view to letting ministerial Decrees and court
rulings fill in the necessary details through the practical application,
which is often on a case by case basis. The divine sources provide
a constitutional framework leaving details to the everyday law mak-
ers. (Can you imagine if the people at the time of the Prophet were
told they would have TVs, mobile telephones, internet, and aircraft)!
To put it another way, to see Fredrick Taylor’s “Time and Motion
Study”, for example, absent from the Qur"àn and the Sunnah does
not mean that Islam is unsuitable for industrial societies, nor does
it imply that the method itself, or all scientific methods for that mat-
ter, are un-Islamic. Second, the Qur"àn and Sunnah have provided
rules that have anticipated situations and pre-empted matters dis-
covered subsequently centuries later. To quote but one example, the
Qur"ànic debt verse, the longest in the Qur"àn, has organized the
recording of the debt to a minor detail; it has differentiated between
civil debt and mercantile debt, when a debt ought to be recorded
and when it may not be, and when a testimony of witnesses could
replace the recording and for how long and in what circumstances
this may be done (Qur"àn, 2: 282); all of which has been antici-
pated and has indeed been included in modern civil and mercan-
tile laws of Islamic and non-Islamic legal systems. The Qur"ànic
attitude towards consumption is another example. “Don’t ignore your
share of this world”, is a philosophy that helps achieve a balance
between consumption and production and assists in keeping the econ-
omy revolving. Low consumption, as it has been demonstrated in
theory and practice, while it may lead to an increase of savings and
investment, may slow down production, reduce profitability, and may
even lead to disinvestment. High levels of consumption may lead to
the opposite effect: a decrease of saving and investment as a conse-
quence of low saving, demand-pull inflation, an increase in the price
of capital, and further cost-pushinflation, and, in a global market,
probably increase in the external debt and the financial risk as a
consequence. Moderate consumption can be conceived as a desir-
able policy that helps avoid both extremes and assists in achieving
a reasonable balance among the various sectors in the economy. And
this moderation in consumption and saving is what Islam advocates,