Islamic Economics: A Short History

CHAPTER THREE

ECONOMIC THOUGHT OF THE

RIGHTLY GUIDED CALIPHS

(632 A.C.–661 A.C.)

Introduction

The rightly guided caliphate, Al-Khilafah al-Rashìdah, or the English
version the Orthodox Caliphate, symbolizes a demarcation line
between a period of asceticism and a stringent application of the
teachings of the Qur"àn and Sunnah, and a period, from the
Umayyads onward, of increasingly relaxed inclination towards these
divine teachings and Islamic ideals. Rich in history, from an apos-
tasy shortly after the Prophet’s death, two separate assassinations of
two distinguished companions and heads of state, one by a Muslim
and the other by non-Muslims and the killing of a third by a group
of Muslim rebels, a schism in the Muslim community that wrecked
the ummah apart, in what became known asal-fitnah al-kobra,to
military conquests on a scale that was never witnessed before and
economic development and societal opening on two of the greatest
civilizations of the time, the period is merited per se as a worth-
while scholarly study. In terms of religious liturgy, the period wit-
nessed, for the first time, the birth of a coherent body of Islamic
jurisprudence, fiqh, that served the Islamic jurisprudence that fol-
lowed for centuries to come and contributed tremendously to the
development of the judicial thinking, economic and otherwise, up
to the outstanding four schools of thought. What concerns us in this
study is the effect of those events, or the relevance of them, on the
development of Islamic economic thought and the contribution of
the Orthodox Caliphs to the progression of the subsequent coher-
ent body of Islamic economic thinking.
Economic Islamic jurisprudence, fiqh, which was first witnessed at
the time of the Orthodox Caliphate, was necessitated by the need
to find answers to new compelling socio-economic questions that
either did not exist during the time of the Prophet, or existed but
not on the same scale (Khallaf, 1942). Conceivably, the answers
were to adhere to the strict code of Islamic legislation, Sharì"ah,