the abbasìd’s golden age 205person to fulfill worship duties, hence work is a divine duty of the
first degree. What he said about the flùfìswas also applied to those
able to earn and do not seek means of earnings. Further, he attacked
those who were able to work but received charity instead.
He valued education highly and stressed the need for it. Education,
he confirmed, is valuable for different aspects of life: learning about
the religion as well as trade and occupations. Education to him helps
specialisation and division of labour, which helps, in turn, to improve
efficiency. Emphasising the importance of education is not surpris-
ing from a man who is reported to have spent most of his inher-
ited fortune pursuing education.
On the institution of Zakàh as alms, al-Shaibànìargued an inter-
esting case. He stated that the rich, the giver of charity, is in need
of the poor, the recipient. Without the poor, the rich would not be
able to fulfill his religious duties nor would he get a divine reward
from giving to the poor. Therefore, the rich needs the poor to accom-
plish his religious commitments otherwise they would remain incom-
plete and the reward for that would not be attained. The poor has
therefore rendered the rich a benefit! As such, providing that the
receiver of Zakàh, or any other form of charity, is deservedly in
need for it, he is preferred to the rich! In this al-Shaibànìreiterates
the Islamic principle that the poor have a right to the wealth of the
rich. However, if the beneficiary of the religious charity is able to
earn and is claiming the right to it falsely, this, besides being reli-
giously unlawful, makes the rich preferred to the poor. Al-Shaibànì’s
conclusion, however, that both the poor and the rich are in need
of each other is a very interesting suggestion.
Without doubt, al-Shaibànì’s writing on Islamic economics was a
notable landmark in the development of the subject.
The next writer is a major writer in that era; the jurist Abù-Ubaid
al-Qasim ben Sallam. His book, Kitàb al-Amwàl”, the Book of Wealth,
is still until today a major reference on the subject. The Abù-Ubaid’s
book of wealth can be regarded as a text on macro-economics.
Abù-Ubaid (d. 224 H., 838 A.C.)
Kitàb al-Amwàl, Book of WealthBy the time Abù-Ubaid came to write his book, almost three times
the size of Abù-Yùsuf ’s Kitàb al-Kharàj, (622 pages, the Arabic