islamic economic renaissance 397of writing on Islamic economics, until page 259 of the second edition
where he refers to the capitalist experience of nationalizing private
ownership for the sake of public interest in what seems to be an
approval of what a capitalist government might be doing (Al-Sadr,
1982).
In discussing the ownership of the means of production, al-Sadr
qualifies the ownership and conditions on which it is based. With
reference to land and natural resources as means of production, he
emphasises that maintaining the productive conditions of these sources
is a provision for the continuation of ownership. To this effect, he
is of the view that if an owner neglects the property, or is unable
to utilise it, the state or, imam, may give it to someone else to make
use of it. The statutory owner may be given a due share from the
economic outcomes of utilization by the new holder. The new holder,
however, is not to be given a statutory ownership; he/she is not
allowed to transfer the ownership by sale, inheritance or other means.
What the new holder has of rights is the right to utilise, not the right
to own. This is a delicate distinction that may help make the prin-
ciple of ownership-transfer more applicable, hence more acceptable.
It is, to use a modern term, a form of quasi-ownership of the neglected
source of production rather than a full ownership. It remains to
confirm that this form of quasi-ownership stays with the holder as
long as he is utilising the property, even if the statutory ownership
was transferred by other means such as sale or inheritance.
In addition, in relation to the previous point, is the question of
the ownership of iqta", the fiefs. During the Umayyad and Abbasìd
caliphate, as we saw previously, the caliph would bestow on some
of his subjects ownerless lands that became owned by the state, in
reward for their services and loyalty. The lands were given away
free and were called qata"i. This practice, which continued under the
Ottomans, grew in size and varied in shape so much so that we find
the governor of Egypt, Muœammad Ali, confiscating the whole land
of Egypt and declaring himself the sole owner of the land (see chap-
ter seven). Al-Sadr addresses the iqta", or qata"iland, from two impor-
tant perspectives. First, he differentiated between the early form of
Islamic iqta" and Western feudalism with its historical and social
backgrounds. Second, which is more important in this study, he pro-
vides a fundamental justification for the validity of the Islamic iqta".
This is the proviso of labour. Supporting his views with the views of
early jurists, he states that the Islamic iqta"does not grant a person