the medieval church, and perceiving that the Old Testament was concerned
with caring for the poor and not with commercial loans, John Calvin^31
removed the ban on lending with interest, with safeguards that predictably
were conveniently forgotten. In duecourse, the Roman Catholic Church
also removed its ban on lending with interest.
As the capitalist world developed, it lost the idea that the point about
lending is to be caring towards the needy. In Victorian Britain, the develop-
ment of the co-operative movement and the building society movement at-
tempted to recover it. In effect, the customers of the co-op were the
shareholders, while building societies worked by attracting safe investments
from people who hoped eventually to buy a house and lending the money to
people who were already in a position to do so.^32
THE PROHIBITION OF CHARGING OF RIBIT/
RIBA (INTEREST/USURY) IN ISLAM
Almost 800 years before St. Thomas Aquinas and John Calvin were
researching ways to resolve the prohibition of charging interest as taught by
Moses (pp) and Jesus (pp) to accommodate the needs for financing of the
growing commercial business, Muslim traders were practicing RF financing
to address the capital needs of Muslims and non-Muslims to finance their
trading and commercial activities. The RF finance system and code for
financing of commercial transactions by Muslim traders and merchants and
the non-Muslims who dealt with them was conducted in India, China, Cen-
tral Asian countries, the Middle East, and some European countries. The RF
financing rules and codes were based on Shari’aa, which can be considered
the Judeo-Christian-Islamic law and values. This law finalized and detailed
RF financing rules, and it was popularized by the revelation of the Qur’aan,
which inculcated all God’s messages from the Torah and the Gospel when it
was revealed between the years 611 and 634 (approximately).
The Development of the Universal Riba-Free
System in Islam
There is an important fundamental red line in the teachings of Islam—the
line that separates what is divinely permissible, orhalal,andwhatis
divinely not permissible, orharam. Every Muslim is trained by his/her
parents—regardless of the level of their religiosity—to know these two
most important words in the vocabulary of Islam from childhood. It suffices
for a mother to tell her child that lying isharam, because the child is trained
to know the divine consequences of committing thatharamact. These
The Faith-Based Judeo-Christian-Islamic Foundation 31