محور : اقتصاد خانواده

راهكار، سبك و روش انجام دادن كار را گويند. و در امور معيشت، روش اجرايى و عملياتى كردن سياست‏هاى كلى وراهبردى معيشتى است.
درآمد، به كليه وجوه و ارزش كالاهايى كه در دوره زمانى معينى به يك فرد، گروهى از افراد، يك بنگاه يا يك اقتصاد تعلق‏مى‏گيرد، اطلاق مى‏گردد.
در اقتصاد اسلامى از لحاظ كميت، محدوديتى براى درآمد مطرح نيست ولى محدوديت كيفى وجود دارد: اينكه مشروع باشد.
درآمد به دو قسم، حلال و حرام مطرح است.
درآمد و لقمه حلال همانا نورانى شدن قلب، ثواب مجاهد در راه خدا، مشمول رحمت الهى شدن، در شمار انبياء در آمدن، ثواب‏صدقه و.... را به همراه دارد. و درآمد حرام از گناهان كبيره است كه تضيع و عدم قبولى اعمال، عدم استجابت دعا، لعنت‏فرشتگان و آتش جهنم را در پى دارد. از اين رو پرهيز از درآمد حرام، ازانجام اعمال صالح مهم‏تر است.
برنامه مصرف در زندگى بايد به گونه‏اى تنظيم شود كه از عهده نيازهاى مادى و معنوى بر آمد، و از مصرف گرايى و اسراف واتلاف اجتناب نمود.
خوددارى از اسراف و تبذير، نكوهش بخل و سخت‏گيرى، دورى از تجمل گرايى، اعتدال و ميانه‏روى، قناعت ورزى، انفاقات‏و توجه به فقرا، از ويژگى‏هاى ساختار مصرف ايده آل اسلام است.
اسراف و تبذير در كثيرى از موارد در يك معنى به كار مى‏روند و به عنوان تأكيد پشت سر هم قرار مى‏گيرند ولى هرگاه درمقابل هم قرار گيرند، منظور از اسراف، خروج از حد اعتدال است بدون آن كه چيزى در ظاهر ضايع و تلف شود و تبذير آن‏است كه چنان مصرف كنيم كه به اتلاف و تضييع بينجامد.
مصرف گرايى به انگيزه‏هاى تفاخر بر ديگران، ابراز خودنمايى، هم چشمى و... به عنوان انگيزههاى منفى و دون شأن انسان‏محسوب مى‏شود و مورد مذمت و نكوهش است.
هم چشمى و رقابت، رفاه‏طلبى ثروتمندان، كجروى‏هاى فرهنگى، نظام آموزشى، تبليغات و رسانه‏هاى گروهى از عوامل‏مصرف گرايى محسوب مى‏شوند.
مصرف گرايى، رشد بعد حيوانى انسان و چيرگى آن بر فرد را در پى دارد كه اين امر به افساد گرى انسان در زمين مصرف براساس مصالح نظام اسلامى و رعايت ارزشها در مصرف، معيار در مصرف مسلمان است.
قناعت پيشگى، پرهيز از اسراف و تبذير نوعى مبارزه با مصرف گرايى است و در عوض تلاش براى توليد بيشتر و سخت‏كوشى در اين راه در اين مبارزه تأثير گذار است.
پس انداز زمينه توسعه اقتصادى را فراهم مى‏نمايد و يكى از عوامل تحقق پس انداز، هماهنگى اعضاى يك مجموعه ياخانواده باتدابير مدير آن است.
پس انداز هميشه به معناى ذخيره كردن اموال در دنيا نيست، بلكه امور معنوى را هم شامل مى‏شود و آثار پس انداز معنوى ازپس انداز مادى بيشتر است.
پس انداز به دو بخش پس انداز ممدوح و پس انداز مذموم (كنز) تقسيم مى‏شود.
يكى از روش‏هاى نگهدارى پس انداز و رشد آن، سرمايه گذارى آن در مجارى مختلف است.

منبع : كتاب تدبير معيشت از ديدگاه آيات و روايات
 

محور : اقتصاد خانواده

 مقدمه‏
درباره امور معيشت و مسائل مادى زندگى انسان، سه نظر مطرح است؛ برخى تمام اهداف اصلى زندگى خود را در لذت‏گرايى و رسيدن به لذتهاى بيشتر قرار داده‏اند. ضعف و يا عدم ايمان به حيات اخروى و نعمات الهى در آن، موجب شده است‏كه اينان تلاش و كوشش خود را در وصول به امور دنيوى منحصر كنند و از امور معنوى و آخرتى غفلت ورزند.
در مقابل، گروه ديگر امور مادى و دنيوى را مانع آخرت جويى دانسته‏اند و با تمسك به ظاهر برخى آيات و روايات، دنيا گريزشده‏اند و گويند: دنيا لهو و لعب است، تمام سودهاى دنيا، باعث زيان است؛ دنيا فانى است؛ ثروت دنيا فقر آخرت را به دنبال‏دارد، و اصولاً آيات و روايات تدبير و برنامه‏اى در عرصه‏هاى گوناگون معيشت ندارند. اين گروه با اين تفكر، حتى در پى رفاه‏نسبى نبوده، سخت‏گيرى‏هايى نيز در اين جهت دارند و دچار افراط و تفريطهايى در كارهاى خود هستند.
گروه سوم در برابر دو نگرش فوق، بر اين باور است كه با توجه به جامع بودن دين اسلام و رابطه تنگاتنگ بين دنيا و آخرت، توجه‏به مسائل مادى در جهت تداوم و استمرار زندگى دنيوى ضرورى و حتى مقدمه زندگى اخروى است. به همين جهت، شرع مقدس‏براى همه ابعاد زندگى انسان از جمله معيشت، تدبير و برنامه و راهكارهايى ارائه داده است.
تتبع در آيات قرآن كريم و سخنان و سيره معصومين(ع) نشان مى‏دهد كه دعوت به آخرت و عالم بقا، هيچ منافاتى با كار وكوشش و توليد اقتصادى و پرداختن به امور مادى و معيشتى نداشته و ندارد. از اين رو پژوهش حاضر بر راه سوم تأكيد دارد.

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محور : اقتصاد خانواده

3. پس انداز
اثر گذارى پس انداز در قالب يكى از راهكارهاى مهم در تدبير امور معيشت، بر اداره و رشد يك سازمان يا خانواده بر كسى‏پوشيده نيست. با مطالعه و دقت در مورد نظام‏ها، مجموعه‏ها و خانواده‏هاى موفق و سربلند، جايگاه و نقش پس انداز بيشترروشن مى‏شود. قرآن كريم و روايات اسلامى به اهميت، روش نگهدارى و رشد پس انداز توجه ويژه‏اى دارد كه برخى از آنهارا بررسى مى‏كنيم.

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محور : مقالات انگليسي + ترجمه در ادامه مطلب

Faith and Finance: April 2010, Harvard University, Boston, Massachusettes. 

Introduction

Conventional wisdom would keep faith and finance in different boxes never to be mixed with one another. This has not served society well. A holistic view of human personality would like finance to be guided by faith inspired values. Faith impacts finance through motivation and value-orientation which, in turn, influence wealth creation as well as use of wealth for enhancing well being. All wealth is joint production involving both natural and manmade inputs. Natural inputs such as land, air, water, minerals, solar and other forms of energy need to be combined with human resources like ideas, accumulated knowledge, new skills, as well as trust, hope and sympathy, etc. The joint nature of wealth creation necessitates sharing of the wealth among those involved in its creation. Product sharing, profit-sharing, renting, wage contract--all involve sharing. But renting and wage contracts are more vulnerable to unfairness. This may take place, for example when a rented piece of agricultural land fails to produce any crop due to draught or flood. Regulators are called upon to ensure fairness in sharing joint products. Regulation of business practices is a well established tradition going back to the earliest periods of history. Its earliest forms are the obligation to fulfill promises and tell the truth. Not tampering with socially approved weights and measures and not indulging in clipping metallic coins soon followed. All these are examples of faith inspired values as they reflect a moral view of human relationships. In the absence of faith moral values have to be anchored into pragmatism which can easily succumb to relativism depriving morality of the strength needed to prevent predatory practices. To assert that these values reflect the evolutionary necessity to preserve and promote vital interests ensuring survival does not contradict their essentially moral nature. There is no conflict between morality and survival necessitated pursuits. It is faith that provides the trust needed to remove any fear of dissonance between well being enhancing values and survival ensuring interests. By enhancing trust morality reduces transaction costs and increases efficiency.

Faith as you know answers for us questions beyond the reach of our sensory means of knowing. Who are we? Where to are we headed? are we accountable for our choices here and now? Faith impacts finance through the answers it provides to such question as why to produce and for whom to produce. The strength of one’s faith is reflected in the intensity of one’s efforts to produce. It is also reflected in one’s decision on what to do with one's earnings. The nature of our faith determines where one stands in the broad spectrum of exclusive pursuit of self interest and reaching out to the entire humanity. Faith broadens the scope of and widens the horizon for productive efforts. The realistic middle ground (to which most of us stick) is avoiding harming others while serving one’s self interest, and aspiring to do good to others if and when circumstances call for it. Faith does this through generating moral obligation towards others. However, all societies have not been the same in this regard. In the recent experience of humanity, western secularism has pushed back faith and encouraged greed and pursuit of self interest as a means to social well-being; concern for others has dimmed. The natural tendency of faith to generate morality is ruptured by false notions about the efficacy of amoral behavior in delivering social good. It is also weakened by man’s proclivity to selfish behavior in absence of spiritual roots.

The overriding focus on shareholder value maximization has pushed out other stakeholders such as customers, employees and society at large. A moral approach to finance has the potential to take stakeholder approach, be long term focused and to address the issue of compensation based on fairness and equity.

Faith has often been replaced by aggressive ideologies justifying cruelty, even brutality in the name of rapid growth. Faith emphasizes inclusive growth even though vested interests care only about impressive growth, The modern scenario of mega cities divided into luxurious living quarters and shiny suburbs on one side and dark, dilapidated slums lacking basic amenities such as clean drinking water and schools on the other side, is largely a product of economics that has purged faith and morality. Despite their claim to be guided by reason, modern economic ideologies have resulted in the most unreasonable scenario in what is aptly called the global village. The same division between the rich and poor that afflicts our mega cities afflicts the global village too. Modern economics has no answer to the question: why? even when it grudgingly admits such an outcome to be undesirable.

The cause of affliction lies in a moral deficit in the contemporary structure of social, political and economic edifice. This moral deficit lies in lack of concern on part of individuals for the good of others, which sometimes degenerates further into exploiting others in pursuit of one’s own gain. The moral deficit itself is caused by the absence of faith; sometime a weak faith or faith diluted by confusing world views produces the same result: impotent faith incapable of moral uplift. A robust faith brings into focus the essential oneness of mankind as owing existence to the same Creator. Brotherhood of man, equality in dignity and identical rights to God given resources in environment as well as in human relations; all belong to this focus and are sustained by it. Regaining this focus should be high on agenda of all concerned.
Ground Reality and Desired State of the World

Going forward one needs to explore two parallel concepts: the actual conditions pertaining to faith-finance relations in contemporary society and the potential of faith in correcting finance's current course. I begin with the latter, the potential of faith for ameliorating the contemporary economic crisis. The nature of finance is too complex to issue a simple list of do-s and do-not-s in the name of faith. Its ever changing nature defies any list of prohibitions and obligations to suffice for all places and all times. However, the crucial values that promise to help in securing fairness in changing conditions are: the concern for others’ well-being; the will to abstain from harming others even at the cost of personal sacrifice; and the willingness to submit to democratically-enacted social regulations. Most of the recent adverse developments in financial markets   responsible for widespread sufferings are rooted in the absence of these values. Current economic theories do not embody or promote these values. For example, the Friedman school that has been influential from early nineteen eighties through today openly warns against firms and individuals trying to care for others.  The ruling dogma is that one best serves society by serving oneself. No wonder the other two values, the will to abstain from harming others and a willingness to abide by rules also evaporated under the encouragement of unlimited pursuit of self interest. Given this environment, who would not twist rules to make them serve one’s interest?

The answer necessitates pondering over what the quest for fairness in financial system entails. In the absence of hard and fast regulations capable of ensuring fairness it is not structures but perspectives, understandings and morals that matter. People who want to behave will find ways to do so, if not straight away then haltingly, by experimentation. They may even find ways to constrain deviants and minimize the loss of social weal due to individual perfidy. Much has been made of lack of full information to economic decision makers in debunking the idea of caring for social good. The reality is there is no way to have full information about future values. The falsity of the assumption of market mechanism somehow magically solving this human predicament has been exposed by a succession of crises. Man must try to make up for inevitable information deficit by experimentation, pooling of available information and sharing the consequences of ill-informed decisions. They can do so at the individual level as they have been doing at the societal level. Faith is a positive aid insofar as it creates an incentive to cooperate for the social good.

People of faith have learnt some lessons during the quest of fairness in the past. These deserve to be our starting point in a similar quest today. As I proceed to summarize them I beseech you not to get stuck with them, quibbling over variety of interpretations and controversies surrounding the circumstances in which they are applicable. I also underline the fact that these form the first steps to be taken in man’s search for a just and fair financial system. By no means would they be sufficient to usher in a just society.
Pillars of Fair Finance

The prerequisites of fairness in finance include the prohibition of interest, fraud (in its myriad forms) and gambling and transactions involving excessive uncertainty (gharar in Arabic). These prohibitions are to be seen in the perspective of private ownership, freedom of enterprise and a supervisory role of state as the guardian of the poor and the weak. Faith encourages charitable giving which includes lending to the needy and expecting to receive no more than what was given. Regarding business loans shifting all risk onto the borrower is repugnant to faith while encouraging partnership and profit-sharing instead suits faith. This follows from nature of environment in which business is done, as future value-productivity is surrounded by risk and uncertainty. Gambling is creating risks to play with chance. Financial speculation that thrives by trade in other people’s risk is a contemporary example of gambling. Some activities are surrounded by uncertainties to an extent that makes contractual relationships built around them problematic. The contracts through which these activities are carried on are not transparent affording the same information to all concerned. The means of just sharing missing, it is better to avoid them. That sums Islamic thinker’s attitude towards excessive uncertainty (gharar).  In Islam the jurists have worked hard to translate the three principles listed above: prohibition of interest, prohibition of gambling and minimization of gharar, into rules governing business relationships. But the ever changing nature of these relations, in itself largely shaped by changing technologies, defies being caught into the net of rules framed at a particular time and place. Innovation in ways of doing business necessitates making new rules, so the process of rule making must go on!

Protecting the weak from the strong, the knowing from the unknowing and the poor from the rich necessitates some socially imposed restraints to human freedom, including freedom of enterprise. Securing fairness would, however, need more than imposing restraints. That is where the values mentioned above: concern for others, readiness to limit one’s potential gains in that context and following democratically enacted laws become relevant. We need to harness human ingenuity in positively enhancing justice and equity, not only in preventing injustice.  Faith is capable of doing so. The nature of a competitive economy is often cited as the reason for the inability of an individual firm to promote social good. It is a challenge to our ingenuity to harness the forces of cooperation to counteract this.
Faith versus Cult

Faith knows no land, race, language, nor culture. But people of faith sometimes develop strong attachments to one or more of these to the extent of identifying their religion with a particular land, race, language or culture. Worse still, sometime religion is made to serve national, racial and other narrow goals. As a result faith loses its power to generate a universal morality overriding narrower interests.  That provides answer to the second query made above: the actual condition relating to the faith-finance nexus. In today’s world faith has had little influence on finance since faith has been made a tool of national, racial and other social ambitions. Religion is the expression of faith in particular people, translating faith’s demands into rules of conduct. Over time these rules have often been turned and twisted to suit particular interests. Even today some countries are in danger of state-religious establishment-corporate alliances which would effectively rule out universal morality.


Rejuvenation of faith necessary to transform the current financial system would first involve the disentangling of faith from other narrower loyalties such as religion or citizenship. Faith in its purest form, i.e. faith detached from religion, citizenship, etc. has the capability to cut across all ideologies and promote morality. By creating positive sympathetic relationships with others faith would make men accountable and responsible to each other. But faith in its current state, faith that is made subservient to nationalism or imperialism, fails to do so. Impure faith creates an artificial distinction between morality and faith. Loyalty to a nation or race, for example, dictates certain ethics and priorities that are generally in conflict with those of another nation or race. In combination with the first and major barrier to moral behavior in finance, human greed, faith cannot impact finance unless and until these barriers are removed.           

 

Islam’s contribution to universalizing faith-generated morality lies in pushing back these barriers to their proper secondary positions. The best periods of Islamic history have been when tribal or racial loyalties were kept in check and universal morality reigned supreme, as reported about the early decades of Islamic history. Conversely, the worst period occurred when tribal and racial identities surpassed universal morality in creation and sharing of wealth. The resilience of the Islamic morality necessitates calling for a review of financial system in the light of Islamic ideals of justice and equity (Adl and Ihsan). The fifty year old movement of Islamic banking and finance is a recent example.
Diluting Faith’s Mandate

Above I stated the original position of people of faith regarding interest on loans: charging interest on consumption loans to the needy was considered immoral; charging interest on commercial loans was considered unfair as it amounted to shifting risk to the borrower. As is well known this position was later modified by many faith groups to allow moderate rates of interest on commercial loans. We need to take notice of this development.

The distinction made between loans for consumption purposes (which do not result in anything marketable) and loans for productive purposes has no basis in the texts to which these faith groups swear allegiance. They did it supposedly on pragmatic grounds to facilitate financial transactions between owners of money capital and users of money capital for creating additional wealth. It was argued that interest payment was needed to compensate for loss of opportunity of profitable employment of that capital on part of the lender, ignoring the fact that no opportunity for guaranteed profit existed in the real world. Man’s environment is characterized by uncertainty of future value productivity of capital as Frank Knight demonstrated in his 1921 book Risk, Uncertainty and Profit. Furthermore, as the author of the article on usury in the Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics (1967) points out, any legitimacy accorded to interest in one sector permeates throughout the economy with the passage of time. Islam eliminated that possibility by declaring excess payment above the initial amount lent as prohibited Riba .As the Quran says:

Believers! Have fear of Allah and give up all outstanding interest if you do truly believe. But if you fail to do so then be warned of war from Allah and His Messenger. If you repent even now, you have the right of the return of your capital; neither will you do wrong nor will you be wronged. [II:278-80].

The distinction between low and high rates of interest or between loans for business and loans for need-fulfillment is not recognized by the Quran. As regards the presumption that commercial loans were not prevalent at that time, it has no basis in history. On the contrary Riba in seventh century Arabia was overwhelmingly common in commerce. This is underlined by the declaration made by the Prophet, peace be upon him, in his last Hajj sermon canceling all interest owed to his uncle, Abbas bin Abdul Muttalib. Abbas advanced money capital to the growers of dates in Medina as well as to the growers of grapes in Taif. Failure to pay at the time the loan was due then justified an increase in the amount to be repaid.

Some have tried to grant legitimacy to interest arguing that it is analogous with rent.  Unlike money capital which must first be spent to acquire real goods and services, rented goods like machines and real estate are usable right away. Islam, like all other religions allowed charging rent as a price for usufruct. Jurists often absolve the lessee from the obligation to pay rent should the rented property lose its ability to provide the expected usufruct.

Legitimacy of profit and rent is hedged with the provisions directed against monopoly and hoarding in order to maintain fair competition. The rest is largely left to the market functioning under the watchful eyes of the social authority.  Abu Bakr, the first ruler succeeding the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, described the ruler's duty as protecting the weak from the strong.

Speculation in financial markets often takes the form of betting on the uncertainty of the outcome of future events. Regulators must realize that such trading in risk is no more than gambling and serves no legitimate financial purpose. As such, regulators should prohibit such trades and they should examine all associated financial instruments, such as derivatives, for such characteristics.                 
Conclusion

Faith has the potential to influence financial markets by molding human behavior in accordance with moral values conducive to social weal. The essential universality of moral values has to be protected from being made subservient to hegemonic ambitions rooted in racial, national or religious identities.  People of faith have devised institutions to realize the ideal of a just society. Within the framework of private ownership, freedom of enterprise and state supervision, prohibition of fraud, gambling and interest form necessary parts of these arrangements.    Rapid technological changes necessitate adapting these institutions to new circumstances and making new arrangements in order to realize social goals. Continuing innovations in financial markets present new challenges for regulators .The quest for fairness in finance becomes a continuous process. The recent resurgence of Islamic finance should be looked upon as part of that process.

 

Inputs from the following are gratefully acknowledged:

Anas Zarqa,Valeed Ansari, Shaheer Rizvi, Jennifer Schwalbenberg, Sarah Akhtar, Asiya Nafeesa Ali, Husam  al-Khateeb, Taha Abdul Basir,
 

محور : مقالات انگليسي + ترجمه در ادامه مطلب

DEALING WITH THE FINANCIAL CRISIS

AN ISLAMIC APPROACH

In this paper I try to note the main causes of the current financial crisis that is leading the world into an economic disaster of unprecedented proportions. This is followed by a discussion on how can we get out of this undesirable situation and move towards a better world. In between I shall also comment on why some of the conventional strategies of crisis management are proving to be ineffective. I conclude indicating the systemic changes that should accompany economic strategies in order to move towards an enduring solution.

 
What Happened
The story is by now well known. Debt financing grew to an extent the repayment capacity of the borrowers could no longer sustain. This was most visible in the housing sector in the United States of America. But it pervaded all sectors of the economy almost all the world over. With so much debt floating in the market, securitization and repackaging took the debts to the common man and those managing their savings. The easiest way to make money grow became, not productive enterprise, but manipulating other people’s debts. Complex derivatives and risk absorbing products like Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs) and Credit Default Swaps (CDSs) attracted the financial institutions entrusted with investing people’s monies for profit. Monetary authorities also obliged financial markets with supply of cheap money. Higher and higher leverage became order of the day. When the inevitable bursting of the bubble occurred and defaults became endemic financial institutions failed to fulfill their obligations. Liquidity dried up. Things stopped moving. Globalization ensured that these effects reached everywhere.

 
Role of Debt

A modern economy is built around debts that bear interest. Monetary management as well as financial intermediation is effected through interest bearing debts. This makes the system crisis prone. It also makes the system unfair and inequitable. Let us take the monetary system first.


The amount of fiat money the monetary authority decides to float in the economy finds its way to people mostly through banks and other financial institutions. Whatever monies are given to people directly as salaries, wages and grants etc., also find their way to banks and other financial institutions as deposits and investments. The monies that go out from banks and other financial institutions mostly do so as debts carrying interest. Some of these debts are repaid and that much new money is cancelled, but the interest paid remains as revenue for the bank. Some debts are renewed on maturity, often with accrued interest added to the principal. Bank loans are part of an economy’s money supply. To the extent the volume of interest bearing loans increases, the money supply also increases.

 Parallel to this stream of debts runs another stream and in the same direction. It is bonds issued by the government; Central, State and Local; as well as bonds floated by private sector corporations. Government bonds’ supply has had a tendency to increase over time.

 

 As time passes the volume of debts in the economy goes on increasing. Obligations to pay interest due and/or return the principal can be met from wealth newly created or already existing. In case debt financed productive enterprises fail to produce additional wealth large enough to meet obligations of repayment with interest, a dip unto old wealth already existing before the debt-financed projects were started becomes necessary. Wealth redistribution in favor of lenders is an inalienable feature of an economy in which debt financing predominates.

 

 In money terms, there is not sufficient money to meet all payment obligations, in view of the interest added to the principal that came out as newly created money. The only way out is to renew some of the outstanding debt or monetize it (by exchanging newly printed currency for debt papers). The debt based system of creating new money and financing productive enterprises necessitates ever increasing volumes of debts. It is difficult to imagine how these debts can ever be paid. To lighten the burden of debt a severe bout of inflation will be necessary with all its unhealthy consequences.
 

When the economy is not growing fast enough defaults occur (as happened in the US recently). Insurers step in to capitalize on the fear of default by offering to buy risk of default from dealers in debt. Speculation in the market for buying and selling risk is detached from speculation in the market for real goods and services. It is not based on relevant information in the real sector, nor do actuarial tables exist to make any kind of scientific calculation possible. Speculating in the market for risks is a zero sum game relying on chance. On the other hand the ability to sell risk of default to a third party makes the lending institutions reckless. They tend to make more loans to less creditworthy clients and fail to monitor their behavior for ensuring repayment. At the same time the distance between people whose monies are lent and those who are supposed to repay them goes on increasing. The long chain of anonymous intermediation separating lenders and borrowers coupled with transfer of risk to specialist institutions creates a make believe world in which nothing but profit margins and leverage matters. Some of this attitude spills over to the stock markets too as dividends and share prices are manipulated with a view to attracting more savings. An increasing proportion of society’s real resources; men, machines and other material;  engages, not in producing real goods and services but in manipulating numbers and creating complex new financial products which enable more bets on already existing profit opportunities.

 
Two consequences inevitably follow. Firstly, it is impossible for all debt obligations to be met making default endemic at some stage. The impossibility is rooted in the twin phenomena of interest added on all debt to be repaid and in the uncertain nature of productive enterprise financed by debt. The system cannot survive without destroying some obligations to repay the outstanding debts. Secondly the distribution of income and wealth tends to become more unequal over time. This consequence is rooted in the transfer of some of the existing wealth from the borrowers to the lenders as the legal system obliges even those debt –financed entrepreneurs who failed, to repay the sum borrowed with interests added. A second factor contributing to enhanced inequality is the banks keeping a lion’s share of the seigniorage resulting from money creation in a fractional reserve system. The competitive mechanism needed to channelize a major part of seigniorage to common man; depositors, clients and other users of banking services; does not function. The reason competition fails to bring down real interest rates to levels in sync with proper sharing of the benefits of money creation, the seigniorage, with people is that interest rates are treated as a policy tool, determined administratively rather than by the market forces. The central bank has to take into consideration the requirements of the country’s external balance of payments and the domestic needs for money supply, etc., in deciding upon the key rate at which it would lend money to commercial banks, which rate in turn forms the basis of   the other interest rates in the economy.

 
Treatment of Uncertainty

 

 Risk and uncertainty are inalienable features of life. The society’s interest lies in mitigating and minimizing uncertainties. Two things greatly contribute towards minimizing uncertainties rooted in human behavior as distinguished from those rooted in nature, like earthquakes, floods, etc. One is behavioral norms or rules every economic agent adheres to. For example telling the truth, keeping promises and honoring contracts contribute immensely towards efficiency. Second is cooperation in facing uncertainties that takes the form of sharing risks that cannot be eliminated. This feature contributes to efficiency as well as equity and fairness. In both cases the crucial factor is incentives, the answer to the question why would one do this rather than do that?

In the conventional system as exposed by the current crisis we have failed on both counts. Lies have been told, norms have been breached, rules violated and contracts ignored. Most economic agents tended to shift risks to others (who in many cases would gamble with them) rather than share risks equitably. Looking at the incentives there is little else than the desire to get rich quickly with little regard for any societal considerations. Contradicting the claims that somehow the culture of unabashed greed will also ensure the survival of the weak and the uninformed, the world has landed into a morass of unprecedented difficulties. The conventional system lacks proper incentives for economic agents adhering to rules and/or cooperating to minimize risks (through information dissemination, for example) and sharing risks equitably.

 
What Is To Be Done?

 

I suggest that a comprehensive solution requires attention towards all the three factors highlighted above: role of interest based debt, speculative and exploitative approach towards risk and an incentive structure focused on maximization of private gain. But before arguing in favor of this approach it is necessary briefly to look at the other efforts currently being made to check the disaster.

 

Current efforts at amelioration can broadly be summed up under three categories: Pouring more liquidity into the system; more strict regulation of the financial markets; and nationalizing parts of the financial system that cannot be fixed in the two above ways. There is no intention anywhere of changing the role of interest bearing debt, adopting a radically different stance towards risk management or restructuring incentives by influencing peoples’ motivation.

 

I submit that as a result of the above measures currently being taken to fix the situation the economy will someday regain its feet on the ground but it will be laden with new problems and will certainly carry the seeds of a new crisis to appear sooner or later. Meanwhile the distribution of income and wealth may become more unequal and the level of confidence in the suitability of the system may fall further.

At the international level the rehabilitation of world’s developed economies will not mean an end to endemic poverty in Africa and South Asia, nor shall it bring promise of enduring peace as the current ways of solving the crisis fail to touch the fundamental causes of hegemonic policies of the rich towards the poor.

 
Enduring Solutions


Humanity needs a change of heart. The philosophy of greed and individualism must give way to a cooperative approach to living. This necessitates disabusing minds from the unfounded premises of neoclassical economics that extolled individualism and maximization of private gain as the surest way to societal felicity. It also requires bringing ethics and morality back into economics and finance. That is the only way the loss of people’s trust into the banks and other financial institutions can be reversed. People trust each other when they perceive they are pursuing mutually reconcilable goals. The current loss of confidence is born of the opposite perception, each fearing the other is out to exploit and take advantage of him.

 
Ethics and morality are not luxury goods a society can dispense with. The very fabric of social living is built around them. An exchange economy, especially its financial system is very sensitive to loosening of that fabric. Reinforcing that fabric brings customers closer to their managers. When the reverse happens people stop trusting their managers and withdraw into their cocoons, to great disadvantage of society. An enduring solution to the current crisis calls for restoration of trust between people by replacing the tendency to treat others as mere instruments for promoting the interests of the self with a relationship rooted in universal human brotherhood. It is only such a revitalized society that can throw up an administration that can protect public interest from being pulverized by vested interests. Writing tougher rules and tighter regulations cannot remedy a situation in which many of the regulators happen to be former or potential future employees of vested interests.

 

Absence of ethics and morality from the public square is also responsible for the dangerous situation at the international level. Almost all international financial institutions; the IMF and the World Bank included; have lost the trust of poor countries. Most international organizations are perceived as tools for serving hegemonic designs of the rich and powerful nations.

 
Reform Agenda

 

An alternative to debt financing from which interest is absent is the first step towards change. Parallel to this we need a way of creating money in which interest plays no role. Equity can easily replace debt as the basis for issuing new money by the monetary authority and/or by other financial institutions. There are viable schemes of monetary management without involving interest but this is not the place to go into details. As regards finance various sharing schemes offer ways of equity financing that suit different sectors of the economy. Leasing and cost plus financing also offer viable alternatives in some sectors.

 

Once the menace of interest is banished from the economy keeping speculation within reasonable limits would become easier. Society should insist on transparency wherever other people’s money is involved. It should also arrange for dissemination of information that would help minimize uncertainty. It will be easier to eliminate gambling on the stock market and/or betting on un-measurable risks in such an environment. Given respect for other people’s interests within and outside the country, hegemonic policies may gradually be replaced by international covenants based on mutuality.

 

Last but not the least is the newly gained awareness of ecological imbalances caused by man’s pursuit of unlimited growth. Conventional system has no inbuilt mechanism to limit growth to sustainable levels, based as it is on individualism and pursuit of private gain. A new approach requires not only new regulations but a move away from individualism and pursuit of private gain towards socially conscious decision making and cooperation in realization of common interests. Man must learn to live in moderation in view of the limits our environment imposes. Moderation in pursuit of material gains and in consumption has been part of the teachings of religions in general and Islam in particular. It is time to bring them in.

محور : مقالات انگليسي + ترجمه در ادامه مطلب

RISK MANAGEMENT IN AN ISLAMIC FRAMEWORK
mnsiddiqi@hotmail.com
15 February 2009

 
Introduction§

 This Note tries to look at risk man faces in economic activity in general and in finance in particular. Economic prosperity and the efficiency and stability of our financial system depend on proper handling of risks. This is also true of justice and equity; they too require that risks be handled in ways favorable to building a just society.

Risk in economic activity emanates from lack of information, which in itself is often in consequence of involvement of future.

 
Most often one produces to sell. The longer the period of production the greater the uncertainty attaching to the selling price, generally speaking. Size of the market is also a factor. Globalization and integration of world markets has also increased risks. Uncertainty also attaches to the cost of production. These uncertainties make the expected profits uncertain. The profits may be high or low, they may even be negative, i. e. the producer entrepreneur may sustain losses. This is the major risk a producer takes.

 

The producer generally runs his business by funds provided by a financier. The financier wants his/her money back and demands some reward over and above the capital invested. Such a reward can come out of the profits accruing to the producer/entrepreneur. As the return of capital as well as the reward promised is, for practical purposes, linked to the results of the enterprise, the financier too is vulnerable to the risks of business noted above.

 

 Most often finance is provided to the entrepreneur not by the fund owner directly but by an institutional financial intermediary. The institutional financial intermediary collects investible funds from large number of savers and supplies them to businesses that want them. Funds supplied to the intermediary are generally for short periods whereas the fund users want them for longer periods. Credit intermediation and maturity transformation, though necessary for financial intermediation, carry risks. Sometimes financial intermediaries take other risks too, like accepting funds in one currency and making investments in another currency. But these risks, like the risks taken by producers, are worth taking as they bring great benefits to society by making possible production that is large scale and takes long periods of time.

 

Expansion of the real economy by larger production of goods and services requires expansion of the financial sector through greater mobilization of society’s savings and innovative methods of financing productive enterprises, exchange and distribution. With the expansion of the financial sector come more risks.

 

If each economic agent was left to bear the risks involved in his/her economic activity alone economic activity will be severely constrained. It is socially advantageous to allow economic agents to distribute the burden of risk bearing among themselves. The more widespread the dispersal of risks, the larger the volume of risks that can be borne by the society as a whole, hence the more efficient the system. But this must be done equitably. Fairness requires that those who bear losses in case there are losses also get  profits in case there are profits insofar as these losses/profits devolve on uncertainty. When risks are distributed in a manner that makes one category of economic agents more vulnerable to losses and another category of people more likely to gain in cases of profits, that particular scheme of distributing risks becomes anti social. If we allow speculators to buy risks using other peoples’ money (promising the ‘insured’ return of their capital with interest) the incidence of losses in case of heavy losses falls mainly on these other people whose money was behind the bet. Where as their ‘profits’ are confined to the fixed fees paid by the sellers of risk. Meanwhile the intermediaries earn their commissions from profits but pass on the entire loss to the fund owners. This seems to be what happened in case of Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs) and Credit Default Swaps (CDSs) in the US financial market recently. It seems prudent to confine the distribution of risk among those actually involved in production, exchange and distribution of goods and services and those willing to invest their savings in these enterprises. In other words, prudent risk distribution should exclude gamblers who want to bet on the possible outcomes of risky ventures. These bet makers do not supply more investible funds to the real sector. The funds at their disposal are used in the manner money is used in a casino: making a bet in expectation of a win, ready to lose the amount involved in the bet, with the crucial difference that the money lost belongs to other people!

 

 Risk Sharing versus Risk Transferring

 

If the financier agrees to a share of the profits as his/her reward, we describe this arrangement as risk sharing. But the producer/entrepreneur may not make any profit. In that case the financier gets only the capital back. There is no reward. Sometimes the producer/entrepreneur may sustain losses. In profit-sharing arrangements approved by Islam, these losses are borne by the financier.

 

In an interest-based economy such as capitalist societies have, a significant part of funds are provided to the producer/entrepreneur on condition of being repaid with a reward added irrespective of the results of the enterprise, whether it is profits or losses. The risks involved in productive enterprise are borne entirely by the producer. The financier does not share the risks of the productive enterprise, even though he gets the rewards for financing from out of the profits of enterprise.

There are many variants of risk sharing. Also there are different ways of transferring risks. Sometimes risks may be transferred to third parties—who neither provide funds for production nor organize production. These are speculators who “buy” risks. In the current state of affairs they have become the dominant factors in the world of finance.

This paper takes the position that buying risks involved in other people’s business is a speculative activity akin to gambling. The behavior of such risk takers is very different from the behavior of one taking risks involved in his/her own business. Their interest does not lie in mitigating risks. More often they wish enhanced risks as it expands their market opportunities and may bring them larger gains. Their interests lie in greater instability. The interests of those who buy risks to profit thereby are opposite the interests of the other parties---producers, fund owners and financial intermediaries. All three gain by stability but the buyer of risks gains by instability. Since society’s interest lies in reduced risks and increased stability the activities of speculators who buy risks to profit thereby should be regarded as anti-social.

 

A is the producer-entrepreneur being financed by B (using own funds or funds entrusted by others). B faces the risk that instead of getting any return on the funds advanced to A, he/she may suffer losses. Now comes X and offers to buy the risks from B.B would pay a price against which X offers to compensate any losses suffered by B in his/her arrangement with A. This is an example of risk shifting—transferring risk to a third party. I submit that this is not allowed in Islam. Even if X is doing similar arrangements with hundreds of financiers like B, the arrangement remains purely speculative. It is not based on any assessment of the productivity of the A’s ventures being financed. It is gambling. This arrangement that the likes of B are making with the likes of X to manage risk is very different from insurance. The Law of Large Numbers, the scientific basis for insurance, does not apply to business risks, as these are unique in each case.

 

The two ways of risk management, sharing or transferring, have different impacts on economy and society. Despite their predominance in the world today, risk management based on transferring the risk, or risk shifting, are less efficient as well as unjust and inequitable. A system of production and

Finance based on risk sharing will be more efficient and equitable.

 

The risk sharing arrangements are more efficient for two main reasons. First, allocation of investible funds is based on expected profitability (i.e., productivity) of the projects concerned, whereas in the interest based system allocation is heavily biased towards the creditworthiness of the project-sponsors, which depends on their wealth holding rather than on the expected profitability of the relevant projects. Second, a system of risk sharing encourages entrepreneurs and innovators—the dynamic people whose ideas take the economy forward. In contrast, a system that allows all risks to be transferred to entrepreneurs, guarantying the capital and a positive return to suppliers of investible funds protects and promotes the rentier class.

Financiers should not be allowed to transfer all the risks attending upon profit seeking on to the producer-entrepreneurs as this creates a pressure for accelerated growth that is deleterious for the environment.

 

Risk sharing results in a more equitable distribution of income and wealth. A system based on transferring all risk to entrepreneurs causes a continuous transfer of wealth from entrepreneurs to wealth owners (as the loss making enterprises are made to pay back the capital borrowed along with the interest promised from out of their past wealth), adversely affecting the distribution of income and wealth, reducing social cohesion and increasing conflicts.

 
RISK SHARING IN ISLAMIC FINANCE

 

Among the earlier forms of risk sharing between the financier and the business being financed, the prominent ones are partnership (musharakah) and profit sharing (mudarabah). Partnership may involve sharing the profits or losses, as the case may be or sharing the products, as in case of muzaraáh (share-cropping).

The earliest reported form of financial intermediation in Islamic societies was al-mudarib yudarib, a person obtaining finance on profit sharing basis entering into a similar arrangement with another person. It is possible to model Islamic banking in modern times according to this formula. The deposit money received by Islamic banks on the basis of mudaraba should be advanced on the same basis (of profit-sharing) to investors who would then finance productive enterprises directly or on the basis of murabaha, ijara, salam/istisna, etc .

That would have kept financial intermediation separate from productive enterprise. Financial intermediation would be based on sharing whereas productive enterprise could avail itself of a variety of arrangements; buying cash, buying on credit, taking advances with the promise of delivering later, taking on lease, etc. They would still face business risks requiring them to manage by diversifying, forward sales, hedging, etc. As businesses focused on certain kinds of enterprises they would be better equipped to manage business risks, unlike financial intermediaries who can not be expected to manage all kinds of business risks.

 However, in actual practice of Islamic banking and finance during the last three decades mark up (murabaha) leasing (ijara) and prepaid orders (salam and istisna) were adapted as devices for financial intermediation. The banks/financial institutions did not in reality have any use for the real goods/services, as they were not involved in production or exchange. They used the funds at their disposal to acquire real goods/services [using salam, for example]to be passed on to those who needed using these goods/services against a debt obligation on their part. The net result is cash for debt. This genre of intermediation seems ill suited to Islamic finance. The Islamic banks/financial institutions that relied on these sales based modes of financing in effect refused to share the risks of productive enterprises being financed. These risks were shifted to the enterprises themselves. These financing devices, like their counterparts in conventional finance, left a trail of debt obligations quantitatively larger than the cash initially advanced irrespective of the results of the enterprises so financed. This has the same impact on the macro economy as lending at interest. Even though sale with a mark up on purchase price, advance payments on counterparts to be delivered in future and leasing concluding into ownership are perfectly legitimate Islamic modes of doing business, when they are used for financial intermediation their macroeconomic impact is inequitable.

They favor financiers by shifting risks to the entrepreneurs. They create a constant pressure for growth (by mandating that total outputs be larger than total inputs) that is destructive of environment.

In doing so they violated the spirit of Islamic finance insofar as risk management is concerned. This has led to widespread dissatisfaction amongst the customers as well as dissentions amongst the sponsors of Islamic banking and finance. It has also opened to derision the advantages claimed over conventional banking and finance by Islamic banking and finance as most of these claims are based on sharing. This paper makes a plea to amend the ways and move from debt creating sale-based modes of finance to sharing based financial intermediation.

 

The above suggestion in effect amounts to a separation of commercial banking and investment banking in a special way. Investment making institutions would not be allowed to accept deposits from the public. They either seek funding on mudarabah basis through banks or sell shares collecting funds on the basis of shirkah. Deposit taking banks, on the other hand, will manage the payments mechanism only.

 

Risk sharing presumes a degree of trust that risk shifting does not require. The ease of risk shifting made it more widely practiced during the past three centuries that witnessed the rise of capitalism and decline of trust. It enabled greater and faster expansion in the financial economy bringing about faster and greater expansion in the real economy producing goods and services. But the practice of expansion through risk shifting has greatly increased the proliferation of interest bearing debts and speculation bringing in its wake greater inequalities in the distribution of income and wealth. Economic growth propelled by the pursuit of private gains has resulted in environmental deterioration, hegemonic nationalism and rising anxiety levels across all sections of society. The situation calls for a review of existing arrangements in the financial sector.

 

Islam’s prohibition of maysir (gambling) requires that unconcerned third parties should not be allowed to ‘buy’ risks. The essence of gambling is taking a risk one creates or invites. This applies to many speculative financial products like Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDO) or Credit Default Swaps (CDS). As noted above those who bet on certain market trends do not serve anybody’s interest. They make no contribution to risk management as such. As proved by recent crisis their intervention in the market makes the financiers reckless and less interested in closely monitoring the money trail. This resulted from the seemingly transferring of risks to those who bought them. When the crunch came it turned out that those who took over CDOs or CDSs were merely gambling on low incidence of defaults, they were not at all equipped to manage the risk of big defaults. Had the regulators prohibited risk shifting the lenders could have guarded against possible big defaults by following a more cautious and responsible lending policy.

 

Islamic Economics looks at production as a life sustaining activity. It aspires to promote a type of economy that sustains life for all, the weak and the poor included. It does not equate life sustaining productive activity with profit making activity. It is also aware of the limits to growth that ecological and environmental considerations impose on us. Even though Islam puts no cap on profits, it has not allowed manipulations that create profit opportunities for few by spreading false information among people. Market regulation with a view to preventing monopolistic practices, exploitation of the weak and outright fraud has always been a feature of Islamic economy. In current conditions it will have to include monitoring corporate governance for ensuring protection of the rights of all stakeholders in joint stock enterprises. Part of the task involves ensuring transparency and flow of information to all concerned. Welfare oriented market regulation should therefore be seen as a part of risk management mechanism in Islamic economy. Risk management should not be seen only from the viewpoint of investors, as the interests of labor, consumers and indeed those of the whole society are involved. Profits are not the only parameter for judging the efficiency of risk management. Rather it is social welfare that involves much more than business profits. Proper evaluation of Islamic risk management techniques requires new measures of value suiting Islam’s more inclusive paradigm. It should not follow the conventional criteria focused on money profits.

 
Future of Risk Management

 

Risk sharing has yet to receive the attention it deserves. It is hoped lessons will be learnt from the global economic crisis and efforts will be made to distance from risk shifting. This requires decreasing the role of debt finance and increasing the role of equity finance. An inverted pyramid of debt obligations is created by the practice of trading in debts, with a slender base of real assets at its bottom. There is no close monitoring of borrowers by lenders. Rather it is speculators shoving complex financial products into the portfolios of uninformed investors who rule the market. The rapid speed of financial innovations keeps the regulators a step behind the market manipulators to the disadvantage of the ordinary investor. The regulators themselves have to change their priorities from protecting business profits to ensuring stability, transparency and fairness. The market cannot be rid of gambling like speculation without restricting trading in debts and curbing risk shifting. Corporations as well as individuals cannot be absolved of the responsibility of keeping the planet earth habitable as well as maintaining social cohesion by ensuring equity.

Islamic financial institutions need to make renewed efforts to expand the practice of equity finance and of risk sharing. The reasons often cited why such efforts did not succeed in the early days of Islamic banking experience. i.e., in 1970s, may no longer apply. There is more information available at lower cost facilitating participatory finance as compared to debt finance. Also, the recent disillusionment from the “Greed is Good” philosophy of economics is likely to help a socially responsible and ethically informed approach to business and finance. The regulators are also wiser after the successive financial crises capitalism has witnessed during the last three decades.

As pointed out above, one of the advantages of equity finance as compared to debt finance is that whereas the later leaves a trail of fixed payment obligations the former creates obligations in sync with the performance of the investments financed. Public monitoring of the performance of joint stock enterprises can go a long way in enlarging the scope for equity finance. A more democratic structure of monetary management at the national and global level is necessary for ensuring that money is not managed in the interest of profiteers but in the interest of humanity at large. This will require replacement of the current monetary authorities at the national and international level that are largely representative of the profit seeking wealth owners by representatives of people who act as guardians of social interest.

 

To summarize, risk management in Islamic framework should ensure that:

 

·         Debt proliferation is minimized. This implies that corporations raise additional funds via equity, not by issuing bonds.

·         Interest on debt is not practiced. This will in effect kill the bond market.

·         Debt is not traded.

·         Risks are shared between financiers and producers/businessmen

·         Regulators should not allow purchase of business or financial risks by outsiders not involved in the business or supply of investible funds for the business but only taking chances on the outcome.

 
APPENDIX

[Reproduced from the author’s essay: Comparative Advantages of Islamic Finance, presented at the Harvard Islamic Finance Forum in 2002, included in the Forum’s relevant publication and available at the author’s website http://www.siddiqi.com/mns]

Since financial intermediation does not involve selling goods and services directly, it would be more appropriate to get financial intermediaries involved in Murabaha business indirectly, as I will explain later. The same applies to other forms of business like Salam (payment now for delivery of agricultural goods in future), Istisna’( prepaid orders for manufactures), leasing, etc. A financial institution is not fully equipped to handle these businesses directly. It is often reluctant fully to expose its capital to the risks involved in direct businesses. As a result it tries to make the transactions as risk free as possible. It does not care if this means, on the average and in the long run, settling down for a lower rate of return.

 

Now imagine a whole range of businesses doing Murabaha, Salam, Istisna and leasing. These businesses would know the risks they are taking. They would also be able to diversify their activities as a means of reducing risk. Perhaps they are already specialising in handling different market segments in terms of the commodities involved. These  businesses would need financing. This financing could come from Islamic financial institutions. This way there would be a buffer between the changing circumstances of real businesses and those handling only finance. It will thus relieve the Islamic financial institutions from the need to reduce risk by making their contracts look like payment of less money now in exchange of more money to be received in future. The fact that their stake will be not in individual deals based on one of the contracts mentioned above but in a large basket of deals will make a crucial difference. In its own interest, the business being financed will have reduced the risk of loss by diversification and other methods. The financial institution will have the added opportunity of diversification by offering its funds to a variety of businesses.

 

What would be the basis for the Islamic financial institutions’ financing of Murabaha companies, Leasing companies, etc.? In my opinion the most appropriate form will be Mudaraba or profit sharing. Islamic banks accepting people’s savings in their investment accounts on the basis of Mudaraba would be giving that money out on  the basis of Mudaraba. This conforms to the earliest form of financial intermediation discussed in Islamic jurisprudence, al mudarib yudarib ( One taking other person’s money on the basis of Mudaraba giving that money to yet another person on Mudaraba ). The risks involved will be financial risks which financial intermediaries have learnt, and continue learning, how to handle. Business risks will become the concerns of business houses closer to those who buy and sell, even produce and import/export, or build and lease, hire and sublet, etc. There will be no need to twist and turn a trade deal to make it serve the purposes of a financial intermediary.

 

One might need to encourage establishing a whole range of companies: Murabaha companies, Salam/Istisna companies , Leasing companies, etc. so that finance is channeled from Islamic banks to those actually engaged in production of wealth. Whether it is the building and construction sector or agriculture, manufacturing industries or the transport and communication sector, foreign trade or domestic commerce or the government’s infrastructure building activities, ways can be found to meet their financial needs through these companies, without recourse to interest based lending and borrowing.

This vision, which involves separating purely financial transactions from business transactions, has two advantages in comparison to what we actually observe today in the Islamic financial markets. Firstly, it would comprise a mixture of sharing based modes with trade based modes of financing that result in creating fixed payment obligations or debts , unlike the current situation dominated by trade based modes. Secondly, it will enable Islamic financial institutions to do needed long term financing, a field from which they are presently shying away. With the exception of istisna which can be a basis of long term financing, all other trade based modes of financing ,e.g. Murabaha, leasing and salam, are suitable only for short term financing. Given this change they could rightfully demonstrate how their activities avoid contributing to the instability of the system, something we accuse interest based institutions of doing. By doing this the system will enjoy the unique feature of sharing based intermediation: synchronization between revenues and payment obligations, and still retain the flexibility which the presence of very low risk modes of financing impart to a system. A strong presence of sharing based modes of financing will give credibility to the claim of Islamic financial system’s being more just than the conventional system.

§ Valuable comments on a previous draft by Professors Abbas Mirakhor, Asad zaman, M.Fahim Khan and Shamim A.Siddiqi are gratefully acknowledged. What you find before you is, however, entirely my responsibility.
 

محور : مقالات انگليسي + ترجمه در ادامه مطلب

CURRENT FINANCIAL CRISIS AND ISLAMIC ECONOMICS
mnsiddiqi@hotmail.com
[31 October 2008]

 

The current crisis emanating from US financial markets and spreading to other developed and fast developing countries like China, India and Brazil, is threatening a global meltdown leaving the entire world poorer and full of forebodings regarding future .It started as a credit crunch due to highly over-stretched leverage, was aggravated by the complexity of the products and reached its zenith due to moral failure generating conflicts of interest and mismatch between incentives of the various groups and individuals involved in the saga.

 

Islamic economics stands for abolition of riba and maysir in financial dealings as well as on a regard for the interest of others in one’s pursuit of material gains.

 

The purpose of this brief note is to examine the relevance of Islamic economics today. Does it have a message for humanity insofar as its current financial problems are concerned?

 

In what follows we first outline the broad features of the crisis under the four headings noted above, trying to establish the thesis that most of them are rooted in a moral failure that leads to exploitation and corruption. This would be followed up by an explanation of  riba and mysir that  equates them to bank interest and gambling-like speculation based on risk shifting as distinct from risk sharing. It will be argued that debt-finance coupled with speculative products whose intricacies defy understanding provide ample opportunities to greedy profit-maximizing agents to exploit the aspirations of ordinary investors and for goading home owners and consumers into living beyond their means and chasing untenable dreams. Even the calls for more and more deregulation, and the philosophy of non interference with financial markets have [im]moral dimensions. There is a hidden agenda behind this call [Joseph Stiglitz and Bruce Greenwald, Towards a New Paradigm in Monetary Economics (2003), p. 206]. Though they swear by the name of efficiency and innovation, the champions of deregulation and laissez faire have their self interest in view, not the social weal. In conclusion a world of banking and finance without riba and maysir will be suggested as the best alternative to the current scenario. In this new environment risk sharing will replace risk shifting and morality, advising people to be moderate in their material pursuits and considerate about public good in their private decisions, coupled with realism, will serve as the corrective to self- destructive outgrowths of current financial capitalism. It will be noted that for this alternative model to be robust and resilient, morality has to be rooted in spirituality. This will provide a basis for willing acceptance of social norms, state supervision, regulation and intervention in the market based on values rather than interests.

 
THE ECONOMICS OF CURRENT CRISIS

 

We begin with the fourth element of the crisis noted above, i.e. moral failure and a mismatch between the incentives of various players in the financial arena. The reason: some of the other elements of the situation described above are partly a product of this factor. Currently, financial institutions include banks, investment companies, insurance companies etc., managed by hired professionals. Those who govern financial conglomerates by virtue of owning enough shares have motives different from ordinary shareholders. Almost the entire population in developed countries is involved in supplying capital through purchase of stocks, bonds, insurance policies, pension funds, etc. While these ‘principals’ are interested in profits they care about many other things too, among them stability, jobs, social justice, and anxiety free communities. Not so the hired managers who consider profit maximization to be their mission as it earns them maximum bonus and continued employment. There are those amongst middlemen who earn fees. They earn more when transactions multiply. In an environment where no one cares about others, focused as everyone is on his or her own interest, public interest is supposedly guarded by regulators. How can the same self-focused assembly of individuals throw up regulators who would work to protect and promote public good remains a moot question for neo-classical economics. An answer to this question is, however, provided by the public choice school: public servants too, elected as well as appointed, seek to maximize private gain!

 

Without committing myself to this rather bleak view of man in society, I suggest that we embark upon a discussion of the first three factors from the vantage point provided by this very view. It means I regard maysir- infested financial products[ like CDS, Credit Default Swaps], the inverted pyramid of debts[with a slender base of real assets] and the dearth of  liquidity…,all the remaining three features of the current situation, to be rooted in the moral failure briefly described above. It could have been different. The reason it is what it is can be found in the denudation of economics from morality after the secularization of society in the wake of enlightenment. Islamic civilization has the instruments to pre-commit man in society to certain values leading to rules  [abolition of interest and gambling, for example] that guard the society from falling prey to shortsighted predators. I proceed to elaborate taking the above-mentioned elements of the crisis one by one.

 
CASINO ECONOMICS AND HUMAN WELFARE

 

What is wrong with gambling? Firstly, gambling does not create additional wealth. Games of chance only transfer wealth from its (losing) owners to new (winning) ones. Considering the human resources consumed in the process, wealth transfers through games of chance cannot be considered to be efficient. They do not serve any social purpose. The satisfaction and thrill they provide to the players do not justify the opportunity cost involved. Other exonerating circumstances like the revenue to state in form of taxes or employment  generated by casinos, lotteries, etc. cannot be considered as ‘advantages’ until the acceptability of gambling itself is established.

 I argue that risk shifting is gambling. One who buys risk exchanges a definite amount of money (the price) for an uncertain amount of money, whose delivery itself is not certain. Credit Default Swaps are an appropriate example. The millions of loans made by a bank are each subject to the risk of default (credit risk) in various degrees. As Joseph Stiglitz and Bruce Greenwald have rightly pointed out credit is not homogenous like money [Towards a New Paradigm in Monetary Economics (2003), page 271]. The risks attached to each loan are unique. The institution undertaking to pay for all defaulters among, say a million borrowers has no scientific basis for measuring the risk it is taking. There is no long history to fall back on. The law of large numbers does not apply. It is just taking chances, gambling. The banks that so protect themselves against credit risks are emboldened to give more and more loans. That is how aggressive lending policy gained an impetus. The sub-prime mortgage crisis would not have occurred without the speculative deals like CDS. Aggressive lenders offered to refinance mortgages on the basis of rising home prices, virtually converting owned homes into ATM machines, sending people on a buying spree, some of it on installment purchase basis, encouraging an expansion that had little basis in the fundamentals: earning powers, disposable incomes and savings and investments.

 

The Islamic approach to risk is realistic but cautious. It does not allow deals involving excessive uncertainty (gharar kathir). It encourages sharing arrangements for facing risks. The additional wealth created with the use of existing wealth through risky ventures should be shared between fund users and fund owners while both bear the risks involved and the resulting losses. Differences in the participants’ perception of risks involved will be decisive in  determining the terms of bargain between those sharing risk. Even though the motive of each party is making profits, it is very different from taking chances in gambling. There is real wealth to be created, real gain to be reaped. It is different in case of risk shifting [as in CDS]. Neither the buyer nor the seller of risk has any stakes in real wealth creation. As in gambling only one party actually gains, either the seller of risk or the buyer. It is different in risk sharing in which both parties gain (or lose). Like gambling, risk shifting is a zero sum game.

 

Risk sharing fits in with a system that integrates risk management with value creation. The Islamic institutions of musharakah, and mudarabah, for example target value creation and are good ways of managing risk. In a healthy venture fear of loss works to counter-balance hope for gain. When a system allows shifting the risk (at a cost) the fear factor becomes inoperative insofar as the seller of risk is concerned. It is worse when the government takes over the risk (as in case of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in USA). Such a system is heavily tilted towards the rich and leads to greater inequality as it protects the lenders but leaves the borrowers to fend for them selves. This is the feature of the current system that lead to an almost universal cry that it amounted to privatizing gain and socializing pain---profits go to the corporations, losses are borne by the taxpayers.

As an aside take a minute to ponder over the Islamic approach as encapsulated in verse 278-281 of the second chapter of Quran:

 

    Believers! Have fear of Allah and give up all outstanding interest if you do truly believe. But if you fail to do so, then be warned of war from Allah and His Messenger. If you repent even now, you have the right of return of your capital; neither will you do wrong nor will you be wronged. But if the debtor is in straitened circumstances, let him have respite until the time of ease; and whatever you remit by way of charity is better for you, if only you know.[2:278-81]

 

 

In effect the above is advising how to handle a crisis caused by default. A crisis like the sub-prime crisis in US (if it ever occurred in an Islamic interest free system based on risk sharing) would be handled not by extending credit to lenders but by giving more time to borrowers and writing off some of the debts.

 
CREDIT WITHOUT CREDIBILITY

 

Over extended leverage, outstanding credits amounting to an ever-increasing multiple of existing capitals of the relevant institutions, is a direct result of financing through interest bearing debts. The business of lending to thrive requires continued expansion of credit. After all, the primary concern of the lending institutions is making money that comes in the form of interest on loans outstanding. Every loan recovery kills an existing income stream,  every loan extension generates a new income stream. With credit defaults swaps available and insurance companies like AIG supposedly providing cover, sub-prime lending looked attractive. The rest of the story is well known.

 

Debt financing of productive enterprise amounts to preferring risk shifting to risk sharing. This is immoral as well as counterproductive. The environment in which productive enterprise takes place does not guarantee creation of additional wealth. It is only a probability. The lender’s demand for a guaranteed positive return to the sum lent is unfair. Actually it cannot be met at the macro [i.e., society’s] level in the long run. Some enterprises do fail. Some others end up without any positive return to capital invested. Repayment in these cases can come only from old wealth already existing when the debt financed new projects were launched. Repayment of the borrowed sum with interest added, by those whose ventures failed to create wealth, causes a transfer of wealth from the entrepreneurs to the owners of money capital who would not share risk yet want a return. Putting producers/innovators at a disadvantage as compared to those having money to spare does not bode well for society. Easy money for those who have contributes to a life style at the top of the wealth pyramid that creates problems at its bottom. Society can continue meeting its debt obligations as long as there is growth at an accelerated rate. But the planet earth, its ecology, environment and resources are not designed for limitless growth. Deterioration in environment, increase in inequality, and social tensions are direct results of heavy reliance on debt finance.

 The problem is aggravated when monetary expansion too takes place in the form of interest bearing debts, as is the case with the current monetary system. In order for new money to come in circulation a loan must be given, a new debt must be created. For every loan to be paid back with interest, borrowers need more money than they have. This additional money leads to additional debts, and so on. As pointed out in the previous paragraph the debt imperative creates a growth imperative that contributes to the destruction of the ecosystem.

 

Selling Debts

 

Some debt financing has always been part of the financial markets. Even in hey day of Islamic civilization trade credit, a form of debt financing , thrived. Islam has no problem with that as it fits in with prohibition of exchanging money now with a larger amount of money after a period of time. The problem starts with sale of debt, whether created by a money loan or owed as a price of goods sold on credit. Sale of debt is allowed at par or face value. But there can hardly be a market for exchanging debts at par. You have a market for debt when bond [i.e., debt] prices are determined by supply and demand.  Sale of debt implies selling risk [or shifting risk]. A thriving market for debts at prices determined by supply and demand [as in conventional bond markets] is vulnerable to gambling like speculation as there exists no objective basis for measuring risks of default. The changing prices reflect changing subjective perceptions of the risks involved. As is well known these perceptions can sometimes be manipulated through planting stories in the media.

 

Remarkably, a ban on selling debts would drastically reduce the outstanding volume of debt. In effect it would scale down the volume of outstanding debts to the level of existing real assets. The inverted pyramid of debts, standing on a slender base of real wealth, would be replaced by a rectangular column of debts, owed against an equal amount of real goods and services acquired. The volatility in the bond market is directly related to the total volume of bonds. The larger the volume of debts, the weaker its connection with real wealth, and the more the scope for gambling-like speculation.

 

Derivatives

 

Derivatives also involve excessive uncertainty. They facilitate managing certain market risks (related to prices, rates of exchange, etc.). Chance remains the basic element in the situation, however, expectations being based on pure speculation. Derivatives too are a zero sum game: you lose what I gain, unlike the win-win situations in trade or risk sharing.  The claim that they increase liquidity and improve operational market efficiency in financial markets remains unsubstantiated. What can be empirically established is that, whatever the initial benefits for a certain class of investors, availability of derivatives invites speculative activity. This is evidenced by the fact that currently the volume of derivatives being traded stands at many times the world GDP. The market for derivatives literally becomes a casino.

 

 
THE NATURE AND ROLE OF LIQUIDITY
 

The demand for liquidity increases with expansion of credit. The current liquidity shortage is rooted in over extended leverage. Unbridled risk taking as in sub prime mortgage, results in lack of trust in the stability of the current prices as well as in defaults leading to strains on bank liquidity. The situation leads to a decrease in peoples’ confidence in the banks, resulting in widespread withdrawals. Pouring in more cash in the system could be more effective if it were to be given to the ultimate debtors---consumers, small businesses, poor home owners, etc.--- who would then use it to meet their financial obligations or engage in new purchases. As it works in the current system it is given to the banks and insurance companies. It enters the market as loans, creating another chain of debt obligations. This amounts to solving a crisis by methods that sow seeds for another crisis.

 

CONCLUSION

 

I wish I could go on. But there is already a wealth of material available on the subject. I seek the readers’ response to my central point: All the technical flaws and tactical mistakes leading us to the current crisis are rooted in a moral failure.

Given a society in which individuals care about public good and cooperate with one another to promote it, even though after securing their self-interest in order to ensure survival, we could escape much of the troubles currently facing us. Only such a society of individuals who care for public good can opt for the right mix of state intervention and private initiatives. Such a society is possible. Let us first shed the illusion that we have been living for decades now under the best of all arrangements, social, political, economic and financial. We have not. Let all join the search for an alternative.

 
 

محور : مقالات انگليسي ( ترجمه در ادامه مطلب )

THE PREACHER AND THE BANKER

Reappraising the Progress of Islamic Finance Industry

Mohammad Nejatullah Siddiqi

mnsiddiqi@hotmail.com

(January 2011)*

 By all counts Islamic finance has done well during and after the financial crisis triggered by subprime lending in US and engulfing the world during 2007-09(?). I mean what counts conventionally. Is there something else that counts? That is a different story.

Economics is about incentives. Man is moved by many kinds of incentives: material, spiritual; mundane, other-worldly; individual, social, etc. Material incentives may relate to wealth, fame, power and privilege, etc. Economics specializes in dealing with material incentives, particularly those related to wealth. It is also best equipped to deal with individual/personal incentives (something it owes to its history over the last two centuries).  It works best where measurable sums of money are involved. It never claimed to deal with other kinds of incentives, especially spiritual ones. It is of little use here to lament these limitations or wish for a more ‘holistic’ approach. Better to use it where it serves and find other ways to deal with what is beyond (conventional) Economics.

Islam too deals with incentives. Though it concerns itself with all kinds of incentives, it gives special importance to spiritual and social incentives. Life’s multifarious needs cannot be all met by encouraging only individual-material-money- focused motivation. In fact this kind of short-sighted approach has been the bane of capitalism. Many a critique of the recent crisis has pointed out this affliction’s role in what happened. A search is on for forces that could limit, if not altogether eliminate the role of this deficiency. In fact the problem is not confined to crises, as capitalism has suffered from this disease from day one. Humanity has been led to believe(I think wrongly) that this affliction is the price we must pay for ‘progress’ at a rate without any precedent in human history, of creation of wealth at a monumental rate. That requires we ignore the fact that more than a billion people still suffer from abject poverty, let inequalities increase overtime bringing in its wake increasing crime and soring anxieties, and leave untreated the threat to world peace posed by existing and forthcoming hegemonies.

That is not going to be. The current paradigm can no longer sustain itself. It is at this point that we recall there is more to good life than individualistic-materialistic incentives can bring forth. Admittedly the cures are not simple. We need a methodology that ensures progress with equitable distribution of the fruits of progress. It is foolish to tolerate abject poverty and deprivation in an age of plenty. World peace is too valuable to be sacrificed for the sake of aggrandizement of any one people. The new approach cannot be effective unless its incentive structure accommodated the social nature of life on earth. In view of the fact that overwhelming majority of human beings believe and have always believed in life beyond death, spiritual dimension of motivation also deserves recognition.

Islam, and all world religions for that matter, wisely relied on spiritual and social incentives to meet the requirements of dimensions of life not amenable to individualistic material incentives. These incentives appeal to the individual, in the first instance. But these incentives also persuade the individuals to cooperate with one another for bettering their conditions (in this life and the life yet to come). This cooperation extended to finance too. As exemplified in early Islamic practice, such cooperation involved, besides individual economic agents, the state as well as voluntary organizations. Cooperation in finance was institutionalized in different kinds of partnerships, credit sales, lending (free of interest), and trade credit, etc. It is not always possible to replicate old institutions in new circumstances. What is important is to keep the spirit of cooperation alive and active, with an approach to wealth creation that sees wealth as means to good life, not as an end in itself. The translation of the cooperative approach into appropriate institutions can be different in different circumstances.

That is where all religions, Islam included, differ from capitalism. Once again the financial crisis of 2007-09(?) has demonstrated that capitalism is incapable of ensuring good life that would inclusive of entire humanity and cover the social and spiritual dimensions of life. The reason lies in capitalism’s incentive structure, which is one sided. Some think clever regulations can manipulate individualistic incentives to serve social objectives. It is good as far as it serves, but the record thus far has not been very encouraging. There is no escaping the conclusion that   social-moral orientation of man’s approach to wealth better start from the individual at the early stages of education. That is what religions have done since the dawn of civilization. Religions, Islam included, give us values (like justice, equity, social equality, compassion) which values have to be translated into institutions suitable for the time-space contexts in which these values are sought to be realized. The real challenge, intellectual as well as organizational, lies in devising suitable governance and regulatory structures that could complete the task begun in educational institutions of inculcating humane incentives in economic agents (consumers, savers, investors, entrepreneurs).

Religions rely on preaching rather than coercion. The intention is to preserve human freedoms. Islam wisely accommodated some coercion necessary to keep order. In finance it has laws like prohibition of interest and gambling to meet some minimum requirements of justice and fairness. But the realization of the larger objectives of Islam in finance requires broadening the incentives-structure. Islamic finance cannot succeed in its vocation on the basis of capitalistic incentives-structure. The realization of Islamic values of justice, equity, social equality, compassion,in contemporary society requires an imaginative exercise in social innovation that Islamic finance votaries have yet to attempt.

When the Islamic finance project was launched in the third-fourth quarter of the twentieth century it had the ambition to do exactly that. Instead of being a mere replica of capitalist finance, that accepted the sovereignty of profit motive, the guiding light of monetary advantage and the focus on the individual, Islamic finance aimed at serving the Islamic objectives of money and finance by eliminating interest and gambling like speculation, removing ambiguity from contracts and  facilitating cooperation and sharing among people. Islamic finance implied a culture of risk sharing by the wealth owners: the depositors into Islamic banks’ investment accounts and those seeking profits through Islamic mutual funds, sukuk, etc. The capitalist culture of seeking profits while refusing to share risks fits ill with the Islamic spirit and does not belong to Islam’s incentive structure. Is it possible to retain the capitalist culture and record progress in Islamic finance? Does Islamic finance involve sacrificing the vitality and forward surge of capitalist enterprise? Can we survive in the fiercely competitive environment of modern industrial society with a non-capitalistic incentive structure and less than capitalistic rates of growth? These are difficult questions indeed, but they have to be raised and dealt with.

A reappraisal of the Islamic finance industry along conventional/capitalist lines misses the distinctively Islamic features of the industry. Reappraising the progress of Islamic finance industry on the basis of Islam’s incentive-structure is beyond the scope of this brief note and too big an order for the limited capacities of this writer. It is a challenging task. It has some   complex dimensions. Understanding the information deficit and its role in contractual relations, especially agency relations, is one of these dimensions. Another one is to recognize herd mentality, irrational exuberance and other psychological aspects of human behavior in investment and stock-trading. Then there is the issue of misalignment of incentives between share-holders, managers and rating agencies, for example. Financial relations like risk sharing or lending ,at arm’s length take a different color as compared to financial relations established directly, on a person to person basis. Most of the Islamic precedents we draw upon for guidance belong to the latter category. How to institutionalize the spirit of human relations in a local community in the global village of impersonal dealings? These challenges to human ingenuity call for creative solutions. Most writers on finance are worried by  the growing distance between the financial sector and the real sector of the economy. With the rise of ‘shadow banking’—financial institutions functioning like banks but not regulated like banks—and dominance of ‘fictitious capital’ having no counterpart in the real economy, the resulting misallocation of resources and the concomitant worsening of income and wealth distribution have assumed crisis proportions. What remedy is possible?

Last but not the least: What do you do if the banker does not listen to the preacher? The easy way over the ages has been for the preacher to threaten with eternal damnation (hell on earth, hell thereafter). But that is not of much help for us, the ordinary folk who fear the preacher but need the banker. There must be a way out! The initial spurt of Islamic financial institutions as exemplified by Tabung Haji, the Mit Ghamr experiment and other community level institutions established in the nineteen sixties, bore the promise of becoming something distinctive. May be they could not meet the needs of impersonal financial relations at a global scale. Some other initiatives, preferably at state level, would have had better chances of success.  But the trillion dollar Islamic finance industry being reappraised by this forum is more of a dish in the standard menu, albeit with an ethnic flavor. Where did we slip?

A detailed answer must await special focus by competent scholars, but some observations are in order. For too long the industry has been focusing on product development, Shariah- compliant products in current parlance, to the neglect of building the institutional infra- structure needed by the new kind of finance. Islamic financial industry worth the name calls for institutions rooted in Islamic values and Islamic (dual) incentives, incentives that are not forgetful of spiritual-social objectives while they focus on material-individualist interests. Man’s environment does not force one to choose between the two: material/spiritual, individual/social. Good living implies a judicious mixture of the two. Balancing the two is what sustains the world despite our aberrations. With modern capitalism the balance has been lost. Islamic finance was conceived to regain balance. We can still do it by paying due attention to our values and objectives, inviting each and all to participate in the task of building appropriate institutions to support a humane society the treats wealth as a means to good life for all and sees finance as a necessary ingredient in this enterpris.

 

*Inputs from Professors Valeed Ansari (AMU) and Habib Ahmad (Durham) are gratefully acknowledged.

محور : اقتصاد اسلامي

ترجمه‏ي:علوي، سيد اسحاق چپرا، م. ع

سازوكارها
يكي از عوامل بسيار حساس و حياتي در امر تخصيص و توزيع منابع محدودِ در اختيار جامعه، نوع تعريف و تصوّر آن جامعه از مفهوم خوشبختي و سعادت است. وقتي خوشبختي تعاريف متعدد و مختلف داشته باشد، سازوكارها و شيوه‏هاي دستيابي به آن نيز متفاوت خواهد بود. براي تعيين كاربرد منابع در يك جامعه يا نظام اقتصادي، سه سازو كار مهم وجود دارد. كه عبارتند از: سازوكار پالايشي، سازو كار انگيزشي و سازو كار تجديد ساختار اجتماعي - اقتصادي و سياسي. درست همان‏گونه كه رفاه و سعادت را مي‏توان به انحاي مختلف تعريف كرد براي فيلتر كردن (پالايش)، ايجاد انگيزه و تجديد ساختار اجتماعي - اقتصادي نيز مي‏توان سازو كارهاي متفاوتي داشت.

...

محور : اقتصاد اسلامي

عربي، سيد هادي

مخارج سرمايه‏گذاري از طرفي بخش بزرگي از تقاضاي كل را تشكيل مي‏دهد، و از طرف ديگر تغييراتي كه در سرمايه‏گذاري صورت گيرد، از طريق كاهش يا افزايش توليد بر ميزان عرضه كل تأثير مي‏گذارد؛ بنابراين، شناخت سرمايه‏گذاري و عوامل مؤثر بر آن، سهم بسزايي در شناخت روابط اقتصادي كلان ايفا مي‏كند.
سرمايه‏گذاري عبارت است از: مخارجي كه صرف افزايش يا حفظ ذخيره سرمايه مي‏شود. ذخيره سرمايه شامل كارخانه‏ها، ماشين‏آلات، ساختمانها، ذخاير انبار، دفاتر و كالاهاي بادوام ديگري است كه در جريان توليد، مورد استفاده قرار مي‏گيرد.1 اگر همه چيزهاي افزوده شده به ذخيره سرمايه در يك دوره معين ملاحظه شود، «سرمايه‏گذاري ناخالص» ناميده مي‏شود؛ اما اگر از آن، استهلاك؛ يعني كاهش در ذخيره سرمايه ـ كه در هر دوره به سبب فرسودگي و گذشت زمان ايجاد مي‏شود ـ كسر گردد، حاصل، «سرمايه‏گذاري خالص» ناميده مي‏شود؛

...

محور : پايان نامه هاي پيرامون اقتصاد

عنوان انگليسي:   
عنوان عربي:   
نويسنده:    روحی سرخکلایی، ابوالقاسم
مقطع:    کارشناسي ارشد
رشته گرايش:    حقوق
دانشگاه:    دانشگاه آزاد اسلامی تهران
   
استاد راهنما:    جهرمی، افتخار
استاد مشاور:    امینی، منصور
استاد ناظر:   
تاريخ دفاع:    1384
کلمات کليدي:   
واحد:   
منابع:
چکيده:
هدف آشنایی و شناخت کامل به مسائل حقوقی و فقهی وقف برای پیگیری و روشن موضوعات کامل وقف در حقوق ایران بوده است. روش پژوهش مراجعه به کتب حقوقی و فقهی مربوط به علوم حقوقی و فقهی و مراجعه به کتابخانه های دانشکده علوم قضائی دانشگاه تهران مجلس شورای اسلامی وسازمان اوقاف و امور خیریه با راهنمایی اساتید محترم راهنما و مشاور و مطالعه کتابهای مربوط بوده است. نتایج نشان می دهد که وقف عبارت است از تجسس الاصل و تسبیل الثمره مسئله ای بالاتر از همه امور خیریه و خیرخواهانه که شاید با این همه شرایط حقوقی و اجتماعی و بحث در جزئیات و شرایط آن جزء در اسلام و ادیان و مذاهب دیگر وجود نداشته باشد بنابراین وقف عملی است صالح و باقی و مصداق کامل تعاون و عاری از منت و صدقه ای است دائمی و بدون ریا و خلاصه آنکه برگ سبزی است پیشاپیش به گور فرستاده می شود.

کاربر گرامی جهت دریافت اصل پایان نامه ها به دانشگاه مربوطه مراجعه فرمایید.

محور : پايان نامه هاي پيرامون اقتصاد

عنوان انگليسي:   
عنوان عربي:   
نويسنده:    عرب عامری، محمدعلی
مقطع:    کارشناسي ارشد
رشته گرايش:    حقوق خصوصی ‬
دانشگاه:    آزاد اسلامی تهران
   
استاد راهنما:    سیامک ره پیک
استاد مشاور:    محمدصادق موسوی
استاد ناظر:   
تاريخ دفاع:    1384
کلمات کليدي:   
واحد:   
منابع:
چکيده:
هدف پژوهش چگونگی پیدایش وقف چگونگی گسترش فرهنگ وقف در جوامع اسلامی و علی الخصوص ایران و پیدایش زمینه های مناسب برای بهینه کردن قوانین است . روش پژوهش به صورت کتابخانه ای صورت گرفته است . نتایج پژوهش مبین آنست که وقف ازجمله عقودی است که زمینه عقلانی آن بسیار مورد تقویت قرار گرفته است . از احکام امضائی حقوق اسلامی است در جوامع و ملل دیگر نیز تحتت عناوین مختلف مورد پذیرش و پسندیده شناخته شده است وقف در حقوق ایران با ندک تغییرات قانونی تحول شگرف در زمینه ایجاد جامعه ی بدون فقر و تبعیض بسیار موثر و مفید است .

کاربر گرامی جهت دریافت اصل پایان نامه ها به دانشگاه مربوطه مراجعه فرمایید.

محور : اقتصاد اسلامي

ميزگردومصاحبه شونده:مصباحي مقدم، غلامرضا

اشاره
حجت‏الاسلام والمسلمين مصباحي از كساني است كه حدود سه دهه در حوزه اقتصاد اسلامي به تدريس و پژوهش پرداخته‏اند. ايشان از ديرباز دلمشغولي مباحث نظري اقتصاد اسلامي را داشته‏اند و در مؤسسه در راه حق، مؤسسه آموزشي ـ پژوهشي امام خميني و دفتر همكاري حوزه و دانشگاه، در مباحث مرتبط با «اقتصاد اسلامي» تأملات و مباحثات و تحقيقاتي ارائه كرده‏اند.
گفت‏وگوي حاضر، فرصتي است بر آشنايي با بخشي از نگرش‏هاي ايشان در نوع نگاه به اقتصاد اسلامي و ميزان تطابق واقعيت‏هاي جاري اقتصاد ايران با آن.

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محور : پايان نامه هاي پيرامون اقتصاد

عنوان انگليسي:   
عنوان عربي:   
نويسنده:    میرحسینی، منصور
مقطع:    کارشناسي ارشد
رشته گرايش:    فقه و مبانی حقوق اسلامی
دانشگاه:    دانشگاه تهران
   
استاد راهنما:    محمدعلی قربانی
استاد مشاور:    مختار امینیان
استاد ناظر:   
تاريخ دفاع:    1383
کلمات کليدي:    ،
واحد:   
منابع:
چکيده:
در این پژوهش به بررسی آراء فقهای شیعه و اهل سنت پرداخته و در حد توان نظرات ایشان را با یکدیگر تطبیق داده است.این تحقیق از روش کتابخانه ای بهره گرفته و مطالب فیش برداری شده است.در این پژوهش به تعاریف لغوی و اصطلاحی وقف، پیشینه و تاریخچه ی وقف، مشروعیت وقف و دلایل مشروعیت آن، وقف عقد است یا ایقاع، اقسام وقف و ارکان آن شرط قبض عین موقوفه در وقف، اعتبار قبول به لفظ در تحقق وقف، اعتبار قصد قربت در وقف موضوع ولایت بر وقف، شرایط متولی و وظایف او و نصب ناظر به وی، و اینکه آیا قبل تولیت بر متولی لازم است یا نه؟ و اجرت متولی و عزل او پرداخته شده است

کاربر گرامی جهت دریافت اصل پایان نامه ها به دانشگاه مربوطه مراجعه فرمایید.