Compassionate Justice: Source of Convergence between Science and Religion - Part 3
Posted Jun 13, 2007

Compassionate Justice:  Source of Convergence between Science and Religion - Part 3

by Dr. Robert Dickson Crane

TABLE OF CONTENTS  Due to limitations on the length of articles on The American Muslim site, this important article has been put online in a serialized format.  The Table of Contents link gives the links for all chapters.


Part Two

Human Rights in Traditionalist Islam:  Legal, Economic, and Political Perspectives


Chapter Six

Human Rights in Islam from the Legal Perspective


Human rights in Islam may be addressed from three different disciplinary perspectives: legal, economic, and political.  These are addressed in Part Two of this monograph. 

In addition, human rights in Islam must be addressed from the larger transdisciplinary perspective of tawhid.  This quintessentially Islamic paradigm of thought, known generally in English as unity of knowledge, is universal because it forms the common framework for both science and religion.  This perspective is addressed in Part Three of this monograph on the traditionalist perspective of classical Islam on human rights. 

Any discussion of human rights in Islam or in any other civilization should begin with recognition that the concept of human rights is new in the history of human thought.  This concept is a product of the secular thought that originated in the European Renaissance, which was a unique movement to liberate humankind from religion. 

Respect for human rights, however, is not new in human history.  What we today call human rights were always conceived as the result of virtues.  Most people in the world still view human rights in a religious context.  The traditionalist objective was not to pursue freedom from moral values, as has become the de facto concept in post-modernist thought, but to practice the values that produce freedom.  Within this context, which is universal in human history, human rights have always been explored and developed as part of the higher concept of justice. 

Justice is perhaps the most universal value in all civilizations, which is why there is so much negative reaction to the failure of American policy-makers to include freedom and democracy within the concept of justice as a higher paradigm of thought.

The study of justice in Islam is a distinct discipline.  Although it has never had a distinct name, just as many Islamic disciplines did not have a name until centuries after they existed in fact, the best term for the Islamic study of justice might be ‘Ilm al ‘Adl. 

The simplest definition of ‘ilm al ‘adl is the search for transcendent justice as a source of wisdom to be manifested or embodied in a set of essential principles for a universal code of human responsibilities and rights.  Only when people observe their moral responsibilities can any rights become real.

The purpose of all religion is to empower the truth, which exists independently of human beings.  An essential virtue of religion is to translate truth into the principles of compassionate justice.  The search for truth at the higher esoteric level is known in Jafari jurisprudence as ‘ilm al taqwa (knowledge of the One through love).  The search to make it manifest at the exoteric or outward level, in the sense of balance through the coherence of diversity known as tawhid, may be identified as the major object of ‘ilm al ‘adl.

These two pursuits, the esoteric and the exoteric, as both the classical Islamic thinkers and their counterparts, Saint John of the Cross and Thomas Aquinas, defined them, have ultimate meaning only as they fulfill each other.  This is the essence of Islamic thought and of every world religion.

Justice is a normative phenomenon in that its applications must derive from higher norms or purposes.  Rules and regulations applied without guidance from their higher purposes can produce injustice.  In Islamic jurisprudence the guiding norms are known as the maqasid or universal purposes of the shari’ah, or as the dururiyat or essentials, or as the kulliyat or universal principles.

We may identify at least seven irreducibly highest principles and list them in suggested prioritization.  In highest priority, these start with haqq al din, which for six hundred years until the present third millennium was ossified in the Sunni portion of the Muslim world to mean “protection of true belief.”  In recent decades, this maqsad has been expanded and reinterpreted by some of the greatest modern scholars in the Sunni world, following the lead of Shaykh al Islam Mufti Ibn Ashur in the first half of the twentieth century to mean “freedom of religion.”

Next come three sets of pairs.  The first pair consists of haqq al nafs and haqq al nasl, which mean the duties, respectively, to respect the human person and life itself and to respect the nuclear family and communities at every level that derive from the sacredness of the human person. 

The first one, at its secondary level of haqq al haya includes the elaborate set of principles that define the limitations of just war.  It also includes a secondary principle, known by several terms in Arabic but translated into English as ecology.  Although respect for nature and one’s place in it as a steward has been central to Islamic thought from the very beginning, only recently has anyone recommended that ecology be raised to the level of a primary maqsad.

The second of the first pair, haqq al nasl, includes the principle of subsidiarity, which recognizes that legitimacy expands upwards from the human person to the human community or nation to the state, and not the reverse.

The second pair consists of responsibilities that deal with institutionalizing economic and political justice.  It must be said that, more often than not, this second pair of responsibilities throughout much of Islamdom has been observed only in the breech.  And even when the principles are acknowledged, the derivative lower levels of institutionalized implementation have been ignored.

The third pair of maqasid consists of haqq al karama, which is the duty to respect human dignity, especially in gender equity in order to remove the barriers that are based on nurture rather than on nature, and haqq al ‘ilm, which is the duty to respect knowledge, including the secondary level of implementation known as freedom of thought, publication, and assembly.

The genius of Islamic traditionalist thought in explicating the paradigm of transcendent justice lies in the development over many centuries of a rigorous methodology of iterative inductive and deductive thought, briefly addressed in Part Three of this monograph.  This is somewhat similar to the induction of ontological and epistemological principles from the material sciences into the universally normative principles of moral theology, followed by the deduction from them of normative jurisprudential rules and specific applications as guidance for the transformation of what appears to be an intractably chaotic world into the sustainable justice of a purposeful universe.

In highly simplified explanation, the architectonics of justice in the Islamic shari’ah consist of a hierarchy of levels proceeding from the general to the specific, the highest known as maqasid; the intermediate or secondary level known as the hajjiyat; and the tertiary level known as tahsiniyat, which might be compared to the specific courses of action in program planning.

The number and even the meaning of the maqasid are flexible, ranging from a generally accepted five a thousand years ago to seven or more in later centuries.  Scholars have always differed in whether or not these should be prioritized among themselves, but there is agreement on prioritization in the form of distinguishing between the maqasid and the hajjiyat. 

Differences in interpretation depend in part on whether one is referring to the maqasid narrowly as law or more broadly as functional guidelines for public policy.  The strictest definitions are called maslaha al mu’tabara, the broader as istislah, and the broadest as istihsan.

For six centuries, the first maqsad, haqq al din, until the present third millennium was ossified in the Sunni portion of the Muslim world to mean “protection of true belief.”  Since the Shi’a bore the brunt of injustice and denial of religious freedom for so many centuries, the freedom and duty to maintain open-ended scholarship never died in most of the Shi’a world.  As a result, freedom of religion and freedom in general have always been important in Shi’a jurisprudence.  Shi’a and Sunni scholars are now cooperating to learn from each other as both have begun to build on such universal scholars as the great Sunni scholar, Shaykh Ibn Ashur, who has designated “freedom of religion” as the highest purpose in Islamic law.


Chapter Seven

Human Rights in Islam from the Economic Perspective

Very briefly, the Islamic concept of economic justice is based on two principles.  The first is the ultimate sovereignty of Allah over all of creation.  This means that private property ownership of the means of production is sacred, but only because it implies the responsibility of stewardship by the individual owner.  Whoever earns from the use of capital, including land and infrastructure, has a right to enjoy the profits, but he must earn them honestly and spend them to support the needs not only of his own family but of the marginalized in society who no fault of their own either are poor wage-slaves or incapacitated.

This social element in private ownership is based on the fundamental Islamic virtue known as infaq, which is the inclination to give rather than take in life.  This is universal in every person but must be cultivated culturally because otherwise the selfish nature of every person, known as nafs al ammara or “the commanding and demanding self,” will claim absolute sovereignty over what belongs to Allah.  This is why one of the “five pillars” or actions to maintain one’s submission to God is charity. 

Charity consists both of sadaqa, which is voluntary giving to others based only on their need, and zakat, which is mandatory and is based on the capital intensivity of the means of production with rates decreasing in proportion to the increase in human input either through labor or capital.  Earnings from labor are taxed at 2% of one’s wealth (not on income), but earnings from cultivated land are taxed at ten percent, because the land but not the water is produced by God.  Profits from uncultivated land as well as from mining ores, which come primarily from the bounties of God, are taxed at 20%.  This provides incentives to invent and apply technology and pursue science in order to improve it.

The second basic principle of Islamic economics is that economic power and political power are dependent on each other.  Economic justice is not merely one aspect of political justice but provides its foundation.  Neither is possible without the other.  This is part of the Islamic concept of tawhid, which teaches the interdependence of everything in the universe.  The pulverization of knowledge into unrelated parts is the principle cause of chaos.  The principle cure is the reestablishment of cosmos.

The most important derivative of this second principle for Islamic economic thought and the most important aspect of haqq al mal or respect for private property ownership in the means of production is recognition that such ownership is a universal human right.  It may not be usurped by government as in socialism, whereby the “ownership” by the proletariat is pure fiction.  Furthermore, Islamic principles of universal ownership are incompatible with the welfare economics of capitalist economies, which have constructed barriers to universal access to ownership and justified this politically by redistributing profits from the rich to the poor.  The result is the concentration of ownership and a constantly growing wealth gap both within and among countries.

Economic justice in traditionalist Islamic thought may be compared to the design of modern input-output theory, whereby every person has a right to participate through either labor or capital in the production of wealth, and an equal right to the distribution of this wealth based on one’s own input.  The sole role of government is to maintain the principle of limitation through what I once coined as the principle of harmonic justice, which is to assure that contributive and distributive justice remain in balance.  Both economic socialism and either monopoly or oligarchical capitalism violate all three principles.

The father of modern Islamic economics is Shaykh al Islam Muhammad al Tahir ibn Ashur.  He taught at Zaituna University in Tunis, which traditionally ranked right after Al Azhar in Cairo as the leading Muslim university in the world, and rose to become the Grand Mufti of Tunisia.  His major contribution to Islamic thought was to revive the normative study of Islamic jurisprudence in the first half of the twentieth century, which had been moribund in the Sunni world for six hundred years ever since the death of the last great Islamic jurisprudent, Al Shatibi.  Ibn Ashur was inspired by the publication in printed form of Al Shatibi’s manuscript, Al Muwafaqat, when Ibn Ashur was a boy and by his association as a student at the age of 24 in 1903 with Shaykh Muhhamad Abdu.
 
Ibn Ashur died at the age of 94 in 1973, but he led the way toward a renaissance of higher purposes in Islamic thought by developing an open- ended framework of respect for new responsibilities that became the foundation for an Islamic science of human rights. He published his magnum opus, Maqasid al Shari’ah al Islamiya, in 1946, when Marxism had captured the minds of almost the entire body of the world-wide Muslim intelligentsia, both liberals and conservatives.  His position was that Marxism is un-Islamic in theory and would be catastrophic in practice. 

His most radical proposal was that wealth in a capital intensive economy is created primarily by capital rather than by labor.  He thereby stood Karl Marx on his head, who had asserted, contrary to all the evidence, that labor is the only factor in wealth creation and that capital is merely a “congealed form” of it.  This so-called labor theory of value justified the expropriation of all private ownership of capital by the state on behalf of the workers, who otherwise would be doomed forever to the status of wage-slaves.  This Marxist theory is still dominant in much of the Muslim world, but only because it is still almost universally accepted in the best American universities. 

Grand Mufti Ibn Ashur developed the principle of equality of opportunity and associated it with access to and preservation of private wealth.  He considered that respect for private property in the means of production and its preservation and safe-guarding (hifz) form the core principle of haqq al mal.  He posed as a basic principle of subsidiarity that, “the preservation of private wealth leads eventually to the preservation of the community’s wealth, because the preservation of the whole is achieved by preserving its constituent parts” (p. 121).  This principle applies to self-determination in both economics and politics.

Ibn Ashur was almost a century ahead of his time by inventing not merely binary economics but trinary or three-factor economics, which is critical to such tools of expanded capital ownership as community investment corporations.  He wrote, “There are two ways for the community and its members to create wealth: owning (tamalluk) and earning (takassub).  Owning is the basis of wealth formation by humans” (p. 280).  Tamalluk means owning property (p. 282), in other words ownership of all non-human means of production, which one may define as “capital.”  Takassub is equivalent to labor or human work in employing capital.  Ibn Ashur writes, “Earning (takassub) depends on three primary factors (usul): 1) land (ard), 2) labor (amal), and capital (ra’s al mal)” (p. 282). 

Land includes natural resources, such as oil, which is created by “God” rather than by either labor or capital.

Labor as a means of production includes ingenuity in management within a corporation to determine the efficiency of the corporation in bringing together the three factors of production, land, labor, and capital.

Capital may be construed to include the results of human effort after completion, such as a highway system as part of the economic infrastructure, technological processes, robots, and patents.  Ibn Ashur defines capital as follows: “Obviously, means of work, such as engines, steam-driven machines, electrical equipment, and even animals used for packing and plowing, would constitute part of capital” (p. 284).

These three factors of production can all be privately owned.  As a general principle in Islamic economics, according to Ibn Ashur’s outline of economic justice, everything that can be so owned should be.  The corollary is that the process of broadening ownership of future wealth must not deprive existing owners of their accumulated ownership rights from the past, because any confiscation of such rights would violate the sacred value of ownership as such.  The only exception would be eminent domain, whereby, for example, the community through its government can appropriate land for urban renewal after paying market value to the existing owners, so that the present and future residents can form a land-based community investment corporation.  Funds for such acquisition, as well as for the establishment of new industries on the land through a community investment corporation, can and should come from the cost-free creation of money by the central bank for productive enterprises individually owned by every member of the community.

A fourth branch of the economy, in addition to the factors of production, is the invisible infrastructure of government, including the legal system and the laws that govern banking, taxes, and corporations.  This publicly “owned” infrastructure of society functions either to further concentrate private ownership or to de-monopolize ownership of the rapidly growing wealth of society as part of a public policy to narrow or close the wealth gap.  Since government is a necessary evil as the only legitimate monopoly of power in society, it should minimize its own power by maximizing the power of civil society and of every person.  This can be accomplished best by promoting economic democracy as the surest means to pursue the vision of political democracy. 

Following the universally accepted principle of Islamic economics, Ibn Ashur did not consider money itself or even credit and shares of stock as a means of production or “capital,” because they are only symbols that may be backed by capital but have no value in themselves.  Such symbols are used to facilitate the transmission of thought in linking people to the economic process by making individual or joint choices among economic activities and transactions.  Money, credit, and stock link people to the instruments of production, known as capital, by enabling them to direct the employment of these instruments.  These symbols of value are media of exchange, which quantify economic value and permit the implementation of promises as a social value.

Ibn Ashur was not equipped to devise specific institutional means to create money and credit based on future profits rather than on past savings, which is the key to modern binary and trinary economics.  His framework, however, leads inevitably to the concept that it is a universal human right for every person to participate in owning productive wealth.  This leads to the concept that it is a universal responsibility of individuals in moral community through government to facilitate this through the perfection of financial institutions so that they will broaden rather than concentrate capital ownership and reduce rather than increase the wealth gap, which otherwise would be inevitable in a modern capital intensive society.  Western economic theoreticians have developed parts of Islamic economics but few have had the vision to see these parts as constituents of a single holistic framework, much less as part of a higher paradigm of transdisciplinary thought.

This right to what may be called contributive justice, i.e., the right to contribute to one’s own and the community’s wealth through one’s own ownership and management of capital, presumes the right also to distributive justice, i.e., the right to the proceeds of one’s contribution, whether in labor or capital.  Ibn Ashur called for social justice, also known as harmonic justice, as a responsibility of government to assure the integrity and equity of both contributive and distributive justice based on broadened ownership.  As he put it, “One of the Shari’ah’s objectives is to regulate the management of wealth” to assure equality of opportunity (p. 278).

Ibn Ashur insisted that justice calls for free markets and transparency in all transactions, which is essential for both contributive and distributive justice.  Free markets provide the only way to quantify economic values and permit individual choice among them. 

The government may reflect the community’s priorities in non-quantifiable values based on absolute principles, which the free market then can apply, but these social values are set by different standards than individual choice.  For example, the government can de-monopolize power by acknowledging universal individual private ownership of natural resources based on the principle that every person is a steward of nature and therefore has an equal right to land and therefore to its rental value and to all the profits from all that it contains.  Of course, the government can impose concentrated ownership by an oligopoly of mafia concessionaires through its monopoly of coercion, but this is precisely what Ibn Ashur condemned.

If Ibn Ashur may be called the father of modern economics in the East, Louis Kelso was its father in the West.  Both of them reached the same conclusion in 1944 when they observed that as the input of capital increased in the production process, the role of human inputs proportionally declined.  This meant that the immoral redistribution of wealth from the rich to the poor would be necessary in order to forestall revolution from below in a capitalist order.  Marx was wrong in failing to see the power of redistributive politics in prolonging the unjust concentration of wealth.  But, Kelso and his alter ego, Mortimer Adler, America’s greatest philosopher, saw that redistributing wealth through the power of government is also unjust because it violates the sanctity of individual ownership rights, on which the integrity and stability of every civilization depends.  Following what half a century later became the motto of the American Revolutionary Party, “Own or Be Owned: Close the Wealth Gap,” they jointly published the answer to Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto in their book unfortunately entitled The Capitalist Manifesto.

They were reinforced a decade later by another visionary, R. Buckminster Fuller, the designer of functional buildings and of entire cities, who wrote in his classic book, Utopia or Oblivion, “We are called to be architects of the future, not its victims. … [The challenge is] to make the world work for 100% of humanity in the shortest possible time, with spontaneous cooperation and without ecological damage or disadvantage of anyone.”

At the same time, I published a follow-up article based on a fifty-page position paper on Third World economic development, one of five that I wrote for Richard Nixon on the key global issues in his 1968 campaign for the U.S. presidency.  Citing Kelso’s seminal article, “Uprooting World Poverty,” in Business Horizons, Fall 1964, I wrote, “Economic counterparts to political pluralism have been investigated, perhaps most creatively by Louis Kelso.  He suggests linking technology with the individual through the wide diffusion of capital ownership among the world’s agricultural and industrial workers.  He questions the long-range benefits of relying on financing growth through past savings, because this technique further concentrates capital ownership during an era when capital rather than labor increasingly is the producer of wealth.  Instead he lists ways to finance capital formation out of future earnings. … A trustee of the Pan-American Development Foundation and Vice-President of Sears Roebuck & Company, John F. Gallagher, has advised the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee that this ‘self-starter guarantee’ program for social and economic progress ‘is one of the most imaginative, non-patronizing, and risk-free forms of foreign assistance that has ever been proposed.’  The New York Times of July 27, 1969, reported its reception as ‘the only new idea about foreign aid since the Marshall Plan’.”

This new direction was opposed and eventually blocked by the essentially socialist paradigm epitomized by the writings of former Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, published in his book, The Essence of Security, Harper and Row, 1968.  In his new capacity as President of the World Bank, McNamara declared, “Paradoxical as it may sound, the real threat to democracy comes not from over-management, but from under-management. … Vital decision-making, particularly in policy matters, must remain at the top.”  My comments in an essay entitled “The Vision of Communitarian Pluralism” were: “This premise of American foreign policy helps explain why the United States has never attempted to promote representative governance in any Muslim country, since tyranny is the ideal way to keep policymaking where it allegedly belongs, at the top, and under reliable American tutelage. … In effect, modernization, if it implies centralized assimilation [especially under foreign control] is not an elixir of order and security, but a cause of the very instability McNamera hoped it would cure.” 

This bankrupt paradigm of thought was precisely what Ibn Ashur, the twentieth century’s greatest Muslim political-economist, was exposing as both the cause and the essence of economic and political injustice and as the inevitable cause of global chaos.

Once Ibn Ashur had punctured the balloon of socialist reliance on governmental power as the source rather than merely as the facilitator of justice, the task of building the necessary institutional superstructure for both economic and political justice became clear, though the specific mechanisms for developing a just third way beyond the envy of socialism and the greed of capitalism still lay in the future.

Unfortunately, Ibn Ashur probably was not aware of Abraham Lincoln as the proto-pioneer of this new paradigm of economic justice.  President Lincoln vastly accelerated the growth of America’s economy and at the same time democratized its ownership by successfully pushing through Congress the Homestead Act.  This revolutionary new law made accessible free to every American citizen 160 acres of government owned land, provided only that they used this investment properly in what was then the major factor of production by producing more wealth, which meant that they had to apply both labor and capital to farm the land.

The same principle has been developed in proposals for capital homesteading, recognizing that capital now is more important than land in economic growth and as a lever for economic justice.  In the “$3,000 Plan,” similar to IRAs, the federal government would issue $3,000 of new money in the form of interest-free credit every year to every citizen from birth to death, so that every citizen could accumulate tax-free a lifetime “capital homestead” of $200,000 that would pay out conservatively an annual dividend income of $30,000 to meet retirement needs. 

When President George W. Bush called for the creation of an “ownership society,” he was responding to the declaration by the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress in 1977 that broad-based ownership of new capital is an effective strategy for raising national productivity.  The most powerful tool for expanding capital ownership without taking from existing capital owners has lain unused in Section 13 of the Federal Reserve Act which created the Fed in 1916.  This calls for discouraging non-productive and speculative uses of credit and for monetizing private sector growth by issuing money for this purpose at a discount, which need be no more the one half of one percent needed to administer the program.  Unfortunately, the costs of World War One led the new central bank instead to monetize government debt through the buying and selling of U.S. Treasury Securities, a practice that continues to this day.

The Fed can promote an ownership society most powerfully by re-activating its existing power under Section 13 through a two-tiered policy for creating money and credit, whereby existing market rates for credit to public sector borrowers, consumers, and speculators would be maintained at the higher tier, but a lower tier would be introduced for ownership expanding productive capital credit through a system of asset-backed currency. 

Such monetized credit should be reserved exclusively for commercial bank members of the Federal Reserve System, as contrasted with the financial markets in Wall Street, to the extent that these local banks make this credit available in equal periodic allotments to every citizen through special IRAs known as Capital Homestead Accounts.  Risk premiums for these accounts should be set by market forces.  Whether the banks prefer to earn from profits or fixed interest, the credit should be insured against the risk of default by commercial capital credit insurers and re-insurers. 

Such ownership-broadening capital credit borrowed through local banks in reliance on their normal risk assessment practices should be invested in “qualified” securities, such as newly issued full-dividend payout shares in a company for which a member of the citizen’s household works, or in community investment corporations for large-scale local land and infrastructural development, or in family-owned and operated businesses and farms, as well as directly in Blue Chip companies of the citizen’s choice.

This monetizing of future capital assets in ways that broaden access to pure credit would give every citizen a growing stake in the trillions of dollars of new and improved, life-enhancing technology, rentable space, and physical infrastructure that will be needed every year for America to sustain its growth and energy self-sufficiency.  It would also provide much more than enough to cover what otherwise would be the estimated and unsustainable $74,000,000,000 shortfall in Social Security and Medicare revenue from government debt that in the current system must be financed by the taxpayer.

Once one accepts the system of ownership economics based on the above trinary factors of production, as envisaged by Shaykh al Islam Ibn Ashur in his revolutionary introduction to Islamic normative justice, the ways to implement it are universally applicable.  They are limited only by human imagination and ingenuity and by the courage needed to perfect the existing system of money and credit so that it will effectively democratize economic opportunity and thereby facilitate real representative government.


Notes:

6.  Crane, Shaping the Future: Challenge and Response, The Center for Civilizational Renewal, Santa Fe, New Mexico, published by Tapestry Press, Acton, Massachusetts, 1997, 159 pages. The appendix to this book develops this discipline as a form of “tawhid cybernetics” suitable as a universal search engine and as a framework for an encyclopedia of all human thought.

See also, the two review articles, Crane, “The Higher Justice of Divine Revelation: The Creativity and Dynamism of Islamic Jurisprudence,” Muslim World Book Review, The Islamic Foundation, http://www.islamic-foundation,org.uk, vol. 27, no. 3, Spring 2007, pp. 6-21, and “Taproot to Terrorism: The Loss of Transcendent Law in America and the Muslim World,” MWBR, vol. 25, no. 4, Summer 2005, pp. 6-21.

7.  Crane, Robert D., The Sun is Rising in the West, compiled by Muzaffar Haleem and Betty (Batul) Bowman, Amana Publications, Beltsville, MD, lst ed. 1999, 317 pages, Part III, “The Search for Justice and the Quest for Virtue: The Two Basics of Islamic Law,” pp.141-166.

8.  Muhammad al-Tahir ibn Ashur, Ibn Ashur, Treatise on Maqasid al Shari’ah, translated by Mohamed el-Tahir el-Mesawi, The International Institute of Islamic thought, London and Washington, 2006, 489 pages.  See also the IIIT’s Imam al Shatibi’s Theory of the Higher Objectives and Intents of Islamic Law, translated by Ahmad al-Raysuni, 2005, 441 pages.  Both of these are part of a IIIT program to make available in English the Islamic heritage on jurisprudence and human rights.

9.  Crane, Robert D., Islamic Commercial Law, U.S. Department of State, 1982, 120 pages.

10.  This recovery of the transcendent is represented in the “global spiral” found in Native American petroglyphs, which date back to the dawn of human habitation and are so beautifully treated in the set of ten lengthy novels by the husband and wife team of archeologists, Michael and Kathleen Gear, 1990-98, Dom Doherty Associates, New York, especially the first two in the series, People of the Wolf and People of the Fire.

11.  Statistics and analysis in Crane, Robert D., “Economic Justice:  A Cure for Terrorism?”, http://www.theamericanmuslim.org, September 29, 2002.
12.  Ibn Ashur, ibid, footnote 8 above.

13.  For modern applications see The Community Investment Corporation: Linking People to Land and Technology through Ownership, Norman K. Kurland, 2000, and The Community Investment Corporation: A Vehicle for Economic and Political Empowerment of Individual Citizens at the Community Level, 1992, both of these by Norman G. Kurland and published as occasional papers of the Center for Economic and Social Justice.

14.  On the moral duty of individuals to act in community in order to promote justice by perfecting societal institutions, rather than merely by acting morally and charitably as individuals, see the foundation documents of modern post-capitalist or Just Third Way economics by Father William Ferree, S.M., PhD.  These are Introduction to Social Justice, Paulist Press, 1948, and Social Charity, a transcript from a seminar on April 11-13, 1956, both available on line at http://www.cesj.org.  Slated for publication on this website in June, 2007, is also Reverend Feree’s first major publication on the subject, The Act of Social Justice, Catholic University of America Press, 1942.

15.  Kelso, Louis O. and Adler, Mortimer J., The Capitalist Manifesto, Random House, New York, 1958.  See also Kelso, Louis O., “Karl Marx: The Almost Capitalist,” American Bar Association Journal, March 1957, vol. 43, no 3.

16.  Fuller, R. Buckminster, Utopia or Oblivion: The Prospects for Humanity, New York, Bantam Books, 1969.

17.  Crane, Robert D., “New Directions for American Foreign Policy: Some Thoughts for Macro-Modeling,” Orbis: A Quarterly Journal of World Affairs, Summer 1969, pp. 455-475.

18.  Ibid, pp. 460-462, and Crane, ibid, Shaping the Future, footnote 6 supra, Chapter Three, pp. 30-31.

19.  Kurland, Norman G., Brohawn, Dawn K., and Greaney, Michael D., Capital Homesteading for Every Citizen, Center for Economic and Social Justice, P. O. Box 40711, Washington, D.C., 231 pages, http://www.cesj.org.  See also Bailey, Norman A., “A Nation of Owners: A Plan for Closing the Growing U.S. Knowledge and Capital Asset Gaps,” The International Economy, Sep-Oct 2000.