Islam and Private Property

In the name of God, the Most Compassionate, the Most Merciful 

There are, of course, many issues and misconceptions as it pertains to the reality of Islamic politics and governance in the postmodern world. With the introduction of new conceptions of statehood, governance, economics, and all manner of other paradigms from the so-called West, or as we prefer to refer to it: the Occident, the Muslim world is still grappling with and is unsure what to make of these things and how to find a level of congruency between what came before and the world as it currently exists. As for a deeper dive into these various issues, we will, by the will of God, write a complete essay addressing each issue in detail. However, we wanted to dedicate a preliminary essay to the question concerning private property and how this is conceived of in the Islamic tradition, without which, we will inevitably see the same misconceptions arise from those within the Islamic communities who have been so thoroughly mentally colonised that they, unknowingly, take for granted many things from enlightenment thinking while draping over it a veneer of Islamic dressing in order to situate it within the tradition and justify their ideas. The conception of private property we will lay out can be applied, equally, to any civilisation that constitutes what Karl Marx refers to as being characterised by the “Asiatic mode of production”, which includes but is not limited to: India, China, Persia and Ottoman Turkey. In reality, this includes any civilisation that sits outside of the development of the institution of private property, but we will further explain the origin of this institution and what it means later in this essay. Before doing so, it must be made clear that the position that we are arguing from, which has been the same for the entire history of the Islamic civilisation, posits the institution of private property as something that has been alien to Islam from the very beginning up until Western colonial expansion and imperialism. Do not be mistaken: even now, it is an alien concept; however, Muslim “intellectuals” (if the term may be used in an exceedingly generous manner) go to great lengths and take much liberty to, for reasons unbeknownst to us, defend from within Islam this very same conception of private property that was so alien to the Islamic world and actively played an immense role in its unravelling.

Private property can be split into two categories: the institution of private property that was seen in the Occident, and general private property as seen in non-Western or otherwise “Asiatic” civilisation. It would be silly to conflate the two, the clear difference being the way in which the state viewed and enforced these two very different phenomena. Marx and Engels recognised the origin of the first type of private property to have originated in Rome and, by extension, in the Greek city-states when they said 

To this modern private property corresponds modern law... The first important example of this is found in ancient Rome, where the development of private property, which had already progressed so far, had as its consequence the breakdown of the old communal property... Through Roman civil law, private property was first declared to be absolute and fully alienable.

• The German Ideology

For the one who held ownership over private property in the Occident, he was given distinct powers: ius utendi, ius fruendi, ius abutendi; the right to use a thing, the right to take its fruits or produce, and the right to destroy or use up the thing altogether; these three were what constituted the three major rights related to dominium (ownership) over something. This wasn’t limited only to land or a ‘thing’, so to speak; it even extended to people in the form of slaves, which fell under the same dominium framework as other private property; the master having ius vitae necisque (the power of life and death). Karl Marx says of this: 

In civil law the existing property relationships are declared to be the result of the general will. The jus utendi et abutendi itself asserts on the one hand the fact that private property has become entirely independent of the community, and on the other the illusion that private property itself is based solely on the private will, the arbitrary disposal of the thing.

• The German Ideology

Meaning that the owner of private property had the institutionally recognised right to alienate it however he willed; this being the moment of rupture from previously common-held property. He could sell it on, pass it onto his heir, destroy it, or whatever else he wished to do with it. This tripartite bundle of rights shifted somewhat with the rise of feudalism; however, the explication of which will not be discussed further in this essay for the sake of remaining relevant to the topic at hand. It suffices to say, for now, that feudalism contained in itself the seeds of its own sublation (making it dissimilar to the Asiatic mode of production); by which this tripartite bundle of rights again rears its head, codified, this time, in the French Code Civil of 1804, Article 544, which defines property as the right to enjoy and dispose of things “de la manière la plus absolue,” in the most absolute manner. In addition to this was the claim that no government could legitimately strip a person of ownership of their property without due process or just compensation, which is the language of Article 17 of the 1789 French Declaration of the Rights of Man, where it says property “un droit inviolable et sacré,” inviolable and sacred. This conception of rights concerning private property was eventually held across the whole of the Occident with the wholesale defeat of the feudal mode of production, now being codified as itself an inalienable right to alienate property. There remains a level of congruity across the Occident, starting with Rome and culminating with (for Marx’s time) the industrial revolution in the sphere of the forces of production and the various bourgeois revolutions in the sphere of politics, which Marx and Engels themselves mapped the development of. This development was made possible only by the supreme alienability of private property, something absent from the “Asiatic civilisations”. Marx details this when he says

In the Asiatic forms (at least, predominantly), the individual has no property but only possession; the real proprietor, proper, is the commune, hence property only as communal property in land [...] since in this form the individual never becomes a proprietor but only a possessor, he is at bottom himself the property

• Grundrisse

and further, when he says in Capital volume III “But, on the other hand, no private ownership of land exists, although there is both private and common possession and use of land.” As a result of this, the Asiatic civilisations were characterised by what Marx describes as a “stagnatory” (The British Rule in India - Marx) life, and, if we further take this analysis to its logical conclusion, the Asiatic civilisations would have never been capable of independently developing capitalism since the material contradictions necessary for such a development were impossible.  We can view this phenomenon of the development of capitalism and, subsequently, imperialism and colonialism as a necessary development to forcefully wake up the Asiatic civilisations from their vegetative and stagnant means of subsistence; this being the first negation. It’s not a coincidence that this ‘waking up’, and with it, the rapid acceleration in the development of the forces of production, came externally, imposing itself on the Orient from what was the comparatively unimpressive Occident, with regard to its role in history. What follows is the negation of the negation, or what should be more accurately described as the Aufhebung (sublation) of this initial rupture; the nature of what this may look like exceeds the scope of this essay. However, it remains to be said that this development, if nothing else, aids in elevating Man from his undignified life of subsistence and stagnation.

Ideally, it would suffice to end the essay here. The Islamic civilisation, being characterised by the Asiatic mode of production, was itself unfamiliar with the concept of a supremely alienable form of private property; this being codified or recognised by the state would have been even more abhorrent to the Muslims. But unfortunately, we doubt this will be enough for any Muslim reading the essay who thinks otherwise; for such readers we will have to write an explanation of how the Islamic world viewed and treated private property, in contradistinction to the Occident, rather than, as many Muslims believe, in agreement. The main confusion arises from the dual meaning of the usage of the term “private property”; if only one were able to split from the word its two very distinct meanings of ‘supremely alienable private property’ and ‘general private property’, then there would be almost no confusion at all save for a few midwits. 

The Islamic world sits at this (almost) intersection between the east and the west, and this is reflected in almost everything; from its Abrahamic lineage to the way it deals with the topic of the essay, private property. We quoted Marx referring to property in the Asiatic mode of production “only as communal property”(Grundrisse - Marx); however, this cannot strictly be applied to the Islamic civilisations. With this being said, we still strongly condemn any attempt to take this difference between the Asiatic and Islamic civilisations to be an essential one, and to derive from this any similarity between private property in the Occident and in the Islamic world. The difference in communal and individual is, here, simply formal and bears no weight to the actual logic behind how private property was viewed outside of the Occident. Islamic law recognises full, transferable, heritable ownership as the normal conditions of property. This is clear from the inheritance rules that were made clear in the Qur’an (4:11-4:12); for property to be inheritable, it must be taken for granted that it is at first individuated; only then can one speak in terms of inheritances. This is where Muslims in today's time get confused and hurry to grasp at, despite having no knowledge, the similarities, these being purely in terms of formal ownership, between Islamic and Western private property. Despite private property being individuated, it never achieves the emancipation seen in the Occident due to the structure outlined by the Qur’an being inherent to the property itself. This inherency can be evidenced by the fact that the wealth tax was seen as something built into the property, the beggars and the poor having a share of the wealth itself (51:19) as opposed to in the Occident, where a wealth tax is seen as something external to the property, that being levied against it, imposed by the state. Furthermore, this Islamic wealth tax actually purifies the wealth itself and blesses the person from whom it was taken (9:103). This already undermines the idea that a person who holds ownership over something retains supreme alienability over it; in reality, the truly inalienable rights are those held by the poor over the property, despite never being given custodianship over it, and ownership is never able to truly separate from the rights that the ummah (Islamic community) hold over it in the same way that modern European ownership fully separates from the community’s claim. Not only this, but conceptions of private property as seen in the Occident ground ownership in the individual will as a self-sufficient, self-justifying source, meaning that, for the consumption or discarding of something, nothing above or prior to the individual will needs to authorise the arbitrary usage; the will itself being the foundation. Islam has no equivalent self-grounding structure and, in fact, the Qur’an repeatedly locates ultimate ownership with God (2:284) and describes the human holder as a trustee, mustakhlafin (57:7), “spending from what he has entrusted you with”, grounding ownership in the ultimate sovereignty of God. There is also conditionality built into the conception of private property (17:26-17:27), restricting disposal as a matter of the object's basic legal status rather than being a form of public override in times of emergency applied from external structures such as the state. We can see here how the Islamic world sits outside of any Occidental institution of private property that one may try and impose onto it, and is closer, in essence, to the Asiatic mode of production described by Marx. The difference between the communal and individuated forms of ownership being those purely out of material necessity; the Asiatics being farming-centred peoples based on large rivers and focusing on irrigation systems. This begets a system of communal ownership, whereas the early Muslims of Arab tribes were merchants, traders, nomads and other such “professions”, to use a modern term, requiring an individuated form of property for obvious reasons. This being simply a formal difference is made even more clear when in the famous case of jurisprudential reasoning (ijtihad) done by the second Rightly Guided Caliph, Umar ibn al-Khattab (May God be pleased with him), he, rather than splitting the land of Iraq and giving it to the soldiers as war booty which was customarily done during the time of His Eminence (may peace and blessings be upon him), instead retained usage of the land with the farmers and had the state hold ultimate collective ownership of the land on behalf of the public treasury. This mirrors exactly Marx’s ideas about the Asiatic mode of production, and here it is seen first-hand being done by the early Muslims themselves, lending credence to the fact that the seemingly essential difference between individuated and communal ownership was, outside of the Occident, a formal one, being contingent on the material conditions. 

This essay is intended to push back on the many confusions concerning private property within contemporary Islamic discourse and, as we mentioned we will, by the will of God, write two further essays about this; one tackling broader misconceptions that, while all stemming from this oriental mindset that most Muslims have today, are of different formal natures, requiring individual elucidation despite stemming from the same mental rot; and the other about the development of feudalism. The latter being something Marx wrote on extensively, but something we are willing to write in a digestible format for modern audiences.