Salaam dear Emil,

Thanks for your post. The freedom of speech, religion and individual success are also what I stand for. If you add political freedom, freedom of entrepreneurship, free market and less government action, you get liberalism.

Islam has the power to moralize capitalism, so we should use the excellent framework it offers us to change the societies in which we live.

Best regards,

Natashamina

Salam to all,

The point of socialism is to have the government ownership of industries and a state ruled economy. I don't recall seeing any Koranic evidence that Islam promotes these.

Of course, helping the poor is a noble cause, but it can allways be done by charities or churches, instead of public sector.

I come from a socialist country that ended up in economic crisis, because the state doesn't know how to run companies - which is not its purpose anyway. We started borrowing the money from every country on earth in order to pay wages and the government started printing banknotes to pay back debts. This led to 600.000% hyperinflation, whereas you'd get your monthly salary which would be worthless within half an hour. Such a phenomenon had already happened, in Germany during the thirties, which brought nazism to power. My own country ended up in civil war in which 200.000 people were killed, and after the civil war it split into seven new micro states.

Since the fall of the Berlin wall, socialism doesn't exist anymore and the only economic system left is the free market economy. And as soon as the ex-socialist economies left the old system, they recovered from underdevelopment.

Best regards to all,

Natashamina

By the way, the person who said that the Arabs are the worst hypocrites hasn't translated the Koran conveniently. Al-A'r?b is translated "the bedouins". You don't make comments on the Koran unless you speak the Arabic language properly.

Salaam everyone,

Islam is NOT the ultimate form of communism. Not only does it allow private property and gives us detailed rules regarding inheritance, it also seems to promote free market and liberalism. It is based on the freedom of thought, "no compulsion is there in religion" as it is stated in the Koran. It also promotes free market and forbids regulated prices by the state.

The Muslims have conquered most of the ancient world within only a century, mostly because they had lower taxes from the Eastern Roman Empire and therefore became popular among the populations. When they conquered Syria, as explains Philip Hitti in his "History of the Arabs", people throw flowers to their feet.

Even though it is most often believed that modern capitalism originated from the medieval Italian cities, Muslims were the first ones to invent cheques (al-s?q in Arabic) you could issue in today's Iraq and cash in today's Morocco.

The Prophet Muhammad, may God bless him, was a merchant, as well as his wife Khadija. Initially, they were quite well off, but when Muhammad started preaching monotheism, the Meccan authorities expelled him from the city, thinking that the new religion would be detrimental to their business. She has spent all of her money to feed the first Muslims who had nowhere to go; Mohammed said later on that "Islam survived thanks to Khadija's money

There is even a fatwa of the Al Azhar University of Cairo stating that "there is no Communism in Islam" (l? shuy?'iyyata f? al-isl?m). Muslims are equal in rights before God, but by no means are they supposed to be equally rich. Allah gives sustenance (al-rizq) to whom He desires and poverty is one of His tests to check the strength of our faith.

Finally, Islam doesn't propose a new economic system - it wasn't revealed to regulate our whole lives but to give us a spiritual and moral framework on which we should build our lives and judge by ourselves whether we should act in a particular way. The Koran is not an economy book, but is certainly DOES NOT PROMOTE COMMUNISM or state ownership in any form. Those who wish to devaluate currencies in order to pay back the public spending merely transfer the debt on the next generations. How un-Islamic.

Best regards & salaams,

Natashamina