The Quran

275

Preface

الَّذينَ يَأكُلونَ الرِّبا لا يَقومونَ إِلّا كَما يَقومُ الَّذي يَتَخَبَّطُهُ الشَّيطانُ مِنَ المَسِّ ۚ ذٰلِكَ بِأَنَّهُم قالوا إِنَّمَا البَيعُ مِثلُ الرِّبا ۗ وَأَحَلَّ اللَّهُ البَيعَ وَحَرَّمَ الرِّبا ۚ فَمَن جاءَهُ مَوعِظَةٌ مِن رَبِّهِ فَانتَهىٰ فَلَهُ ما سَلَفَ وَأَمرُهُ إِلَى اللَّهِ ۖ وَمَن عادَ فَأُولٰئِكَ أَصحابُ النّارِ ۖ هُم فيها خالِدونَ

Ahmed Ali

Those who live on usury will not rise (on Doomsday) but like a man possessed of the devil and demented. This because they say that trading is like usury.¹ But trade has been sanctioned and usury forbidden by God. Those who are warned by their Lord and desist will keep (what they have taken of interest) already, and the matter will rest with God. But those who revert to it again are the residents of Hell where they will abide for ever.

Riba (root RBW). Raba, yarbu, multiplying, swell, expand (beyond the natural or original size), as in 22:5; excess such a surplus that comes to the surface like scrum, as in 13:17; rabiyun increased hold that overpowers, as in 69:10; arba more than the other, as in 16:92: Taj and Muhit. All this points to unnatural or artificial increase. It is first mentioned in a Makki Surah, 30:39, as lending money on interest to increase one’s capital through others’ wealth; and is explained at 2:275 as the opposite of trade, and at 3:130 as doubling and redoubling. By suffocating a person’s freedom of action and independence – another meaning of riba being asthma it results in oppression, and is condemned in strongest possible terms and forbidden.
Since other possibilities of exploitative manipulations of people’s needs and constraints exists, the word acquired a special significance in the Quranic order, so that its conceptual ramifications extend to other forms of lending and borrowing, even such as lending the pounds of grain and demanding eleven on return. But today, in the clash of Islamic thought and Western practice, the word has become a subject of polemics, mainly though corruption in the process of translation. The Arabic of the Qur’an is pre-Quranic in its etymological and historical perspectives, and the sense of many words is altered when rendered in terms of modern Arabic. The same is true of the Bible where ‘usury’, the exact equivalent of riba in English, had originally, and formerly, meant “interest of any kind on money lent,” has been changed, by accident or design, to mean “iniquitous or illegal interest on a loan,” (Chambers 1901 edn.), and ‘usurer’ has been changed from its original Biblical sense of “money-lender for interest;” and altered in modern (American) versions of the Bible including that of King James Version of 1611 to “money-changer” as in Mark: 11:15, or the “exchangers”, as in Matthew: 25:27.