Islamic socialism

Islamic socialism is a political philosophy that incorporates elements of Islam into a system of socialism. As a term, it was coined by various left-wing Muslim leaders to describe a more spiritual form of socialism. Islamic socialists believe that the teachings of the Qur'an and hadith, citing aspects of the religion like zakat, are not only compatible with principles of socialism, but also very supportive of them.

Some early figures in Islam, such as Abu Dharr al-Ghifari, a companion of Muhammad, and the first Caliph, Abu Bakr, are sometimes regarded as forerunners of Islamic socialism for their advocacy of wealth redistribution. Interest in fusing Islam and socialism emerged in the nineteenth century, with Islamic Reformist thinker Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, whose writings on the topic were published in the 1930s and influenced many later thinkers. Social movements such as the Wäisi movement in Tatarstan, in the Russian empire, similarly drew on Islamic and socialist thought. In the twentieth century, the Indian Deobandi scholar Ubaidullah Sindhi, the Movement of God-Worshipping Socialists in Iran, the Muslim League in Pakistan, and the Iranian scholar Ali Shariati are among those to play a role in the history of the ideology.

Abu Dharr al-Ghifari, a companion of Muhammad, is credited by some twentieth century scholars, such as Egyptian Muhammad Sharqawi and Sami Ayad Hanna, as well as by Ali Shariati (who translated his texts into Persian), as an early antecedent of Islamic socialism. He protested against the accumulation of wealth by the ruling class during Uthman's caliphate and urged the equitable redistribution of wealth.

The first Muslim Caliph Abu Bakr introduced a guaranteed minimum standard of income, granting each man, woman and child ten dirhams annually—this was later increased to twenty dirhams.^{[citation needed]}

In the 1890s, the Islamic Reformist thinker Jamal al-Din al-Afghani discussed topics of “Socialism and Social Justice” (Ar. al-ishtirākiyya wa al-ʿadāla al-ijtimāʿiyya) during his stay in Paris. However, his thought was only published in a collection edited by Muḥammad al-Makhzūmi in 1931 due to censorship issues in the late Ottoman Empire. Al-Makhzumi notes that al-Afghani conversed with divergent schools of thought, among them sympathisers with European Socialism whom he saw as "extravagant" and "wasteful". He juxtaposed this with Islamic Socialism, which, he argued, was professed by the early caliphs and saḥāba (companions of the prophet), among them Abu Dharr.

As a response to a question about European socialism by "a prominent Turkish man of letters" about the value of socialism in Europe, al-Afghani proclaimed that socialism had already been practiced by the Arabs even before the coming of Muhammad's revelation. He evokes the charitable Arab poet Hatim al-Ta'i as proof of the generosity during that time. This generosity, where the person retained their personal right to property, but saw it as their duty to provide for people in need, was retained and given divine ordinance in the Qur'an. Al-Afghani cites several Qur'anic verses to showcase the call for mutual responsibility, charity, and the opposition to improper profit or usury (riba; such as Q 8:41, 2:271, 2:275-276, 9:60).

In al-Afghani's account of the formative period of Islam, he understands Abu Bakr and Umar to have successfully lived by the standards of Islamic Socialism. During the reign of Uthman, however, extravagance would have taken over the Muslim leaders of Egypt, Syria, and Iraq. Abu Dharr, one of the first converts to Islam, confronted the governor of Syria, Mu'awiyya, with this fact, but, after an attempt to bribe Abu Dharr, Mu'awiyya sent him away to the Caliph. It was over this matter that Abu Dharr chose to resign to al-Rabadha away from the Muslim community. This historical narrative would be expanded and resuscitated by later advocates of Islamic Socialism.

According to Sami A. Hanna and Hanif Ramay, one of the first expressions of Islamic socialism was the Wäisi movement in Tatarstan, Russia, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The movement opposed the rule of the Russian Empire and was supported by Muslim farmers, peasants and petite bourgeoisie. It suffered repression by the Russian authorities and went underground in the early 20th century, when it started cooperating with communists, socialists and social democrats in anti-government activity, and started identifying itself as an Islamic socialist movement in the wake of the 1905 Russian Revolution. The movement aligned with the Bolsheviks during the Russian Revolution of 1917, during which the movement also established the first experimental Islamic commune. The Muslim Socialist Committee of Kazan was also active at this time. After the death of Lenin in 1924, the Wäisi movement asserted its independence from the Communist Party; however, it was suppressed during the Great Purge in the 1930s.