The social system...

The social system, which regulates the society's general aspects, be they economic or political, is embodied in the individual's own conduct; it is impossible to regulate the individual's conduct without regulating the society in which he lives. Take a look at the capitalist system: As a social system, it regulates the economic life upon the basis of taking free economy as its principle.

Such a principle is embodied within the conduct of the capitalist towards the laborer, and his way of making a work contract with him, in the conduct of the usurer with his customers whom the first lends the latter money on interest basis and in the way he conducts the interest contract with them, etc. Every social system, therefore, is linked to and directly affects the individual's conduct.

If the Shari'a regulates the individual's behavior, it, thereupon, has its own method in regulating his conduct when borrowing some money, or hiring a laborer, or working for someone else, and all of this is by necessity linked to the social system. Any separation between the conduct of the individual and that of the society in organization is certainly self-contradictory.

As long as we admit the fact that the Shari'a regulates the individual's conduct, and that it has a say in every act of man, as long as we admit all of this, we then have to carry such an admission to its conclusion and come to believe in the existence of a social system within the Shari'a.

I do not know what those who disbelieve in the existence of the Islamic economic system, or of the solutions to the economic problems in the Muslim society, say about the period of such an application during the dawn of Islam. Did not Muslims at the dawn of Islam live as a society that led an economic life and applied Islam in all its social activities? Was not the leadership of the Islamic society in the hands of the Prophet (ص) and according to the tenets of Islam?

Did not that leadership possess defined solutions in dealing with its problems of production and distribution and various other economic problems? What if we claim that these solutions express Islam's way in regulating the economic life and, then, an economic doctrine in Islam?

If we conceive the Islamic society during the government of the Prophet (ص), we cannot conceive it as lacking an economic system, because there is no society in the world without its economic system which regulates its economic life and the distribution of wealth among its members.