Point being?
Islam has mandatory wealth tax (zakat) that can only be given to the poor/needy. It also forbids neo-liberalization of commodities ie betting is not allowed, crypto is not allowed etc. anything that does not have a material being can not be sold or bought. Then there is stuff about forbidding interest on loan. Then stuff about poor people getting to paradise before rich which lead to early adopters donating almost all of their wealth.
None of this feels free-market-capitalisty.
After reading some of the comments I thought of looking up if Graeber had actually said this quote. It looks like he did. In an interview in 2012: David Graeber: Beholden | Rebecca Solnit and David Graeber on anarchism as a problem-solving tool, the return of debtors’ prisons, and why communism is ingrained in capitalism. The full paragraph goes like that:
For example, the notion that anything that money touches, or that commerce touches, or that exchanges trade, is capitalism, and if you introduce any element of that into what might seem to be a non-capitalist situation, then suddenly that is part of capitalism. One of the things I discovered while writing this is that, to the contrary, markets and state power have always been deeply intertwined. And one of the facts that I discovered while researching, which I didn’t know at all before I started writing, is that free market ideology—does anyone know where it first comes from? It comes from medieval Islam, and specifically, Shari’a. Because Shari’a provided this commercial law that is independent from the state.
Graeber also liked to point out that Shia Islam is quite anarchistic and anti-state authority.
And also that markets divorced from state power lacked a lot of the coercive power they have in the modern Anglo-European unity of state and capital.
How is Shia Islam anarchistic? It’s basically Muslim Catholicism.
I whish that would still be the case today :<
Shia has far fewer states and been less interested in temporal power, even Iran is quite an odd case.
You can still kill billionaires. I believe in you.
i’d be surprised if graeber actually said this
Its kind of true, but the ancient islamic version sucked way less.
islamophobia is cool again, i see
I read this more as making fun of alt righters who are deeply islamophobic while also supporting free market ideology.
Pretty much ever religion is full of bad stuff that should not be relevant today but if you said free market is christian then those idiots would use it to reinforce their believes.
in that context it would make sense but that’s not the context in was posted in.
Serious question. How is this islamophobic?
this is meant to be against capital, yes? since this an anarchy comm? and the argument it’s making is that capitalism is a product of sharia law, yes? and sharia law is law as derived from the qu’ran, yes?
so, the reason it’s giving to be against capital is “it comes from islam”, yes? at least that’s the only way i can find to interpret this.
It is meant to be against capital because it comes from the brutal medieval era. Thats at least my interpretation of it
the medieval period may have been brutal in europe, but next door, the islamic golden age was happening at that time, involving huge advances & development in medicine, mathematics, philosophy, art, etc between the 8th and 14th/15th centuries.
if it was purely about that it would not mention sharia, which is still a thing today.
I think religious law is bad, whether it’s islamic or jewish or christian or any other religion’s. I don’t criticize islam as much as other religions these days, because there’s brutal islamophobia in the west, and where I live especially. But still, no gods, no masters, and that includes islam.
If “islamophobia” meant simply being scared of and/or hostile toward Islam itself and not Muslims and/or Arabs in general, then you’d have a point here, but that isn’t what’s happening.
Why are you scared of Islam or hostile towards it?
On top of the magical thinking encouraged by any religion, Islam:
- Explicitly condones child marriage and rape (Muhammad married Aisha when she was 6-9 and consummated the marriage at 9-12)
- Explicitly condones slavery; many of the details of the way in which it does this were progressive for the time, such as freeing slaves as atonement for sins, but that’s the problem with considering a text to be eternally perfect: the world moves on. Kosher butchering is another example of this phenomenon.
- Strongly condemns apostasy; a minority of scholars believe that the only punishment involved is in the afterlife, but even then, there’s social pressure to not even consider leaving the religion. This ties back into the suppression of free thought and the encouragement of magical thinking common to so many religions.
