Money and Muslim Philosophers

The aim of this chapter is to explore the ways in which Muslim philosophers of the Golden Age of Islam, between the mid-eighth and mid-thirteenth centuries, perceived the phenomenon of money. This chapter offers a novel interpretation of the role of money in the Qur’ān and the Sunnah, which form the basis of Muslim knowledge, by reading the texts not through the prism of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, which presents money as a substitute for barter, but through a tradition approaching philology as an art of reading well. On this interpretation, money does not only appear as a unit of account, store of value, and a means of exchange, but it is also considered, above all, as a social construction. In this sense, money is a common good that should benefit the entire population and should not be concentrated in the hands of a very small minority. Following an anthropological investigation in the region of al-Qasīm—in the center of Saudi Arabia—I propose, finally, the use of the expression “means to acquit rights” rather than that of “money”: when we pay close attention to the meaning of words, we do not perceive things in the same way.