Colonialism: Private Property, Indigenous Land, Waqfs

Classical economists were ignorant of indigenous cultures because theirs was an Eurocentric world. In European customs and standards, land was private property, titled ownership. Land for indigenous people, however, was a gift from Mother Nature to be used communally. European theoreticians, and colonizers, were arrogant in the extreme. Imported theories and ideas led, in the hands of equally elitist policy makers, to systematic dispossession of tribal lands and genocidal extermination of the indigenous people themselves. The Christian missionaries joined colonial policymakers in the systematic extermination of indigenous cultures, and dispossession of ancestral land through unequal treaties that were forced on them. Pushed out their land, indigenous people were hounded into small reservations, systematically oppressed, and subjected to abuse and discrimination. The struggle over indigenous land claims is a long and bitter history, and it continues to this day. In Muslim lands, European colonialism institutionalized private property. Like indigenous people, colonial models led to the dispossession of Muslim Waqf lands, laying the foundations of such contemporary problems as in Palestine or Cyprus.