al-Dawr al-Tawzi'i li-l-Milkiyya fi al-Iqtisad al-Islami (The Distributive Role of Property in the Islamic Economy: a Comparative Study)

al-Dawr al-Tawzi'i li-l-Milkiyya fi al-Iqtisad al-Islami: Dirasa Muqarana ("The Distributive Role of Property in the Islamic Economy: a Comparative Study") is a dissertation for the MA in Islamic economics from the Department of Shari'a at the University of El Hadj Lakhdar, Batna, Algeria, written by al-Tahir Qana under Dr Jamal Laamara in the academic year 2006–2007 and defended on 27 February 2008. ^{1 2}

The author notes that earlier studies treated property in Islamic law from many angles, and that his contribution is to study the interaction between the Islamic pattern of property and the kind of distribution it produces, compared with conventional economics. ³ He describes his method as descriptive-analytical and comparative, aiming to compare systems rather than their proponents: scholars are rarely named in the text and no biographies are given; juristic disagreements are taken up only where one view is clearly stronger or has been accepted by contemporary Islamic economists; and hadiths are checked in works of takhrij, especially those of al-Albani. ^{3 4 5}

It has four chapters of two sections each: ^{4 6 7 8 9 10}

• Chapter 1: Property in conventional economics and its role in distribution: the capitalist and the socialist systems of property and their distributive effects, with an assessment of the remedies each applies to its own failings (printed pp. 12–48).
• Chapter 2: Property in the Islamic economy: the concept of property in language, law and jurisprudence, the concept of wealth, then the three kinds of property — private, public and state — with their proofs and limits (pp. 50–89).
• Chapter 3: Distribution in the Islamic economy: the distribution of sources of wealth before production (land and what goes with it), the factors of production and their returns (labour, capital and land), then redistribution, both compulsory solidarity and voluntary mutual support (pp. 91–133).
• Chapter 4: The role of property in distribution: its role in distributing natural wealth and in the functional distribution of income, the level of sufficiency, then the practical requirements (reviving the public institutions of the Islamic economy) and the educational ones (formation in creed and ethics) (pp. 135–182).

The author adopts a threefold division of property and regards the difference from the twofold division (public and private) as one of form, since those who use the twofold division place state property within public property; he prefers the threefold one as showing more clearly the economic and social roles of property. ¹¹ In his view distribution in the Islamic economy begins before production, with the sources of natural wealth allotted among the three kinds of property: land whose people embraced Islam on it is their private property; dead land belongs to the state until it is revived and becomes private property by reviving it; and one who claims land and does not cultivate it for three years loses it. ^{12 13} In distribution after production, he holds, shares follow need first and then labour, not the market automatically as in capitalism nor labour alone as in socialism. ¹⁴

The author concludes that property in multiple forms is the just pattern in harmony with human nature, and that leaning to one form alone is an injustice whose effects appear as poverty, unemployment and maldistribution; that the initial distribution of the sources of production governs the causes of wealth and poverty; and that the Islamic economy accepts the factors of production of conventional economics in form but not in substance, linking organisation to labour, forbidding interest to the owner of capital and leaving prices to the market in normal conditions, without monopoly or price-fixing. ^{15 16} He recommends statistical studies of the link between the distribution of natural assets and of income, and further research on property's role in fighting poverty. ¹⁶ These comparative judgements on capitalism and socialism are the author's views, attributed to him.