Elimination of Riba From the Economy

Elimination of Riba from the Economy is in your hands. It contains papers and proceedings of a workshop held at the Institute of Policy Studies in April 1992. The workshop was held in the background of the historic judgement of the Federal Shari’ah Court on Riba which came in December 1991 and was to be enforced from July 1992. It is unfortunate that the federal government chose to go in appeal to the Supreme Court and this led to the deferment of the implementation of that historic judgement. The IPS organised a workshop on the problems and challenges of elimination of riba from the economy. Seventeen papers were presented at the workshop. Two oral presentations were also made. Every paper and presentation was thoroughly discussed. A lively concluding session was held in which a number of speeches were made, the communiqué of the workshop was announced and there was a concluding speech by the then finance minister, Senator Sartaj Aziz.

As Part Two of this book, we are including two articles by Dr Ausaf Ahmad which review the evolution of Islamic banking during the last two decades and the present state of the experiment. These studies give the message that interest-free banking is not merely a theoretical concept but also a reality that is blessing faith.

An effort has been made to publish in these proceedings most of the papers, presentations and key points for discussion. Our apologies to Dr A.M. Irfani and Mr. M. A. Chishti, Mr. Zaigham Rizvi and Mr. Mohammad Yousuf as their papers could not be included due to administrative difficulties. Dr M. Fahim Khan and Dr Munawar Iqbal made valuable presentations on indexation but these could not be included as the topic deserves to be taken up separately. However, we take this opportunity to thank them for their cooperation and contributions.

We are sorry it took our editorial team more time to prepare the final manuscript than was originally visualised. These proceedings have been edited by an IPS team. Dr Waqar Masud Khan reviewed the papers. Brother Khalid Rahman and Mr. Zahed A. Valie edited these and also went through the transcripts of discussions so as to distil long discussions into condensed points for inclusion in the proceedings. Besides, help also came from Brothers Dr Rizwan Tahir, Tarik Jan and Arif Sultan.

I would like to thank these brothers profusely for the very difficult job of culling out material from hundreds of miles of footage of tape-recording containing discussions spreading over 30 hours. The team deserves our very profound thanks for preparing the material for publication in the form of this book. May Allah give them best of the rewards for the effort they have put in.

Some of the comments and questions have been included in the discussions without naming the participant due to lack of voice identification. We hope participants will ignore our lapse.

We have taken the liberty of adding one contribution to this volume which was not part of the workshop, yet is very relevant to its theme. The Supreme Court of Pakistan (Shari’ah Appellate Bench) had issued a questionnaire on riba, in connection with the government’s appeal against the FSC judgement. These questions relate to some of the themes discussed in the workshop. The present writer’s response to the Supreme Court’s questionnaire has been included because of its relevance.

Finally, I would like to once again thank all the paper writers, discussants and participants of the workshop for their valuable contributions and the staff of the IPS for producing this valuable book on a challenging subject. I am sure it will help all those who are seriously interested in getting rid of the curse of riba and strive towards establishing a just and self-reliant economy.