The mother of all rights; without secure property, the Islamic world can't escape tyranny and stagnation

Reason, April, 1994 by Tom Bethell

Islam does present some problems for property rights. In particular, the Koran frowns on hoarding ("That which they hoard will be their collar on the Day of Resurrection"), and interpreters of Islamic law have consistently agreed that the injunction against hoarding applies to land. This is turn has led to a highly destructive "use it or lose it" interpretation of land tenure.

In "Property Rights in Contemporary Islamic Thought," published in the Review of Social Economy in 1989, Sohrab Behdad reports little disagreement among Islamic scholars that "plain or unworked land may not be privately owned by individuals. But one may claim priority in the use of such land by improving it with one's labor and capital." Continued "priority," however, will depend on continued use of the land. Someone with access to a patch of land who has failed to use it can be construed as hoarding it. Unworked land cannot be owned, and therefore cannot be rented. A hadith, or saying of the Prophet, is explicit on this point: "He who has land should cultivate it. If he will not or cannot, he should give it free to a Muslim brother and not rent it to him." The rental of cultivated land is acceptable, however.

If you can't own land until you have irrigated, drained, built upon, or planted it, these costly activities must be undertaken in an atmosphere of insecurity. Only a foolish homesteader will mix his labor and capital with a patch of desert, knowing that it was not his to begin with and that only with luck will he become its owner in the end. Such an arduous undertaking will only be undertaken if backed by the full assurance of the law. Given pervasive official corruption, it will not be undertaken at all. Rather than contribute to the unjust gains of their oppressors, the Arab fellahin (peasant) will sensibly remain inactive--even at the risk of being judged "fatalistic" by historians.

This dynamic, in turn, contributes to certain negative stereotypes of Arabs. Raphael Patai, in The Arab Mind (1983), refers to the Arab's "unwillingness to persevere for the purpose of deferred achievement" and to his "aversion to physical labor." Above all, Patai says, the Arab dislikes "tilling the soil, fighting its thorns and thistles, toiling and sweating to make it yield." The difficulty of obtaining property rights to land in the Arab world perhaps illuminates this aversion to labor.

This Arab stereotype was cruelly applied by a British army officer named C.S. Jarvis, governor of the Sinai in the 1930s. In his memoir, Three Deserts (1936), he wrote: "The Arab is sometimes called the Son of the Desert, but this is a misnomer as in most cases he is the Father of the Desert, having created it himself. The arid waste in which he lives and on which practically nothing will grow is the direct result of his appalling indolence.... In his campaign of destruction, the Arab has been most loyally supported by his animals, the camel and the goat."

Jarvis failed to grasp the underlying disincentives and so misconstrued as idleness what may have been a rational response to despotism. And here the intriguing question arises: Is it pure coincidence that deserts flourish where such disincentives have persisted for centuries?