Natural Nations and Natural Money:  Two Keys to Progress through Political and Economic Justice

by Dr. Robert D. Crane

  On October 12th, 2006, the national legislature in Iraq made history by declaring that the peoples of Iraq are autonomous nations in a federal structure.  This implementation of this new confederal entity is to occur after an eighteen-month period of preparation.  This presumably is to give the Sunnis, who boycotted the legislative declaration, and the Shia and Kurds time to negotiate a means to share the oil revenues, as well as to gain real independence from the foreign forces that have labored mightily to impose centralized foreign control.

  Two issues emerge as crucial to the future of the Fertile Crescent, as well as to most of Southwest Asia.  The first is: what right do the Shia and Kurds have to national sovereignty?  This is a largely a question of history, which must be addressed from the perspective of the oppressed rather than of the oppressors.  Equally important is the theoretical question why does any group of people have the right to be internationally recognized as a nation.  This has been carefully hidden as a legitimate issue by Western modernization theorists who have insisted that nations must be built on a secular ideological basis rather than permitted to survive as remnants of the past and as alleged impediments to modernization.

  The essential political issue is: what is a natural nation as distinct from an artificial and illegitimate one.  A true nation, as defined by Rene Guenon sixty years ago, when he was still a hidden Muslim, is a large community of persons who share a common sense of the past, common values for the present, and common hopes for the future.  A natural nation is a group of people who are a projection of tradition not a figment of some ideological imagination. 

  This is the opposite of an artificial nation, which is what modernization theorists try to create by destroying indigenous values in order to incarnate a utopian vision of a secularly fundamentalist state wherein every person has been brainwashed to dream only of survival in a global economy dominated by a foreign elite. The destruction of nations in order to form states in the form of political collectivities similar to economic corporations undermines the normal human sense of one’s own sacred value and the derivative value of human community, which best provide the incentives inherent in human nature to build prosperity and leadership in the modern world. 

  This has been spelled out in my books and many of my articles going back many decades.  My most recent writing on this subject was published in http://www.theamericanmuslim.org on March 4th, 2006, in my article entitled, “The Vision of Communitarian Pluralism: The Conflict Between State and Nation.” 

  The second most important question that will determine the future of all peoples at the crossroads of the three Old-World continents, as well as in the two New World continents on the edges of the Old World, is economic.  In a pluralistic political world, the question remains who will own the means of production and thereby determine whether political pluralism will be based, as it must be, on economic pluralism.  Peace through justice must be based on recognition that ownership of capital assets and ownership of money determine political power. 

  The issue that most concerns Muslim financial experts is: how does one overcome the speculative and predatory forms of financial capital that can destroy entire economies?  The simplest answer to this specific question is reliance on real or natural money rather than on artificial money.  The prohibition of artificial money follows from the Islamic teaching that money should be treated as a medium of exchange and not as a commodity.  This, in turn, requires finance to be based on the “real bills doctrine,” which calls for money to be created only if it is backed by real assets instead of government debt.  This is basic to the concept of private property.

  The most important principle in classical Islamic economics is the sacredness of private property, known as the principle of haq al mal, which is considered to be the only secure protection against government oppression.  Private property in the natural resources of the Fertile Crescent is critical to its future.  The Sunnis insist that they share in the oil revenues from the Shia and Kurdish regions, which is perfectly legitimate.  Their strategic weakness lies in their apparent insistence on following the socialist doctrines of Saddam Hussein, who enforced centralized governmental control of oil in order to distribute “surplus” profits as a form of bribery and welfare economics.  This would merely maintain the basic policy failure of trying to impose centralized political control, which, in turn, could be exploited by local mafia in collusion with foreign oil companies and provide justification for continued American military bases in Iraq.

  The answer to the institution of acceptable economic pluralism in the Fertile Crescent is privatization of all oil ownership in the form of inalienable voting shares of stock owned equally by every individual Shia, Kurd, and Sunni.  This would give every resident of this region an equal incentive to support the confederal regional government that made such economic justice possible.  Although taxation on the dividends would initially be heavy to finance post-war reconstruction, soon the profits of the new owners would triple their wage incomes, jump start the regional economy, and largely eliminate the incentives to kill each other.

  Only when these fundamental principles of normative (especially Islamic) economics are respected can the free market serve as an instrument to enrich the many, instead of merely the few at their expense, Only institutional reform in accordance with these principles can protect the sacredness of broad-based private property ownership in the means of production, which, in turn, is the only means to pulverize concentrated political power and empower the many instead of only the few.

  The answer to the injustices of the world is not socialism and not capitalism but what may be called this Just Third Way.  This has been developed in books and position papers by the Center for Economic and Social Justice, http://www.cesj.org, which was founded twenty-two years ago as an interfaith think-tank in Washington.  Efforts to expand and apply this approach are being made through the establishment of a Global Institute for Peace through Justice with offices in the most important capitals of the Muslim world, including Baghdad. 

  A basic premise of its work is the belief that Muslim leadership is a key to formulating and applying constructive solutions in the universal search for global economic and political equity.  To the extent that Muslims are radicalized by the institutionalized injustices in the world, only Muslims can marginalize and overcome their own homegrown radicals by offering hope for peace, progress, and freedom through the institutionalization of a new universal paradigm of justice.