Amiel C.W.

slowly deteriorating teeth, blond hair, live alone, overly sensitive to light, enjoy the sensation of having an empty stomach.www.amielcourtin-wilson.com ////Usury as Exploitation of the Needy ///// The condemnation of usury in the form of charging for loans to the poor and destitute is a recurring theme in several traditions. This is clearly the contextual meaning of the Judaic biblical passages in Exodus and Leviticus (Encyclopedia Judaica, 1971) and Ruston suggests that “the original target of the medieval usury laws was the medieval equivalent of the ‘loan shark’ [but that] the medieval theory was unsatisfactory because it could not distinguish the helpful loan from the oppressive” (1993: 173). Sir Sayyed’s school in Islam similarly interprets riba as “the primitive form of money-lending when money was advanced for consumptional purposes” (Ahmed, 1958: 21). In the Indian tradition, this understanding of usury can be also found, as is evident from this twentieth century quote: “It is Usury - the rankest, most extortionate, most merciless Usury - which eats the marrow out of the bones of the raiyat [cultivators] and condemns him to a life of penury and slavery" (Jain, 1929: 110-111). Ruston (1993) claims usury as exploitation of the needy still exists in modern times. He cites as an example the findings of a 1992 Policy Studies Institute report which concludes that the poor pay more in absolute terms for their money, while seeking credit only for absolute necessities rather than to finance the acquisition of luxury goods which they cannot afford. This is borne out by a recent study by the National Consumer Council (1995) on financial services and low income consumers; as one respondent put it: “It's like being caught, gotcha, and then they [the banks/lenders] start winding you in”. Hence, the poor have to sweat doubly so that the rich might live on interest. A parallel modern argument relates to the devastating social impact of the so-called “Third World debt crisis”, a situation which even Pope John Paul II (1989) acknowledges in his Sollicitude Rei Socialis when he states: “Capital needed by the debtor nations to improve their standard of living now has to be used for interest payments on their debts”. This critical modern manifestation of usury is dealt with in more depth and detail in the comprehensive works of Susan George, A Fate Worst Than Debt (1988) and The Debt Boomerang (1992), among numerous others. For now, it is only worth pointing out to critics of the Islamic interest-free banking system that if sovereign debt during the 1970’s had been advanced on an equity investment basis, debtor countries would not have been caught on the rack of compounding interest at rates established by non-domestic macroeconomic factors. Servicing costs could not have burgeoned whilst at the same time most commodity prices paid to debtor nations collapsed. Return on capital and perhaps capital repayment itself, being commensurate with a nation’s economic wellbeing, would have fluctuated in accordance with ability to pay. The debtor nations would therefore have enjoyed fiscal security akin to that of a low geared company. Of course, the fact that much sovereign debt comprised recycled dollars from oil producing Moslem countries is an irony, and a disgrace, that should escape notice no more than eyes should be averted to the hypocricy of usury-promoting countries such as Britain and the United States whose leaders often proclaim Christian values. Be that as it may, by applying the Islamic approach, a lot of human misery could have been avoided. Applying the same principle, this could be the case for the countless individuals and enterprises caught in the trap of impoverishment through non-sovereign debt.