In the early establishment of the Medinan state, God’s command to shift the prayer direction (qiblah) from Bayt al-Maqdis to the Ka‘bah indicated the conferment of divine favor upon the Holy Prophet and his nascent community of believers (Qur’an, 2:144).
His coming and the establishment of his Tradition (Sunnah) is the breaking away from not only outmoded but also corrupt and unjust ways of the Qurayshite polytheists.
Similarly, the conception of the suq was to break the corrupt and unjust economic monopoly already being perpetuated in the established markets.
The Byzantine gold denarius and the Sassanian silver drakhma, prevalent and known among the Arabs as dinar and dirham respectively, were chosen to be the standard currencies for business transactions.
The English word ‘carat’ originated from the Arabic qirat, which is a unit of weight measured from a carob’s seedpod. Like the Roman solidus it was based upon, the weight of the dinar was determined to be 24 qirats, equivalent to 4.5g of pure gold.
According to Imam al-Ghazali (d. 1111) in his Ihya’ ‘Ulum al-Din (Revival of the Religious Sciences), God created gold and silver to fulfill the role as fair arbiter of values in the commerce among men.
Some verses in the Holy Qur’an speak about paradisiac reward of gold, silver, and bejeweled adornments for the righteous in the blissful Afterlife.
While the Qur’an acknowledges Man’s natural affinity to lustrous minerals, it also condemns to perdition hoarders of gold and silver in this world who withhold their expenditure in the way to God (9:34–35).
Commenting on the Qur’anic verses, Imam Fakhr al-Din al-Razi (d. 1209) in his exegetical work Mafatih al-Ghayb (Keys to the Unseen) explained that extreme love for material things drive hoarders to acquire abundance of wealth even in the wrongful ways that obstruct others from getting their rights fairly.
Of course there will always be cheaters. Historically, coins have been adulterated with other metals, thereby reducing the precious content. As these pure metals are physically soft in nature, biting upon a coin in order to leave a mark is a technique that helps in revealing fake money.
Due to the physical softness, gold coins deteriorate over time as they exchange hands. The governments of the past, which were mandated to protect the integrity of individual coins, would collect used coins through taxes and tithes and maintain the money supply by issuing freshly minted ones in the form of salaries and cash payouts.
The 17th and 18th centuries saw the mathematization scheme of René Descartes and Isaac Newton bringing about a mechanized picture of the world. As things become easily broken down into parts and mathematically abstracted, so too money became eventually abstracted from its intrinsic value.
Today, demonetization exercise extracts aging promissory notes from circulation and exchanges them with bills freshly printed with newer security features in order to safeguard against counterfeiting.
In relation to this, taxation cannot therefore be merely a means to extract wealth in order to fund economic activities or development projects in the interest of the public. Rather, it must also be part of an integral monetary system protecting the integrity of individual denominations.
The invention of electronics and the coming of the digital age allowed money – by now abstract values – to be transferred instantaneously across the world. The reason this can work is because the systems in place are able to consistently ensure the security and integrity of monetary values.
On the one hand, some may perceive the current trend of cryptocurrency and digital money to be an effort to decentralize from a bureaucracy seeking to impose minutiae control over people’s lives. However, that is a reflection of a worldview that already deified technology beyond its purpose as a mere tool.
On the other hand, it could disrupt money’s role as fair arbiter of values, therefore posing a serious challenge to a nation’s sovereignty in ensuring its currency’s integrity.
Like the physical currencies that preceded it, cryptocurrency that is constructed from abstract virtual and mathematical system can only work well insofar as it is secure and consistent.
If anything is to be learnt from history, it is that any set of rules devised by human beings is still a human invention subject to very human fallibility and would eventually succumb to human trickery.
Take for example of the cyber heist that was reported in 2016 where USD 81 million was stolen from Bangladesh central bank through a hack into SWIFT’s international bank transfer system purported to be secure.
Given the increasingly abstract and sophisticated system of today’s financial technology, there is a need for a critical mass of experts who can profess to understand it in its entirety.