Ribā

Ribā, commonly rendered usury or interest, is the unlawful increase forbidden in Islam, the gain exacted upon a loan or in certain exchanges over and above the principal. Its prohibition was established by a series of verses of the Qurʼān revealed in the Madīnan period and confirmed by the sunnah of the Prophet Muḥammad ﷺ, and it was solemnly proclaimed by him in his sermon at the Farewell Pilgrimage, when he abolished the ribā of the Jāhiliyyah. Among the gravest of the prohibitions in the law, ribā is treated in the sīrah both as a feature of the pre-Islamic economy that Islam set aside and as a matter upon which the Qurʼān pronounced with especial severity.

The word ribā signifies increase or growth, and in the usage of the Jāhiliyyah it denoted the increase added to a debt when its term fell due and the debtor could not pay: the creditor would defer the debt in return for an increase in the sum owed, so that the amount grew with each deferral, a practice that bore heavily upon the poor and the indebted. This ribā al-nasīʼa, the usury of deferment, was the form most familiar in the Arabia of the time, and it is this that the Qurʼān had chiefly in view in its condemnation, though the sunna extended the prohibition to certain exchanges of like commodities as well.

The Qurʼānic prohibition of ribā was revealed in stages, as was the way of the revelation in weaning the community from established practices. The early verses warned that what men gave in ribā to increase their wealth did not increase with God; later verses forbade the devouring of ribā doubled and multiplied; and the decisive passage of Sūrat al-Baqarah declared war from God and His Messenger ﷺ upon those who did not abandon what remained of ribā, permitting the creditor only his principal, that he might neither wrong nor be wronged. These verses, among the last revealed, set the prohibition in the strongest terms, contrasting ribā with the lawful gain of trade and with the merit of charity.

At the Farewell Pilgrimage, in his sermon upon the plain of ʻArafāt, the Prophet ﷺ proclaimed the abolition of the ribā of the time of ignorance, declaring that all ribā was set aside, and that the first ribā he abolished was that of his own family, the ribā owed to his uncle al-ʻAbbās ibn ʻAbd al-Muṭṭalib, which he remitted in full. By this public renunciation, beginning with the debts owed to his own kin, the Prophet ﷺ gave effect to the Qurʼānic command and established the abolition of usury as a settled ordinance of the community, bound up in the memory of the tradition with the great valedictory sermon of his last pilgrimage.

The Sunnah of the Prophet ﷺ further defined the law of ribā, in particular through the tradition of the six commodities—gold, silver, wheat, barley, dates, and salt—which, the Prophet ﷺ taught, were to be exchanged like for like and hand to hand, any increase or deferral in their exchange being ribā. From this the jurists derived the second branch of the prohibition, the ribā al-faḍl, the usury of excess in the exchange of like commodities, distinct from the ribā al-nasīʼa of deferment. The Prophet ﷺ cursed the one who took ribā and the one who paid it, the one who recorded it and the witnesses to it, declaring them alike in the sin, and he ranked the devouring of ribā among the gravest of the destroying sins.

In the sīrah tradition, ribā is remembered as the unlawful increase that the Qurʼān condemned in the severest terms and that the Prophet ﷺ abolished at the Farewell Pilgrimage, beginning with the usury owed to his own house. Forbidden by the revelation in its stages and defined by the sunnah in its two forms, the usury of deferment and the usury of excess, its prohibition stands among the foundations of the economic law of Islam and among the reforms by which the Prophet ﷺ ordered the dealings of the community, setting the lawful gain of trade and the merit of charity in the place of the increase exacted upon the debts of the poor.

## References

1 Qurʼān 2:275–281; 3:130; 4:161; 30:39. 2 Abū ʻAbd Allāh al-Bukhārī, Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī, “Kitāb al-buyūʻ,” bāb ākil al-ribā, nos. 2084–2086. 3 Abū al-Ḥusayn Muslim ibn al-Ḥajjāj, Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim, “Kitāb al-musāqāt,” bāb al-ribā, nos. 1584–1598. 3 Ibn Hishām, al-Sīra al-nabawiyya, trans. Alfred Guillaume as The Life of Muhammad (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955), 651. 4 Muhammad ibn Jarīr al-Ṭabarī, Jāmiʻ al-bayān ʻan taʼwīl āy al-Qurʼān (Beirut: Dār al-Fikr, 1984), 3:101–16, on Q 2:275–81. 5 al-Jaṣṣāṣ, Aḥkām al-Qurʼān (Beirut: Dār Iḥyāʼ al-Turāth al-ʻArabī, 1985), 2:181–200. 6 Ibn Qudāma, al-Mughnī (Cairo: Maktabat al-Qāhira, 1968), 6:51–70. 7 J. Schacht, “Ribā,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed., ed. P. Bearman et al. (Leiden: Brill, 1995), 8:491–93.