Halal & haram: Recovering Islam as ‘deen'

Summary The five obligations may state the minimum visible markers by which a person enters and practises the Muslim community; they do not exhaust the meaning, purposes or institutional demands of Islam. Islam cannot be defined simply by adding obligations to prohibitions, nor can Islamic finance be redeemed by finding a more careful label for what remains permissible [Who will draft Riba Prohibition Law? The larger Qur'anic challenge is to move from certifying transactions to transforming relationships—from a marketplace of fatwas to a social order in which wealth serves human development [Beyond Riba: Reconstruction of Just Financial Order—V: Social finance as public responsibility, Minute Mirror, August 11, 2026 and Beyond Riba: Reconstruction of Just Financial Order—VI: From declaration to implementation, Minute Mirror, August 11, 2026. AI Generated Summary Arshad Zaman's essay, 'Halal: Islamic, or Just Lawful?', performs a useful service. It questions the commercial habit of placing the word 'Islamic' before any financial product that has survived a compliance screen. Something may avoid a formally prohibited element without becoming just, humane or socially beneficial. His warning against treating mere permissibility as an affirmative Islamic virtue deserves serious attention. The difficulty lies in the conceptual framework used to make that warning. Arshad Zaman begins by treating Islam essentially as religion and defining its public manifestation through the familiar five obligations. He then proposes that 'Islamic,' in a positive sense, should refer to what is obligatory, while the large field left after prohibited acts are excluded is merely lawful. This taxonomy may be intelligible within conventional jurisprudence, but it cannot carry the weight of defining 'Islam' itself. An adjective describing a civilisation, ethical order or worldview cannot be confined to one of the five juristic classifications of individual conduct. There is also a category error. The five obligations may state the minimum visible markers by which a person enters and practises the Muslim community; they do not exhaust the meaning, purposes or institutional demands of Islam. To ask, 'Who is a Muslim?' is not the same question as 'What makes an economy, state or social relationship Islamic?' The first concerns affiliation and personal obligation. The second requires a theory of justice, authority, production, distribution and collective responsibility. Arshad Zaman, a noted economist, carries an answer fashioned for the first question into the second, where it inevitably proves too narrow. Many noted scholars in history have challenged precisely this reduction. They argue that the Qur'anic term 'deen' cannot be rendered adequately as religion or madhab. Religion, as historically organised, tends to centre on belief, ritual, private salvation and priestly or juristic mediation. Deen is a complete order of life governed by permanent values, expressed through collective institutions and judged by what it does to human beings and society. This formulation is deliberately unsettling: followers can lower a dynamic deen into religion by converting its transformative principles into inherited beliefs, formal observances and disputes over rules. The alternate argument is not that the Qur'an contains no commands or prohibitions. It plainly does. These limits belong within a moral and social structure; detached from that conventional order, they become fragments mistaken for the whole. This distinction exposes the central tension in Arshad Zaman's essay. He rightly says that only a small proportion of Qur'anic verses supplies the direct basis for legal rulings and that law is peripheral to its central message. Almost immediately, however, that central message is presented chiefly as guidance to individual Muslims seeking success on the Day of Judgment. Many would regard this as the decisive retreat from deen to religion: the Qur'an's programme for transforming life is compressed into personal conduct undertaken principally for reward hereafter. The disagreement also concerns authority. Arshad Zaman describes the Sunnah as 'unrecited Revelation' capable of creating rules where the Qur'an is silent, adds settled juristic consensus, and then moves through analogy and other methods of reasoning. This is a recognisable position within classical jurisprudence, but it is not a neutral definition of Islam. It is the very historical construction many contest. For them, the Qur'an remains the final and self-explanatory criterion, while every subsequent interpretation is a human effort. Once this contested hierarchy of sources is presented as Islam itself, disagreement is pre-programmed: rival schools can validate different chains, analogies and causes, each producing its own boundary between lawful and forbidden. The Qur'an itself resists that compression. Its celebrated description of righteousness in 2:177 begins by denying that virtue consists merely in turning one's face east or west. It joins conviction to spending cherished wealth on relatives, orphans, the needy, travellers and emancipation; keeping commitments; and remaining steadfast under adversity. Surah al-Ma'un condemns those whose prayer coexists with indifference to the orphan and failure to feed the poor. Verse 4:135 commands believers to stand firmly for justice even against themselves and their own kin. These are not appendices to ritual. They are tests of its truth. The economic implications are equally direct. The Qur'an explains a rule of distribution so that wealth 'may not merely circulate among the rich' (59:7), condemns the devouring of wealth through wrongful means (4:29), and couples the prohibition of riba with the command that neither party inflict nor suffer injustice (2:275–279). The operative question is larger than whether a contract can be fitted into a recognised legal form. It is whether the economic relationship embodies justice, prevents exploitation and disperses rather than concentrates social power. Here the never-ending debate over halal and haram reveals its limitation. Classification is necessary: a moral order must have boundaries. It becomes evasive when the classification of isolated transactions replaces scrutiny of the system producing them. A financial institution may remove the word 'interest,' insert a sale, lease or partnership into the documentation, obtain a certificate and reproduce substantially the same allocation of risk, bargaining power and guaranteed return. The paperwork changes; indebtedness, exclusion and concentration of wealth may remain intact. The question 'Is this instrument permissible?' then prevents the more demanding question: 'What kind of society does this instrument help create?' Arshad Zaman is alive to part of this danger when he calls much Islamic-finance labelling marketing. His proposed remedy, however, returns the anxious individual to the same circle: learn the prohibitions, consult an imam, obtain an independent fatwa where necessary, and seek another opinion when qualified scholars disagree. This may help a conscientious person navigate an existing market. It does not tell us how an unjust market is to be reconstructed. Nor can it end the controversy, because jurists may differ over the relevant cause, analogy, source, custom and factual characterisation while every new financial product generates another demand for certification. The holy Quran offers a radically different starting point. It ordains that the Divine attribute of sustaining and developing every being towards fulfilment must acquire institutional form. The Qur'anic order accepts responsibility for ensuring that no person is deprived of the means of development. Human personality grows not through withdrawal from society, but through productive labour, service, sharing and the creation of conditions in which others can also flourish. Economic life is not a morally neutral marketplace bordered by a few forbidden zones. It is one of the principal fields in which deen succeeds or fails. Who benefits when Islam is treated predominantly as a code administered through specialised intermediaries? Why do Muslim societies generate volumes of rulings on contractual form while tolerating hunger, hoarding, inherited privilege, exploitative labour and extreme concentrations of wealth? Can a transaction be called Islamic if it is individually certified but sustains a collectively unjust order? A more adequate test would operate at three connected levels. The express Qur'anic boundary must be respected; the substance and consequences of the transaction must be examined; and the institutional order must be assessed against justice, human dignity, social responsibility and equitable circulation of resources. None of these can safely replace the others. Prohibition without purpose produces formalism. Purpose without boundaries can become convenience. Individual piety without collective justice leaves exploitation undisturbed. Arshad Zaman has opened an important discussion by showing that 'lawful' and 'Islamic' are not synonyms. The discussion must now travel further than what the conventional 'religious framework' permits. Islam cannot be defined simply by adding obligations to prohibitions, nor can Islamic finance be redeemed by finding a more careful label for what remains permissible [Who will draft Riba Prohibition Law? Minute Mirror, April 7, 2026]. The larger Qur'anic challenge is to move from certifying transactions to transforming relationships—from a marketplace of fatwas to a social order in which wealth serves human development [Beyond Riba: Reconstruction of Just Financial Order—V: Social finance as public responsibility, Minute Mirror, August 11, 2026 and Beyond Riba: Reconstruction of Just Financial Order—VI: From declaration to implementation, Minute Mirror, August 11, 2026. The debate over halal and haram will remain endless so long as every new product is examined in isolation while the structure producing poverty, exploitation and domination is treated as given. Deen begins where certification ends. ________________________________________________________________ Dr. Ikramul Haq, Advocate Supreme Court, writer, literary critic, Adjunct Faculty at Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS), member Advisory Board and Visiting Senior Fellow of Pakistan Institute of Development Economics (PIDE), holds an LLD in tax laws. He was full-time journalist from 1979 to 1984 with Viewpoint and Dawn. He also served Civil Services of Pakistan from 1984 to 1996.