The Treatment of Riba in Western Literature

As we know, Islamic Economic System prohibit the payment of interest in the borrower- lender relationship and replace with profit/loss sharing financial instruments. Generally, there has been an implicit assumption by Islamic writers that the prohibition of interest is special to Islamic literature.
In truth, its advocacy has been a feature of both religious teachings and nonreligious literature over several decades. This article will classified the major arguments against interest in Western literature in terms of the relationship between interest, charitable deeds and social divisions, the preferred use of money, the effects upon work effort and the time dimension. In truth, there is little in contemporary economic literature which is fundamentally opposed to interest payments. Historically, interest has been opposed in the social divisions since it creates hardship to borrowers. For instance, the Old Testament recommends loans to the poor free of interest and loans need to be cancelled every seventh year except loans to foreigners. The Old Testament in turn was a major influence upon Jewish and Christian opposition to interest and may have been, many centuries ago, the original reason for the Koran's dismissal of usury. Many people treat interest as a tool to gain profit from those who in needs since a borrower must be in need so they did not have any option to choose. However,now lending on interest is a blame action, for a person who borrows is not use to buy unimportant things but is obviously in need, and since he is compelled to pay the interest as well as the capital, he must necessarily be in the utmost straits. There has also been a recognized in Western literature that interest is unearned income in the sense that no work effort is required. There is less convincing an argument against interest is the view, found for example in Aristotle, that money should only
function as a medium of exchange and not also as a store of value .This view is also present in Aquinas where interest undermines the stability of money as a measure of value, by ascribing different, time-dependent values to the money supply. Others have more recently accused interest as creating instability in the velocity of circulation of money, of affecting aggregate spending and adding to economic fluctuations.