İlahiyat Akademi

Öz

Social order is a phenomenon that can be established when individuals within it internalize concepts of justice and rights, fulfilling the requirements related to them. In societies lacking these concepts, absolute order and the connected social peace are absent. The main indicators that show that justice and rights do not prevail are the weaknesses in the sharing of the total material values produced in society. In circumstances where certain groups take a large share of society's wealth, it is inevitable that social unrest will arise. The fact that a small segment of society has a large share forms the basis of disintegration and chaos in society. Society is the environment in which human beings hold on to life and realize many of their relationships. People realize all their positive or negative behaviours through their relationships with society. The physical environment in which one lives also has an important contribution to these relationships. The Qur’ān presents messages to all humanity, starting from its initial circle of address. Some of these messages are related to the manner of assignment/ownership and disposition of financial assets that people own. A person's view of material assets is directly related to his view of the world and worldly life. The Qur’ān addresses the polytheistic Arab community, its initial recipients, whose perception of life is individualistic and limited to this world; they are insensitive to the problems of the society and the environment in which they live. Since the concepts of justice and rights do not exist in the polytheistic Arab society, it is meaningless to expect the concept of social justice to exist in the economic life. Considering this insensitivity and indifference of the polytheist Arabs towards their own society as a negative issue for the course of society, the Qur’ān aims to shape the minds of its addressees in this direction by providing incentives, orders and prohibitions in order to correct them. The moral understanding of the Qur’ān is basically based on belief in Allah and the afterlife. In this regard, the Qur’ān has determined the primary goal of directing people's gaze in that direction and concentrating their perceptions accordingly. Since it aims to change the whole of human life at the center of belief in Allah and the afterlife, the Qur’ān has followed a gradual method that aims to change all aspects related to financial assets, which are the most important of social relations. Considering the acquisition of financial assets, which are vitally important for the positive shaping of social life, and the human disposition over them, emphasizing that the real owner of all assets is Allah and that human ownership is temporary. The Qur’ān declares that the first behaviour leading to salvation in the afterlife is to donating some one's wealth. In many verses, Allah states that His consent in the relations between His servants can only be achieved through sharing. From this perspective, we can easily say that orders and recommendations regarding financial assets are basically related to sharing ethics. In order to strengthen this phenomenon, the Qur’ān tries to base the economic actions of human beings on honesty, compassion and sharing their profits by appealing to human emotions and activating the feelings of goodness in their nature. In this respect, we can say that the Qur’ān discusses man's acquisition of material assets and their disposal over them on the basis of reward or punishment in the afterlife and the concept of sharing.