(Interesting article by the autonomist-leaning George Caffentzis. It puts Islamic radicalism into the same context as the U'Wa, Ogoni and Chiapas struggles against oil companies.)
Counterpunch, December 15, 2004 Local, Islamic and Global The Petroleum Commons
By GEORGE CAFFENTZIS
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The Islamic Petroleum Commons: From Morocco to Indonesia
Another conception of a petroleum commons has developed in Islamic economic theory and political practice since the 1970s. It claims that petroleum found beneath Islamic territory is the common possession of the worldwide Islamic community (Ummah) and consequently it is neither state nor private property. This conception is challenging the relations that have been worked out between the oil companies and Islamic nation-states since World War I.
A key event in the development of the international oil industry was the destruction of the last Caliphate, the Ottoman Empire, at the end of World War I. A Caliphate requires a secular military-political entity that is pledged to defend the worldwide Islamic community. The Ottoman Turks had been performing this role of "defenders of the faith" since the 15th century. Their imperial lands included Iraq, Kuwait, and parts of Saudi Arabia--i.e. the center of the main oil reserves of the planet. In order for the petroleum industry to operate on a capitalist basis, the large international oil companies and main imperialist powers at the end of World War I (US, Britain, France) tore up the Ottoman Caliphate and created a number of rentier states that were largely under their control.
The incompatibility between the existence of the Caliphate and the for-profit operations that were required by the oil industry is evident. An Islamic Caliphate had to be committed, at least in principle, to specific re-distributive economic principles (including the concept of a petroleum common owned by the ummah, the entire Islamic community) that were in contrast with the corporate control envisioned by the founders of the oil industry in the Middle East in period between 1918 and 1945. A genuine Caliphate would have had to invest in ways that would have made it autonomous from the directives of the imperialist powers (governmental or corporate). Last, a genuine Caliphate would have had worldwide reach, and would have had to be committed to intervening in areas where the Islamic community resided. These areas, however, were often essential parts of the empires of Britain, France and Holland. (e.g., India, Algeria, and Indonesia).
What is presently called Islamic fundamentalism, or political Islam, or Islamism, is in part an effort to revive the Caliphate almost a century after its end. This gives these social movements a "global reach," as they claim to unite and "protect" the Islamic community presently stretching from Morocco to Indonesia and, through immigration, into the heart of Europe and North America. Whatever the ultimate fate of this type of patriarchal politics and whatever its class composition, this drive towards a Caliphate represents an important reality for the oil industry since both are operating at the center of the major oil reserves of the planet. Indeed, if one correlates the nation-state members of the Organization of Islamic Congress with the oil reserves that are estimated to lie in their territories, one sees that nearly two-thirds of the world's petroleum is "Islamic" Such a drive is toward an "imagined community"--but then, what community except the most intimate is not imagined?
Along with the revival of Islam as a political force has come the development of an "Islamic economics" that has a number of tenets relevant to the oil industry. First, since oil is a sub-soil resource, from an Islamic perspective, it is seen as a gift from Allah and hence a community good. Although Islamic economics respects private property --after all, Islam is a religion founded by a merchant-- it also recognizes the role of communally shared resources. Islamic economics accepts the standard division of private, state, and common property, and oil is definitely included in the category of common property. It is now traditional to repeat at this juncture the famous statement of Mohammed: "The people are partners in three things: water, pastures and fire [today, petroleum]." The recognition of an Islamic petroleum commons is seen as a first step in the realization of an Islamic economics.
True, some common property must be mined (like oil, gold, silver, and iron), but the minerals themselves remain the common property of all Muslims. The Caliphate itself might mine them or sub-contract their collection, but all revenues gained from their sale should be kept in the Bait al-Mal--the same treasury that the zakat, or redistributive tithe, is destined for.
The second principle of Islamic economics is the redistributive one. Islam, for all of its respect of private property, instituted from its beginning a system of income transfers. Even non-Muslims know of the zakat, but there are many other re-distributive mechanisms (e.g., the prohibition of charging interest) that make the doctrine of neo-liberalism anathema in Islamic discourse. A Caliphate is duty-bound to fund the poor, the needy, the travelers, the debtors and its jihad from the funds in the Bait al-Mal. This is especially true of revenues derived from oil, since they are directly derived from the sale of a communal good. Thus the charges of corruption hurled against the Saudi Arabian elite by Islamists are especially damning, since the Saudi elite's extravagant ways of living can be accused of denying bread to the mouths of the poor children Allah destined it for.
The third principle of Islamic economics is based on the prohibition of waste and the concern for conserving scarce resources. Islamists can plausibly argue that if the conspicuous consumption and self-protective expenditure on military hardware indulged in by the present elites are ended, more oil could be left in the ground. Such an economic policy would clearly have a significant impact on the price of oil, since oil would no longer be considered a state or corporate commodity to be sold to the highest bidder, and instead would be viewed as a common good whose conservation would be valuable in itself.
Common property in the Islamic tradition is often not emphasized in academic expositions of Islamic economics, where the pride of place is given to a symbolic zakat and a banking system that denies a role to interest. The works of Pakistani social thinker Savyid Abul-Ala Mawdudi (1903-79), martyred Egyptian Islamist Sayyid Qutb (1906-66) and Iraqi writer Muhammad Baquir al-Sadr (1931-80) --the intellectual progenitors of Islamic economics-- are often taken to task for imposing unrealistic constrains on the development of capitalism in the Islamic world. Nevertheless, if the doctrine of the petroleum commons were implemented as the basis of social planning, in an Islamic world that counts more than a billion people, we can presume it would have a far greater impact than any other of its economic recommendations.
If Islamic nations turned their petroleum resources into a commons, then three major, even revolutionary changes would follow. First, this would lead to a tighter control of the pace of extraction and a willingness to exercise the "Right to say 'No'," resulting in much higher oil prices. Second, the surplus of the commons would flow into re-distributive projects in the Islamic world, rather than being channeled into the economies and financial systems of Europe and the US. Last, the neo-liberal program for the Middle East (as outlined in George W. Bush's plan for the outcome of the Iraq war) would be challenged.
full: http://www.counterpunch.org/
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