The Economic System of Islam — Page 89
89 Under non-Islamic systems, conquered territories are given away to the companions of conqueror or to those with influence. It is because of this system that the Norman conquerors were able to parcel out land in certain areas of England, Scotland and Ireland to chosen nobles, while leaving the inhabitants landless, with no place even to build their own homes. This situation persists in several areas to this day, where large owners rent out their build- ings, but retain their power and influence. The same thing hap- pened in France, Germany, Austria and Italy, though some im- provement in the situation occurred following the Napoleonic wars. In the United States of America, too, as the country devel- oped, a group of big land owners emerged through the simple ex- pediency of dispossessing as many of the original inhabitants as they could manage and then continued to hold on to what they had gained, or rather usurped. And the same story repeated itself in Australia and Kenya, where English settlers took possession of hundreds of thousands of acres, leaving the natives landless. As a result of the Islamic conquests in Arabia, the conquerors were given a portion of the land. Since in Arabia proper, arable land was limited, there was little danger of large illicit landowners to emerge. In Yemen and Syria however, both of which had a long established agricultural tradition, land was left in the possession of the original owners. Iraq, in contrast, was a sparsely populated, but fertile country that had been evacuated when the Persians moved back to their own country. Although some Generals in the victorious Islamic army did initially try to redistribute the land among the conquerors; Hadrat Umar ra disapproved of the idea. His reason was that he could foresee the harm it could do to succeeding generations. He, therefore, retained the vanquished land as