Why Islamists in the Arab world speak the language of free markets

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. A POLITICIAN promised to open his poor country for foreign investment and wean it off aid, while Tony Blair nodded sagely. Standard fare for Davos—except that two months earlier the politician, Asaad al-Shaibani (pictured), was a member of a jihadist group blacklisted by the UN.

It was hard to imagine he would end up as Syria’s foreign minister, extolling the virtues of the free market on a mountain in Switzerland. Yet in one sense, his journey was not unusual. Across the Arab world, Islamists are often more devout capitalists than their nationalist rivals.

When the Muslim Brotherhood came to power in Egypt it wooed private capital for everything from energy to education. Ennahda, Tunisia’s main Islamist party, took more flak for trying to privatise state firms than for trying to Islamise society. Some of this is tactical.

The Islamists who assumed control in recent years did so after popular revolutions. They needed to distinguish themselves from their predecessors. Syria under the Assad regime combined a Soviet-style command economy with crony capitalism.

Only sensible, then, that its new rulers would promise something different. The success of Turkey’s business-friendly Justice and Development Party, which took power in 2002, has been a model. When lawmakers need a religious justification for their policies, clerics are happy to provide it.

Dar al-Ifta, a state-run religious authority in Egypt, argues that a planned economy is contrary to Islam because it restricts personal freedom. The ideal Islamic economy, it explains, is a “free market devoid of monopoly, deception" and other ills, in language that sounds more Adam Smith than al-Shafi’i. Many scholars argue that nothing in Islam