Debt: The First 5000 Years - autonomous learning

THE MIDDLE AGES 281
Ghazali also notes that there might also be a problem of one person
not even needing what the other has to offer, but this is almost
an afterthought; for him, the real problem is conceptual. How do you
compare two things with no common qualities His conclusion: it can
only be done by comparing both to a third thing with no qualities at
all. For this reason, he explains, God created dinars and dirhams, coins
made out of gold and silver, two metals that are otherwise no good
for anything:
Dirhams and dinars are not created for any particular purpose;
they are useless by themselves; they are just like stones. They
are created to circulate from hand to hand, to govern and to
facilitate transactions. They are symbols to know the value and
grades of goods.90
They can be symbols, units of measure, because of this very lack
of usefulness, indeed lack of any particular feature other than value:
A thing can only be exactly linked to other things if it has no
particular special form or feature of its own-for example, a
mirror that has no color can reflect all colors. The same is the
case with money-it has no purpose of its own, but it serves as
medium for the purpose of exchanging goods.91
From this it also follows that lending money at interest must be
illegitimate, since it means using money as an end in itself: "Money
is not created to earn money." In fact, he says, "in relation to other
goods, dirhams and dinars are like prepositions in a sentence," words
that, as the grammarians inform us, are used to give meaning to other
words, but can only do because they have no meaning in themselves.
Money is a thus a unit of measure that provides a means of assessing
the value of goods, but also one that operates as such only if it stays in
constant motion. To enter in monetary transactions in order to obtain
even more money, even if it's a matter of M-C-M', let alone M-M',
would be, according to Ghazali, the equivalent of kidnapping a postman.92
Whereas Ghazali speaks only of gold and silver, what he describesmoney
as symbol, as abstract measure, having no qualities of its own,
whose value is only maintained by constant motion-is something that
would never have occurred to anyone were it not in an age when it
was perfectly normal for money to be employed in purely virtual form.
I I I I I