Corruption According to the Main Sources of Islam

Abstract

Corruption is a widespread global problem that has far reaching
negative consequences on all spheres of life. Muslim-majority countries
are most often ranked as ‘highly corrupt’ by the Transparency International
Corruption Perceptions Indexes. Yet the majority of studies about corruption
are predominantly undertaken from a Western perspective. A review of the
available literature would suggest that it is hard to find a piece of work that
considers the problem of corruption from all its theoretical aspects from an
Islamic perspective or is exclusively dedicated to examining it from to the
perspective of the Qur’ān, Sunnah, or indeed both together. To fill this gap, this
paper is a thematic examination of the problem of corruption according to the
main sources of Islam; i.e. the Qur’ān and Sunnah, through which an attempt
is made to investigate the main theoretical facets in relation to understanding
and tackling corruption.