Sabri F. Ülgener (1911-1983), with his ability to combine eastern and western cultures in his own character, his rigorous and disciplined way of working and his ability to use different sources in his research, also has an important place in the aspect of history of economic thought of the Turkish academy of the 20th century and influenced the studies that conducted after him, is a scholar who deserves to be studied in depth.An important feature that distinguishes Ülgener from other scholars is that he focused on “lived history” rather than “documented history” in his research. Rather than archival sources, works of classical Turkish literature, moral books, works of art, newspapers published in the Ottoman period, the memories he listened from people who were born in the last period of the Ottoman Empire and were still alive in his own time, and the memories left behind by those people were the main reference sources of Ülgener. Ülgener rigorously traced back the marks of the Ottoman economic mentality in all these sources.The Ottoman economic mentality, which Ülgener continued to research throughout almost his entire academic career, naturally coincides with the research field of the discipline today called “Islamic Economics”. In 1944, Ülgener himself wrote an article titled "Economic Policy Issues in Islamic Law and Moral Sources", and he examined the issue of price fixing [narkh] in Islam in this article, with the effect of statism policies that had to be implemented due to the hard conditions of the Second World War. Another work that is directly related to the subject of mentality is the article he wrote in 1949, titled “The Ethics of the Craftsmen since Fourteenth Century and Some Situations of Complaints”. In the article, Ülgener examined the negative impression of the craftsmen of that period in the minds of the public and the reasons for it.It was unthinkable that Ülgener, who carried out research on the economic topics of Islamic law in the second half of the 1940s, remained indifferent to the issue of the “interest”. This study, which is the subject of translation, is related to interest, the most fundamental issue of Islamic economics. Ülgener was invited to a congress held in New Delhi in December 1958 and he presented the paper that is the subject of that translation at the congress. The presented paper was not published in Türkiye, but it was included as a note called “opinion” in the issue of Islamic Review, published in England, with the number of 55/2 (February 1967). The aforementioned paper, as understood from the Ülgener biography written by A. G. Sayar, was first written in Turkish with the old script [Ottoman] and then presented in English. Sayar names the paper "The Situation of Islam in Economic Development Against Money and Credit Issues".Ülgener makes a distinction between the interest used in directing and calculating investments and expressing the premium paid for the use of money [Ülgener proposes to call this type of interest as “benefit”], and the interest, which represents an unrequited surplus for consumption purposes [usury, riba] in the paper. Expressing that the interest prohibited by Qoran is actually the usury, he examines the reasons behind the prohibition. Seeing the prohibition against usury for consumption purposes as justified, Ülgener says that especially Muslim countries with insufficient development level should reinterpret Islamic law in order to ensure their own economic development, make a distinction in the concept of interest, and asextension of this thought, he states that they should permit interest as a guide at the point of placement of investments and should also include such Western-style monetary institutions in their structure.The paper, which was not included in the corpus prepared during the collective publication of Ülgener's works, is important in the aspect that it has never been published in Turkish and that it is a study in which Ülgener explains his thoughts on interest clearly and consistently.
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Jan 1, 2023
Katarína Teplická 
Open Access