Derivatives and Speculation: A Tangled Web

There is a story that I like a lot, that I’ve probably told before, but I’m going to tell it now. It’s about group of boys who were working at a hazel nut farm. And they were gathering hazel nuts for the farmer and at the end of the day he paid them with a large bag of hazel nuts. And they were talking amongst each other as to how to divide this bag of hazelnuts. And one of them said, “Let’s go to Mullah Nasradeen and he’ll divide them for us. So they went to the Mullah and they asked him to divide the nuts for them. And he asked them, “Do you want me to divide them according to God’s law or according to man’s law?” And the boys said, “Well in that case, divide them according to God’s law.” So he said, “Fine, why don’t you all sit down.” And the five boys sat in a circle and Nasradeen took the hazelnuts and poured them out of the bag into the middle of the circle and he took half of the hazelnuts and slid them over to the first boy. Then he took the half that was left and cut it in half again and gave half to the second boy. Then he took the portion that was left which was now a quarter, cut it in half and gave it to the third and fourth boy, and gave nothing to the fifth.

And the first boy was really quite pleased. The second boy also was not complaining. The third and fourth boys figured that they gotten a little more than a fifth which would have been more than they would have gotten anyway or around what they would have gotten. But the last boy was really bitter. And the word that came out of his mouth constantly was, “Why? Why? Why?” And Mullah sat back and he said, “You know you asked me to divide it according to God’s law, not according to man’s law. Now, if I were going to divide it according to man’s law, I would have asked you each how much work you did. Then I would have asked you how much each of you were responsible for what was collected that day and I would have given it out proportionately to the amount of work that you have done. But you said I should divide it according to God’s law. And God does as He wills. And it is our responsibility to be able to accept what He does”.

Now, here we are in this world living according to the laws of man, trying to understand the laws of God, of Allah. We have been ingrained with certain ideas of what we call fairness. Those ideas of fairness come from the way we view things. However trust in God is different than fairness. And to make that leap is a very difficult thing, because here we are in a situation where there are many things that we don’t know the answers to. There are hundreds of questions that we can come up with where things appear in the world to be inequitable. Where things appear to be more difficult for some, and less difficult for others. Where some seem to have an easy ride and some seem to have the most difficult of circumstances. And we lament, why, why, why. Not only do we lament, why, why, why, we come up with theories like communism, where we say, everybody should give according to their ability to everybody as to their need. Something like, we are going to decide what’s fair in this world, what’s equitable in this world, and we are going to decide how to distribute Allah’s wealth in the world.