What Does the Quran Say About Interest? A Three-Faith Comparison

The Hebrew Bible distinguishes between lending to fellow Israelites and lending to foreigners. Leviticus 25:36–37 forbids taking interest from a poor brother, and Deuteronomy 23:20 permits charging interest only to a non-Israelite. The Hebrew term neshek (bite) captures the predatory image of interest gnawing away at a borrower's resources. Rabbinic tradition later elaborated an elaborate system called heter iska — a legal fiction converting a loan into a partnership — to permit commercial lending while technically honoring the biblical ban.

Medieval Jewish thinkers like Maimonides (12th century) treated the prohibition as a moral duty rooted in communal solidarity rather than mere economic policy. The Talmud (Bava Metzia 60b–75b) devotes an entire tractate to interest law, listing dozens of forbidden forms of indirect benefit. Modern Orthodox authorities generally permit institutional lending under heter iska arrangements, while the underlying scriptural ethic of selfless generosity — giving without expecting return — resonates with the Quranic vision of spending whose reward rests solely with God Quran 2:274.

Early Christianity inherited the Jewish suspicion of interest and intensified it. The Third Lateran Council (1179) and the Council of Vienne (1311) formally condemned usury, threatening excommunication for unrepentant lenders. Thomas Aquinas argued in the Summa Theologica (II-II, Q.78) that money is consumed in use, so charging for its use is selling the same thing twice — an inherently unjust act. This scholastic framework dominated Catholic moral theology for centuries.

The Protestant Reformation shifted the debate. John Calvin (1564) argued that not all interest is sinful, distinguishing productive commercial loans from exploitative ones — a position that gradually normalized lending in Protestant economies. Today, most Christian denominations focus their critique on predatory or excessive interest rather than interest per se. The underlying scriptural ethic, however, remains consistent with the ideal of giving whose reward comes from God alone rather than from human exploitation Quran 2:274, and of spending generously without seeking personal gain Quran 2:262.

The Quran's prohibition of riba (often translated as usury or interest) is among its most emphatic economic rulings. The Quran frames the ban within a sweeping contrast between exploitative wealth accumulation and the selfless generosity it repeatedly praises — those who spend their wealth night and day, secretly and openly, are promised divine reward and freedom from fear Quran 2:274. Conversely, those who nullify their charity through arrogance or harm are compared to a barren rock swept clean by rain Quran 2:264, underscoring that wealth must circulate with moral integrity.

The Quran's vision of prophetic mission reinforces this ethic: prophet after prophet declares, 'I ask of you no reward for this; my reward is only from the Lord of the Worlds' Quran 26:109Quran 26:180. This recurring formula — found across multiple surahs — establishes that the righteous do not monetize their service to others, a principle scholars like Yusuf al-Qaradawi (20th century) apply directly to the riba prohibition. The contrast between asking no reward from people Quran 26:127 and the riba-taker who demands guaranteed increase from borrowers is central to classical tafsir literature.

Classical scholars unanimously prohibited riba, though they debated its precise scope. Ibn Rushd (Averroes, 12th century) catalogued scholarly disagreements in Bidayat al-Mujtahid, noting consensus on the prohibition of pre-Islamic riba al-jahiliyya (doubling debt on default) but divergence on whether modern bank interest falls under the same ruling. Contemporary Islamic finance — pioneered institutionally in the 1970s with the founding of the Islamic Development Bank — attempts to structure profit-sharing (mudaraba), leasing (ijara), and cost-plus sale (murabaha) contracts as riba-free alternatives. Not all economists agree these instruments are substantively different from interest-bearing loans, making this an active area of scholarly debate.