Surah al-Humazah and the love of wealth

Surah al-Humazah (Qur'an 104) is a short chapter that condemns the slanderer and mocker, the one “who amasses wealth and counts it” and imagines his wealth will make him immortal. The authors argue that it describes more than one person's greed. It describes a whole outlook in which money becomes the measure of a person's worth, and people with less are looked down on.

They read the surah alongside modern discussions of capitalism, an economy built on private ownership and profit, and materialism, an outlook that places too much importance on possessions and status. The two are not the same, the paper notes, but they often reinforce each other. Drawing on the commentary of Ibn Kathir, the authors pick out four themes in the surah: mockery, accumulation, delusion and destruction. Counting wealth again and again suggests anxious attachment, not simple bookkeeping. Believing wealth brings permanence is the delusion that money, technology or comfort can remove human fragility and accountability. And opening with the mocker ties wealth to contempt for others.

The authors then turn to present-day evidence. They cite reports from the OECD, the World Bank, the IMF and the World Inequality Report on persistent poverty and highly concentrated wealth, and psychological research linking materialism to lower well-being. In Islamic thought, they note, wealth itself is not condemned; it comes with duties of accountability, circulation and justice. The surah's image of a fire that reaches the hearts suggests to them that the deepest damage is spiritual, so technical fixes for inequality, without moral change, remain incomplete.

The paper is careful not to turn the surah into a slogan against every market or treat it as an economics textbook. Its conclusion is moral: the surah denies wealth the right to become ultimate, and reminds readers that wealth without accountability is unstable and status without humility corrupts.