Islamic Law on Gambling and Some Modern Business Practices

Although the prohibition of gambling is very clear in Islam its concrete phrasal definition is not provided in any of its original sources. Hence Islamic scholars throughout the centuries have been formulating the definition based on their understanding of the textual evidence concerning gambling. Since the definitions provided by the past scholars directly correspond to certain activities existed in their days, it is crucial to analyze the definitions and apply it to some form of modern activities suspected to resemble gambling in one way or another. For this purpose, this paper will use descriptive content analysis methods by analyzing some views of the Islamic scholars regarding the definitions and elements of gambling as appeared in some of the Quranic commentaries and Islamic law treatises. The findings will then be applied to some current business activities such as insurance and speculation in stock and commodities markets. The study found that some of these activities do have some elements of gambling but they are not enough to turn these activities into gambling per se. In addition, there are several measures can be executed to prevent such activities turning into plain and pure gambling.