The Quran sets out an economic rule of great scope: the prohibition of usury (riba). In Surah Al-Baqarah (2:275-279), it declares: "Allah has permitted trade and has forbidden interest" and "And if you repent, you may have your principal - [thus] you do no wrong, nor are you wronged." Surah Al-Imran (3:130) adds: "O you who have believed, do not consume usury, doubled and multiplied."
This prohibition, revealed in the 7th century, is often presented as a mere religious rule. Yet it meets, at the level of principles, a modern economic critique forcefully formulated by the French economist Maurice Allais, Nobel Prize in Economics 1988.
Maurice Allais (1911-2010), the first Frenchman to receive the Nobel Prize in Economics, devoted a major part of his work to the analysis of interest rates, credit and money. In his major work Économie et intérêt (1947), he distinguished the short-term interest rate, dependent on monetary policy, from the long-term equilibrium rate that must equalize saving and investment.
Throughout his life, Allais denounced the dangers of a financial economy disconnected from the real economy: monetary instability, speculation, excessive money creation through credit, and the preference for immediate financial profit at the expense of productive investment. He advocated for stable money and for anchoring the economy in the real production of goods and services.
This critique meets, at the level of principles, the logic of the Quranic prohibition of riba: refusing that money produces money without real creation of value, requiring that profit be backed by a tangible exchange or investment, and preserving stability and justice in economic relations.
Contemporary Islamic finance, which has experienced worldwide growth since the 1970s, was built precisely on this requirement: replacing interest-bearing loans with risk-sharing mechanisms and financing backed by real assets (musharaka, mudaraba, ijara).
Note of caution: Maurice Allais never adhered to Islamic finance nor based his critique on the Quran. His approach is purely scientific and secular. The convergence here is a convergence of principles — the critique of interest, the anchoring in the real economy, the pursuit of stability — not an adherence by Allais to a religious vision. This convergence must be presented as an illustration that leading secular economists, through reason alone, reach conclusions close to principles set out by the Quran fourteen centuries ago, without claiming that Allais "confirms" the Quran.