Inflation: A Silent Weapon Slaughtering Egypt and Its People
(Translated)
Al-Rayah Newspaper - Issue 567 - 01/10/2025 CE
By Ustadh Said Fadil*

Inflation in Egypt today is no longer merely a number announced in bulletins from the Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics, or statements from the Central Bank. When the government announces that the official inflation rate has fallen to around 12% or targets 10% in the coming years, ordinary people wonder: Does this reflect our reality? Does it mirror the daily surge we face in the prices of food, transport, energy, and medicine? The gap between the official figures and the daily life experience reveals the true nature of inflation: not as a neutral economic phenomenon, but as a hidden tax imposed upon the Ummah without law or legislation. Inflation a tool by which pockets are looted and savings depleted.

Inflation means a decline in the purchasing power of money. What an individual could buy for one Egyptian pound yesterday requires two Egyptian pounds, or more, today. This price increase does not necessarily signify a rise in the real value of goods. Instead, it reflects a decrease in the value of the money itself. This devaluation constitutes an indirect theft of the efforts of workers, farmers, and employees, as their fixed wages in the local currency lose value over time. Western economists themselves have termed inflation the “hidden tax.” The British economist John Maynard Keynes stated, “Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the capitalist system was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens... Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.” (“The Economic Consequences of the Peace” (1919) ch. 6). This is a frank admission that inflation is not merely an economic symptom, but an instrument for plundering wealth.

The plight Egyptians witness today, soaring prices of bread, rice, oil, and transport fares, is living proof that inflation is not just a number in official charts. Instead, it is crisis in livelihood, bearing down heavily on poor families and the middle class, whose savings have been eroded, plunging them into abject poverty.

In August 2025, Egypt announced that urban inflation reached about 12%, while analysts’ estimates placed it closer to 14% or higher. For essential goods like food and energy, actual inflation reaches 20% or even 30%, according to estimates by independent economists. The gap between the official figure and the truth reveals that the state is concealing the reality of the crisis, and its data does not reveal the people’s suffering. The employee who receives a fixed monthly salary, or the farmer who sells his crop at a predetermined price, finds himself unable to keep pace with the escalating prices.

Here, inflation becomes a means for the state, alongside international institutions, to rob people of their money under the guise of monetary policy and economic reforms.

What is happening today is a manifest injustice. Divine Shariah Law has made the protection of wealth one of the five essential objectives of Shariah that must be preserved. Allah (swt) said,

[وَلَا تَأْكُلُوا أَمْوَالَكُم بَيْنَكُم بِالْبَاطِلِ] “And do not consume one another's wealth unjustly.” [TMQ Surah Al-Baqarah: 188]. The Messenger of Allah (saw) said,

«كُلُّ الْمُسْلِمِ عَلَى الْمُسْلِمِ حَرَامٌ، دَمُهُ وَمَالُهُ وَعِرْضُهُ» “Everything of a Muslim is inviolable to another Muslim: his blood, his wealth, and his honor.” Inflation is but a form of consuming people’s wealth unjustly, for the state prints money or devalues it without real backing, causing people’s wealth to erode and their sweat and effort to be in vain.

Money, in its essence, is not a commodity to be bought and sold for itself. Instead, it is a measure of value and a medium of exchange. When this function is lost due to the printing of paper money without backing, the economic system becomes corrupt, and people’s wealth is consumed unjustly. Ibn Taymiyyah said, النقد لا يقصد لنفسه بل هو وسيلة إلى معرفة مقادير الأموال وقيمتها “Currency is not intended for itself. Instead, currency is a means to ascertain the measures and values of wealth.” This illustrates that stripping currency of its value is a theft of the very mechanism that regulates transactions.

Islam resolved the crisis of money from the outset by establishing gold and silver as the basis of currency. The Dinar and the Dirham were the Shariah currency of the Islamic state for many centuries, preserving price stability even during long periods of prosperity and global trade. Imam Al-Shafi’i said, ولا يجوز أن تكون الدراهم والدنانير إلا ما كان من ذهب وفضة “Dirhams and Dinars can only be what is made of gold and silver.” The Shariah mandates that currency must be real wealth with intrinsic value, not papers printed by governments or loaned by international central banks according to their whims. Only thus can the root of inflation be severed and the Ummah’s wealth protected from theft.

The Shariah solution is not complete without exposing the destructive role of international institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, which impose conditional, interest (riba) loans on Egypt and others, drowning them in debt and forcing them into austerity policies that impoverish the poor further. The American economist John Perkins confessed in his book, “Confessions of an Economic Hit Man,” that he was an “economic hitman” working to drown developing nations in loans to keep them subservient to America and multinational corporations. This is a frank admission that these institutions are international gangs that plunder the wealth of nations.

Inflation does not stem solely from domestic policies. It is a colonialist tool imposed by pegging local currencies to the US dollar, which itself lost its gold backing since the 1970s. The dollar is printed without reserve, while developing countries are forced to peg their currencies to it, and repay their debts in it, thus bearing the burden of inflation exported by the American capitalist system to the entire world.

Islam has provided a radical cure for the crisis of inflation:

Firstly: By abolishing unbacked paper, fiat money and adopting gold and silver, or a representative currency note for them, as the state’s currency.

Secondly: By prohibiting interest (riba) absolutely, thus dismantling the system of riba debts that drowns countries in deficit and inflation.

Thirdly: By establishing the Khilafah Rashidah (Rightly-Guided Caliphate) that implements the rulings of Shariah in the economy and other matters, and severs the country’s subservience to international institutions and colonial states.

Fourthly: By redistributing wealth through Shariah means, such as Zakat, Fai’, and Anfal, and regulating the three types of ownership, public, private, and state property, to prevent monopoly and plunder.

The inflation ravaging Egypt today is not an inevitable decree nor an unassailable economic destiny. Instead, it is the product of a corrupt monetary system based on unbacked fiat paper money and the riba debts imposed by international institutions. It is, in truth, a hidden tax and a systematic theft of people's sweat, effort, and savings.

There is no solution to this crisis except by returning to Islam, to the currency of gold and silver, and to cutting off subservience to Western colonialist institutions. Only then will the Ummah be freed from the shackles of inflation and the theft of its lifetimes and wealth. The Messenger of Allah (saw) said,

«مَنْ غَشَّنَا فَلَيْسَ مِنَّا» “He who deceives us is not one of us,” and inflation is a grand deception practiced by regimes and colonial states alike.

Let the Ummah’s voice ring out: We shall be robbed no more, and we will accept nothing but the Shariah Law of Allah (swt) as our rule and standard.

* Member of the Media Office of Hizb ut Tahrir in Wilayah Egypt