I made an error in my long post on Wah'habism. The owner of Achnacarry Castle at which the Red Line Agreement of 1928 dividing up the world for the oil majors was owned by the Chairman of Royal Dutch Shell, but he was Sir Henri Deterding, not Walter Teagle. Teagle was in attendance as the Chairman of New Jersey Standard (future Exxon).
Two further notes:
A major question regarding Islamic economics is the extent to which it favors socialism or capitalism. The French Marxist economist, Maxime Rodinson, argued in _Islam and Capitalism_, 1973, New York: Pantheon (originally in French) that it is inherently pro-capitalist given the rules in the Qur'an about property inheritance and the open approval of profit, despite the forbidding of interest. Others have seen a socialist potential in certain passages declaring that only Allah is the owner of things, although as in Iran this has ended up being interpreted as justifying clerical ownership of the means of production. An advocate of Islamic socialism is Mohammed Abdul Mannon, _Islamic Economics: Theory and Practice_, 1970, Lahore: Muhammed Ashraf (a disproportionate number of Islamic economists have been of Pakistani origin, beginning with Sayyid Abdul A'la Mawdudi, _The Economic Problem of Man and Its Islamic Solution_, 1947, Lahore: Islamic Publications, translated to English from Urdu, 1975). These pro-socialist views were predominant in the early stages of the Iranian revolution prior to the removal of Abolhassan Bani-Sadr who was associated with the pro-socialist Ayatollah Taliqani. However in 1982 the Khomeini-dominated Council of Guardians passed rulings that definitely tilted Iran towards a more capitalist position.
In the Kingdom of Sa'udi Arabia (KSA) the pro-capitalist interpretation has always held, despite government ownership of the oil, of Petromin, and major government involvement in directing petrodollars to industrial development through SABIC. The views of the ultra-strict Hanbali Sa'udis have also manifested themselves in their extreme opposition to "godless communism," to the point that KSA never has had diplomatic relations with any communist state, unless they have recently switched to recognizing the PRC rather than the ROC when I wasn't paying attention. Barkley Rosser James Madison University
-- Rosser Jr, John Barkley rosserjb at jmu.edu