The Maqasid al-Shariah are basically the main goals or objectives that Islamic law tries to achieve to ensure everyone’s well-being.

There are five key things it focuses on protecting:

1. Faith – Making sure people can freely practise their religion.

2. Life – Keeping people safe and preserving human life.

3. Intellect- Protecting our ability to think and make decisions.

4. Lineage – Looking after family ties and honour.

5. Wealth – Safeguarding our property and money.

Every rule in Islam is designed to protect one or more of these five things.

For example the prohibition of consuming alcohol in Islam protects a humans mind, life, religion, and wealth. Alcohol impairs judgment, endangers health, and can lead to harmful idiotiotic behaviour, threatening both individual and societal well-being. By safeguarding the intellect and its ability to think clearly a lot of physical and psychological pain is avoided.

Another example is the prohibition of fornication. It serves to safeguard lineage and family, ensuring the stability and integrity of family structures by preventing illegitimate births and the complications they bring. It also protects honour by preserving the dignity and reputation of individuals and families. Additionally, it supports the protection of society by reducing social problems like broken families, diseases, and conflicts, thereby contributing to overall societal stability and moral order.

When it comes to the prohibition of interest (riba), it directly relates to protecting wealth. Interest is prohibited because it can lead to exploitation, where the rich (bankers and corporations) become richer at the expense of the rest of society, which is exactly what is happening with the current global central banks’ fiat monetary system.

The increasing cost of living every year, overpriced housing, the rising prices of rent and fuel are all fundamentally linked back to interest-based credit expansion by banks. This  interest / riba expansion devalues the purchasing power of fiat money and therefore forces humanity to work longer and harder to keep up with inflation. It creates bubbles in the property market making the ability to own a home outright a distant dream for most. This in turn creates an unfair system where ordinary people are tempted to get into debt (mortgages), which is a further trap & goes against the principle of justice in Islam.

By prohibiting interest, Islam encourages truly fair free markets and business investments where risk and reward are equally shared. In this way, wealth is circulated fairly across society, and the economy avoids the financial crises that occur in interest-based systems (boom-bust cycles).

Instead of making money from interest, Islam promotes risk-sharing business investment agreements. It also encourages helping one another through interest-free loans, ensuring that wealth is used in a way that benefits society as a whole. This strengthens local communities and by extension nations.

So, in a nutshell, the ban on interest is there to protect people’s wealth and create a fairer economic system, which is a big part of what Islamic law aims to achieve.