Ḥubb al-Māl
Definition
Hubb al-mal — love of wealth — is the root disease that produces miserliness as its primary symptom. Al-Ghazali distinguishes between the permissible regard for wealth as a tool and the diseased love of wealth as an end: the person who loves money for what it can do (provide for family, enable worship, serve the community) is relating to it correctly; the person who loves money for itself — who feels genuine satisfaction at its accumulation and genuine pain at its expenditure — has assigned to it an emotional significance that only belongs to Allah. This assignment of ultimate value to a created thing is a subtle form of shirk.
As understood in the classical tradition of Imam al-Ghazali and the scholars of his school.
Appears in
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