The Concept of Intellectual Property As Al Mal: An Islamic Perpective Approach

Abstract

The idea of legally acknowledging and protecting the intellectual property is prevalently known in
any legal system in the world, but not many people know how this idea is dealt in Islam. Islam as
the religion of wholeness (syumul), deals with almost all aspects of life and aims at protecting five
main objectives of syariah3 (maqasid al syariah) namely religion (al din), life (al nafs), intellect
(al aqal), lineage (al nasl) as well as property (al mal). As the time goes by, people started to
realize that human intelligence and creativity shall not be the object of manipulation, thus
necessitated them to come up with some sort of protection for their invention by legally
acknowledging it as ‘intellectual property’. This paper will try to discuss the position of intellectual
property in the Islamic jurisprudence by determining its ‘maaliyyah’ (capable of being considered
as property).