The concept of public property, and its opposing category of private property, is well known today, due primarily to the centrality of the latter to liberal and capitalist thought and the former to socialist thought. However, the notion that certain things are owned by individuals, giving them exclusive disposal rights thereof, whilst others are for the common disposal of people collectively long precedes modernity. Modern thinkers were not the first to come up with these ideas. They but adopted them within or for certain broader ideological paradigms. John Locke, for instance, makes private property central to his (liberal) political theory, where for Karl Marx the abolition of private ownership of the means of production is central to ending capitalist exploitation. Islam has its own notions of private and public property far removed from the associated ideological frameworks of modernity. Private property is neither the grounds for all individual rights on the basis of which hu
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