Comparison between Gambling and Futures Contracts in English and Islamic Law

A futures contract is an agreement to buy or sell a specific amount of an asset at a particular price on a stipulated future date. A futures contract is a standardized exchange-traded agreement. One of the most important challenges about the validity of futures contracts is that if such contracts are kind of gambling. It seems that by using legal doctrines, judicial procedure and legislation development, English Law passed the mentioned challenge. In this paper, first, we investigate the approach under which English Law encounters this issue and the elements by which a transaction is a kind of gambling in Islamic Law. Then, regarding distinct differences between futures and gambling contracts, we try to eliminate the challenge and justify such transactions. We found that: first, gambling is similar to futures contracts from the viewpoint of encountering the risk; while, gambling is the creation of risk in order to risk; taking risk in futures market is encountering the risks that necessarily exist in free market economy. Second, in gambling, the base of gaining profit is probability, chance and random, and what a gambler gains is the speculative gain; yet, the base of gaining profit in futures contracts is market analysis. Third, gambling contract's concept includes win-lose, which is one of the elements of gambling contracts in Islamic Law; while, another profit is hidden in futures contracts whose concept differs from win-lose. This concept is Hedging or Speculation. In fact, futures markets are risk transfer systems. Forth, the framework of activity in gambling is playing a game. However, a futures market is a place for combining analyses in order to develop an economic financial activity rather than a place for gaming. Finally, we can justify futures contracts in Islamic Law by passing the challenge of being considered as a gambling.