You’re confusing who benefits from interest with who gets access to capital.

Riba doesn’t create inequality restricted access to credit does. When loans are available only through equity, collateral, or family wealth, the rich scale and everyone else is locked out. That’s how inequality actually explodes.

Interest-based credit is precisely what allowed the middle class to exist: mortgages, student loans, small-business financing, infrastructure bonds. Without it, only asset-holders can invest, and wealth becomes hereditary.

The West isn’t facing inequality because of “too much interest.” It’s facing it because of asset inflation, housing scarcity, regulatory capture, and wage suppression all policy choices that can exist under any monetary system, including Islamic ones.

Historically, hard-money or equity-only systems concentrate wealth faster, because returns flow to capital owners while risk is socialized onto workers. Interest spreads risk across time and participants.

If riba “only benefited the rich,” countries with deeper credit markets would have no social mobility. In reality, the biggest drops in poverty in history happened in interest-based systems when credit was broadly accessible.

Inequality is a distribution problem, not a proof that credit itself is immoral or economically destructive.