Description
Context and Significance
Markets across the GCC, particularly in Bahrain, reveal a persistent pattern of price collusive inflation via informal parallelism — a phenomenon in which independent vendors imitate one another’s pricing to maintain elevated benchmarks. This pattern blurs the distinction between competition and coordination, turning basic food items into instruments of symbolic signaling and unregulated wealth transfer.
It is also essential to clarify that certain low-cost offerings — such as sandwiches sold for as little as 0.350 BHD — fall outside the scope of this inquiry. While they may still represent 200–300 percent mark-ups, they originate from humble street-food contexts and do not constitute the systemic market failure under analysis.
More recently, field evidence revealed cross-channel price differentiation: identical dishes were priced differently across dine-in, takeaway, and delivery-app menus, even after excluding delivery fees. Such variations expose a deeper distortion, where platforms and restaurants exploit consumer opacity to extract unjustified mark-ups. This side finding underscores the absence of regulatory oversight ensuring uniform consumer pricing, further validating the symbolic-interactionist explanation that digital ecosystems amplify imitation rather than competition.
Within the Islamic economic worldview, such manipulation directly contradicts Qurʾanic commands for fairness and transparency in trade. The verses (An-Nisāʾ 4:29; Ash-Shuʿarāʾ 26:183) prohibit consuming wealth unjustly or depriving others of their due, while Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī condemns monopolistic and speculative practices such as hoarding (iḥtikār) and artificial price elevation (najsh). Viewing these market behaviours through this Sharia lens exposes them not merely as economic irregularities but as moral transgressions undermining adl (justice) and ihsān (good conduct).
Thus, the Seeing Beyond framework is positioned as both an interpretive and ethical lens — one that unveils hidden behavioural patterns and bridges modern competition analysis with enduring Islamic commercial ethics.
