Introduction Materialist Approaches to I

8/15/2019 Introduction Materialist Approaches to I

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© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2011 DOI: 10.1163/156852011X586796

Journal of the Economic andSocial History of the Orient 54 (2011) 117-131 brill.nl/jesh

Introduction:‘Materialist’ Approaches to Islamic History

Ulrika Mårtensson *

Both patrimonialism and neo-tribalism lie behind what most of all differentiatedIslamic from European political thought: the absence of the concept of public office,of the state as separate from individual rulers, and of a distinction between private andpublic. Te notion of the state, being abstract, was alien to [tribal] narrative thinking.Te idea of an explicitly secular political authority could not take hold because politi-cal language had been determined by religiousʿilm.

Anthony Black,Te History of Islamic Political Tought 1

Anthony Black’s claim that behind all the individual things that separateIslamic and European political thought and history lays Islamic jurisprudenceand theology (‘religious iʿlm’) is a paradigmatic example of approachesthat this special issue seeks to challenge. Te origin of the special issue

was the panel Challenging Culturalism: ‘Materialist’ Approaches to IslamicHistory , which was organised by Ulrika Mårtensson (Religious studiesand Islam) and Steve amari (Islamic and World history) for the 2008annual convention of the Middle East Studies Association. Te panel con-cept was simple. We claimed that the discourse of ‘Islamic difference fromthe West’, an extreme version of which is the ‘clash-of-civilization-theory’propounded by Bernard Lewis2 and Samuel Huntington3 as well as by

*) Ulrika Mårtensson, Department of Archaeology and Religious Studies, Te NorwegianUniversity of Science and echnology, [email protected]. I am indebted to theother contributors, and especially Michele Campopiano, for constructive comments onthis Introduction.1) Black, 2001: 350.2) Lewis, 1990.3) Huntington, 1993.


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118 U. Mårtensson / JESHO 54 (2011) 117-131

radical Islamists,4 can also be found, in a milder form, in studies of Islamichistory and societies which emphasise the systemic ‘difference’ betweenIslam and Western civilisations. Tis not-clashing-but-different-theory is adiscourse about Islamic history which attributes greater signicance to thereligion Islam for historical developments than to such universal and ‘mate-rial’ historical factors as ‘modes of production’, trade, industry, law, socialconict, and regional identities and loyalties.5 If these factors are consid-ered ‘material’—as opposed to ‘religious’ and ‘cultural’—they would bringout the decisive elements involved in historical developments, which inturn would bring to light the similarities between ‘Islamic’ and ‘Western’thought about social institutions, political economy, and economy proper.

Such was the panel’s concept. However, as the discussant Elton Danielpointed out, ‘proper’ historians always consider material factors. Te prob-lem as perceived by the panel organisers thus pertains not to the disciplineof history as applied to Islamic societies, but more narrowly to ‘Islamicstudies’ or other applied sciences (such as political science) which from theoutset have assigned to Islam a causal role for the development of politicsand societies. As Maya Shatzmiller shows in her contribution to this issue,there is a distinct contemporary trend in research on economic and social

history that looks at the role of social institutions for economic change. Inthe case of ‘Islamic’ history, such studies have tended to apply broad theo-retical models instead of conducting empirical research. Te result hasoften been that Islam is assigned a causal role.

I as editor of this special issue come from Religious studies, a discipline which inevitably puts the religion of Islam at central stage. It thereforebecame a challenge to produce a special issue which would combine eco-nomic history, complex assessments of the religion Islam’s role in historicalinstitutional developments, and historiography in the sense of dening

economic analysis in the medieval source material itself.Te time frame of the four papers in this special issue is ca. 750 to ca.1100, and the regional focus is Egypt and the Mesopotamian parts of the

4) For early explorations of affinities between Islamism and ‘culturalist’ approaches to Islamand the West, see Al-Azmeh, 1993/1996.5) For surveys of this historical approach, see Aziz al-Azmeh’s collection of reprinted essays,Te imes of History: Universal opics in Islamic Historiography (2007). For al-Azmeh, themost important recent exponents of this approach are Patricia Crone, Medieval IslamicPolitical Tought (2004; a US edition of which is entitled God’s Rule: Government andIslam), and Anthony Black,Te History of Islamic Political Tought from the Prophet to thePresent(2001).


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Abbasid caliphate. During this period economic growth coincided withthe rise and decline of the Abbasid dynastic state, ultimately signied bythe ascent of the Buyid and Seljuk dynasties tosult ̣a (‘rule’) in Baghdad.Tis is also the period when Islamic jurisprudence and theology (ʿilm) weresystematized into the classical schools and the legal system matured intothe institutional division between on the one hand siyāsa(‘governmentadministration’) andshurt ̣a (‘the police’), and on the othersharī ʿa (literally,‘the straight path [of Islam]’).6

Siyāsarefers to legal procedures, judgments and punishments carriedout by ‘agencies and tribunals other than those of aqād ̣ī , i.e. siyāsa justice

was institutionally independent ofsharī ʿa but theoretically bound by itslegal principles.7 Since siyāsa was the rulers’ sphere, it can be seen as a pre-cursor to the later medievalqānūn laws which were issued by the rulers,not by the sharī ʿa jurists. Shurt ̣a was a function ofsiyāsa and refers to theupholding in the public space of law and order by apprehending offenders,bringing them to justice, judging and punishing them:8

[Te] siyāsaform of justice and penal procedure was general to Muslim politiesthroughout their history. Princes and governors held court and decreed punishmentsin major cases, especially ones with political signicance—of rebellion, subversion andother challenges to authority. But for the common everyday infractions of robbery,murder, injury, affray, drink, fornication and other moral infractions, it was theshurt ̣a

which was responsible for maintaining order and punishing the crimes.9

According to Sami Zubaida, “at many points in the history of Muslimpolities criminal and penal matters were dealt with predominantly inaccordance withsiyāsa justice, by administrative authorities, typically theshurt ̣a ”.10

While siyāsaand shurt ̣a were institutionally distinct fromsharī ʿa —thelaw administered by the ‘religious’ scholars (al-ʿ ulamā ʾ and al-fuqahā ʾ) and

judges (qud ̣āt , sing. qād ̣ī )—the two legal systems nevertheless dealt with a

6) Te following descriptions of the two legal systems is based on Sami Zubaida’s recentstudy, Law and Power in the Islamic World (2003), which in its turn relies on Emile yan,Histoire de l’organisation judiciaire en pays d’Islam (1960). See also Dominique Sourdel,‘Gouvernement et administration dans l’Orient Islamique jusqu’au milieu di XIe siècle’,1988: 22-56. 7) Zubaida, 2003: 56. 8) Ibid.: 56-7. 9) Ibid.: 56.10) Zubaida, 2003: 58.


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set of commonly dened crimes and offences. However, whilesiyāsaandshurt ̣a could apprehend and bring offenders to justice, thesharī ʿa was lim-ited to cases brought in by litigants. Compared withsharī ʿa and its strictrequirements of proof and testimony-based evidence, the criminal justiceof siyāsaand shurt ̣a was more vulnerable to arbitrariness and corruption.11

Te professional class of secretaries or ‘scribes’ (kātib, kuttāb) played animportant role concerningsiyāsa , and it was from their top ranks the viziers(or ‘prime ministers’) were drawn. As Yassine Essid points out, the secretar-ies constituted a link between the Byzantine and Sassanid administrativetraditions and the Islamic states, transmitting both theoretical and practi-cal knowledge. Te economy of the Abbasid caliphate was administeredthrough three main functions: ‘Te function of direction—absolute—embodied in the ruler; the highly precarious function of delegation devolv-ing upon the wazīr ; and, lastly, the function of execution, carried out withskill and self-sacrice by the secretary’.12 Among the secretaries’ duties wereland surveying, land registry, real estate tax collection, and calculation ofrevenues and expenditures, writing and correspondence.13

Siyāsa and sharī ʿa came together at the apogee of state justice, signiedby the court of appeal, ormaz ̣ālim (‘grievances’). Te maz ̣ālim court was

instituted in the early Abbasid caliphate and was initially presided over bythe caliph himself as supreme dispenser of justice. Te cases brought beforethe court could concern miscarriages of justice from bothsiyāsa and sharī ʿacourts, in the vast majority of cases against members of the lower classes.

As the maz ̣ālim court became increasingly bureaucratised the caliph wasoften substituted by the vizier or the chief judge (qād ̣ī ) who, althoughalways asharī ʿa scholar, was appointed by the caliph.14

As we have seen,siyāsaand sharī ʿa had in common criminal law andpublic offences. Another important issue over which they coincided was

the land tax (kharāj ), the main source of revenue for the state and animportant factor in the power politics between the imperial governmentand the provincial governors. As the contributions to this special issue aimto show, the fuqahā ʾ provided the legal foundations for various administra-tive policies on land tax. Signicantly, the fuqahā ʾ framed their approachesto land tax in terms of divine justice. However, in spite of this common

11) Ibid.: 57-8.12) Essid, 1995: 15.13) Ibid.: 15.14) Zubaida, 2003: 51-6.


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religious frame of reference, they reasoned very differently about the landtax itself and the different available systems. Our contributions show thattheir reasoning depended rst and foremost on their personal political andeconomic analysis, rather than on any presumed evident implication of thereligion Islam andsharī ʿa . Since these scholars’ analysis differed so signi-cantly, it is hard to see how they can be made to t into one model of howIslamic legal thought affected the political economy, even though theirarguments were all framed in religious terms. It is suggested here that thereligious framework reected their institutional affiliation,sharī ʿa , whichself-consciously identied itself with the divine principles set out in thesacred scriptures (Qurʾān and h ̣adīth), as distinct from the state adminis-tration (siyāsa ), rather than a specic way of thinking about the politicaleconomy. By analogy, the correspondence between form (religious frame-

work) and substance (analysis) exists only on the most general level, as aconcern with justice, legal and social; i.e. where the secretaries saw justiceas primarily related to the institution of kingship, the fuqahā ʾ saw it as primarilyrelated to God, whose guidance was a prerequisite for justice tobe reected in the human sovereign’s rule. Apart from this, however, thereligious framework spans several competing and contradicting analysis.

As indicated above, the economy as a whole did well under the legalinstitutions of siyāsaand sharī ʿa , while the fortunes of the ruling dynastiesfollowed a pattern of ascent and decline recognizable from other parts ofthe world as well. In line with this special issue’s ambition to show whatunites ‘Islamic’ and ‘Western’ thought, the contributors have explored theobjectives and agendas that might have motivated the medieval historians

whose works we use as sources of information, and that are expressed as thehistorians’ efforts to analyse the causes of decline of state power. While thisapproach concerns historiography rather than history proper, it has conse-

quences for historical research as it raises our awareness of the fact that themedieval Islamic historians’ information isanalytical , not neutral and, assuch, more than ‘personal’. In this respect our contributions agree with

Yassine Essid’s important work A Critique of the Origins of Islamic EconomicTought (1995), in which the author demonstrates that Islamic economicthought was a continuation and development of Hellenistic (Greek andPersian) economic thought, and that the secretaries and fuqahā ʾ who wroteabout macro- and micro-economics from the early Abbasid caliphateonwards did so with a clear analytical sense. By doing so, Essid also falsiesthe dominant Western scholarly perception that Islamic economic thoughtbegan with Ibn Khaldūn (d. 1406).


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Essid’s approach is highly similar to that expressed in S.M. Ghazanfar’srecently published volume of reprinted articles, Medieval Islamic EconomicTought: Filling the ‘Great Gap’ in European Economics (2003). Ghazanfar’sthesis addresses the prominent economic historian Joseph Schumpeter’s(d. 1950) claim, put forth in his posthumously published History of Eco-nomic Analysis(1954), that after the classical Greeks and the elaboration oftheir thought in late antiquity, no constructive analytical economic thought

was done until Tomas Aquinas (d. 1274) and the medieval scholastics—hence ‘the great gap’ theory. According to Ghazanfar there was no gap.Instead, there was an unbroken chain of analytical economic thought from

Aristotle through the early medieval Islamic scholars and political thinkersto European scholasticism and, eventually, the Renaissance; indeed, To-mas and other early scholastics explicitly referred to the works of Ibn Sīnā(d. 1037), al-Ghazzālī (d. 1111) and Ibn Rushd (d. 1198). 15 Aristotle isthus the common link that connects Greek, Islamic and Latin Europeaneconomic thought and provides their common denominator: private prop-erty rights.

Ghazanfar’s approach is controversial not only because he comparesIslamic and Western, and pre-modern and modern economic thought, but

also because he breaks up the rmly established distinction between ‘reli-gious’ and ‘secular’ thought. Exploring the jurist-theologian al-Ghazzālī’seconomic thought through the terms of modern economics, Ghazanfarargues that such issues as demand and supply, prices, prots, market behav-iour, production, barter, money, currency devaluation, and public nances,can all be identied in his writings and amount to a pre-modern economictheory.16 Naturally, Ghazanfar has critics. Paul Oslington, for example,argues that it is impossible to compare medieval Islamic thought withmodern economics because Islamic thought isreligious and holisticand

therefore does not make the modern Western distinction between com-partments such as ‘religion’ and ‘economics’. Oslington is representative ofthe ‘Islam-centric’ approach which, as Al-Azmeh has pointed out (1993),holds modern Islamism—here represented by Sayyid Qut ̣b, Mawdūdī,Khurshid Ah ̣mad, and Sharīʿ atī—to be the ‘true’ representation of Islam asopposed to secular, modernist understandings. Te following quotationfrom Oslington illustrates this:

15) Ghazanfar, 2003: 1-22; Ghazanfar and Islahi, 2003: 23-44; 49.16) Ibid.: 23-44.


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Te main point here is not just that Ghazanfar and Islahi have misinterpretedal-Ghazzālī, but that their interpretative lens prevents them from coming to terms

with the nature of al-Ghazzālīs writings. A different approach is needed to understandal-Ghazzālīs economics—if indeed he conceived of economics in a meaningful waygiven the modern conception of economics. Before considering what this differentapproach might be, it is worth mentioning another group of Islamic thinkers from thetwentieth century—the Egyptian Sayyid Qut ̣b, the Pakistanis Abu al-A lʿā Mawdūdīand Khurshid Ahmad, and the Iranian Ali Shariatī, who have received little attentionso far from Western economists. Tese writers are associated with the Islamic revivalmovement that has struggled with Islamic modernism throughout this century. Whilethey have received some attention from historians and students of religion, the eco-nomic aspects of their writings have not had such attention, despite their work repre-senting one of the strongest living economic traditions outside the West. It has perhapsmade so little impact of Western economic journals because the interpretative approachexemplied in the Ghazanfar and Islahi article does not deal with a nonsecularapproach to economics. [. . .] Te most fruitful alternative approach in my view wouldbe for economists, whether they be Muslim or non-Muslim, to use a broader interpre-tative framework when analysing Islamic religious texts. [. . .] Tis broader framework

would see the modern secular position as one among many and would be open tonegative evaluations. [. . .] [It] might tell us more about another way of doing econom-ics and yield some interesting insights into the nature of modern secular economicsitself.

Ghazanfar and Islahi responded to Oslington’s critique by pointing outthat rather than overlooking the religious-theological framework thatencompasses al-Ghazzālīs thought, their point is that this frameworkincludes the same ‘secular’ economic concepts that are found in moderneconomics, as was indeed also the case with European scholastics like

Aquinas.17 Tis implies that, even though the frameworks are different,there are similarities in problem-areas and concerns between medievalIslamic and modern ‘Western’ economics, as micro- and macro-economics

present specic problems which transcend temporal and cultural boundaries.If one agrees with Ghazanfar’s claim, that even though medieval Islamicthought was carried out within a theological and even teleological frame-

work, it was a form of pre-modern economic thought, then we should notconsider everything produced within an Islamic religious or theologicalframework as intrinsically non-secular and non-Western. While the major-ity of the medieval Muslim economic thinkers did indeed postulate thatcausality ultimately was subject to divine omnipotence, and while theirconcepts of social and redistributive justice were sanctioned by reference to

17) Ghazanfar and Islahi, 2003: 49-52, esp. 52.


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divine justice, it is equally evident they analysed specic, problem-relatedcauses and effects in terms of objective, empirical mechanisms. Te reli-gious or theological frameworks are thus of general formal but not particu-lar substantial and analytic signicance for medieval Islamic economicthought.

Ghazanfar’s claim that there was economic theory in the works of medi-eval Muslim jurists and theologians has concrete methodological implica-tions for how we should approach Islamic historical sources. In studies ofIslamic history and historiography, there is an interesting divergenceregarding whether the medieval sources are analytical. Te only Muslimhistorical writer accredited with anexplicitly dened analytical model isIbn Khaldūn in the Muqaddima , the methodological part of his history ofstates and dynasties, in which he developed his famous model of powerrelations between states and tribes. Ibn Khaldūn’s predecessors, i.e. theearlier medieval Muslim historians, are not accredited withanalysisin thesense of explaining historical developments through economic theory orthrough a theory of society and political power, as Ibn Khaldūn did in the Muqaddima .18

However, even though there is broad consensus that only Ibn Khaldūn

can be accredited with developing an abstract analytical model, scholars’perceptions of the relationship between the substance of Ibn Khaldūn’smodel and the thought of previous thinkers and historians differ signi-cantly. Regarding Ibn Khaldūn’s economic thought, Ghazanfar has pointedout that while Joseph Spengler saw him as part of an established Arabicliterary body of economic thought, David Boulakia concluded that he was‘without predecessors and without successors’.19 Similarly but from theperspective of history, Franz Rosenthal and Chase Robinson have describedIbn Khaldūn’s analytical model as an early version of modern sociological

theory with no relation to earlier medieval Muslim histories.20

Aziz

18) Rosenthal, 1968: 115-8; Khalidi, 1994: 222-31; Robinson, 2003: 102. Even al-Azmehin his critical essays does not attribute economic or social theory to medieval Muslim his-torians, only a legalistic worldview reecting the concerns and methodology of jurists;

Al-Azmeh 2007: esp. 67-100.19) Ghazanfar, 2003, pp. 128-9, ref. to Spengler, 1964: 304, and Boulakia, 1971: 1118.Ghazanfar actually veries Spengler’s claim through the several studies of pre-Ibn Khalduneconomic thinkers included in his edited volume.20) Rosenthal, 1968: 115-8; Robinson, 2003: 102. Robinson in particular has described theentire body of Islamic historical writing up to Ibn Khaldun as dened by the ‘traditionist’mentality, which as a matter of principle denies any individual creativity on the part of


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al-Azmeh and arif Khalidi emphasise instead that Ibn Khaldūn’s analyti-cal model was not the appearance out of nowhere of a modern sociologicaltheory, but that he drew in all essentials on the medieval historical disci-pline and its focus on the state and the preconditions for political power.21 In particular, Khalidi has pointed out that Ibn Khaldūn relied on al- ̣abarī’s(d. 923 A.D.) History of the Messengers and the Kings for his account of theearly caliphate; in Khalidi’s words, the main difference between the twohistorians was:

Where ̣abarī accumulatesakhbār , layer upon layer of transmission which the readeris left to judge for himself with only minimal hints from the author, Ibn Khaldūnprojects the [historical] events [. . .] onto a far larger tableau where the nature andappeal of power and religion to differently ordained segments of a given society mustbe taken into account in any attempt to understand the signicance of events.22

However, even though Khalidi points out that there is a relationshipbetween al- ̣abarī’s history and Ibn Khaldun’s analytical model in terms ofhistorical information and focus on political power, he still does notaccredit al- ̣abarī with historical analysis along the lines of Ibn Khaldūn.Here more will be made of the relationship between the two historians. Itis suggested that since the facts which form the basis of Ibn Khaldūn’sanalysis—‘how power is acquired, how it is maintained and how it is lost’,including the economic preconditions of each state concerned23—are con-tained in al- ̣abarī’s history, al- ̣abarī’s work reects ‘political economy’ tothe same degree as Ibn Khaldūn’s Muqaddima does. Te most signicantdifference between the two works is thus formal , not substantial: the formerprovides analysis framed in narrative form while the latter is discursive;this difference in form is also expressed in Ibn Khaldūn’s ownoeuvre , asonly the Muqaddimais discursive while his history proper is narrative, likeall the other earlier medieval histories.24

historians who are seen as—and saw themselves as—transmitters of historical informationrather than creative writers; ibid.: 83-102. From Robinson’s perspective, Ibn Khaldun’sindependent and analytical approach appears as ‘individualistic’ in a manner that is excep-tional compared to his predecessors.21) Al-Azmeh, 2003: 9-42; Khalidi, 1994.22) Ibid.: 227.23) Ibid.: 225.24) Concerning the formal difference between Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddima and his history,see al-Azmeh, 2003: 9-11, esp. 10.


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Tis is not to reduce the novelty of Ibn Khaldūn’s analytical model, onlyto suggest that it should be seen as part of an evolving science. Boulakia’s,Rosenthal’s and Robinson’s approaches imply that Ibn Khaldūn’s Muqad-dima came out of nowhere as far as its analysis is concerned. Al-Azmeh’s,Khalidi’s, and Ghazanfar’s approaches, on the other hand, imply that the Muqaddima was the fruit of a long development of ‘political economy’ which treated recurrent problems related to the decline of state power.From this viewpoint, al- ̣abarī’s history and the other universal histories ofthe ninth and tenth centuries also constituted a landmark in the develop-ment of Islamic history, as they subsumed the available historical informa-tion at the time into histories of imperial government and religion, fromancient Persia to the Islamic caliphates. Ibn Khaldūn in his turn was ableto develop his model because he had at his disposal a plethora of universaland local histories produced until his own day. Since Ibn Khaldūn hadaccess to this corpus, he would have been able to identify patterns acrossthe historical sources to an even greater extent than the earlier historians.

Al-Azmeh’s and Khalidi’s insight that Ibn Khaldūn’s Muqaddima is adiscursive expression of the facts contained in his history implies thateven the narrative pre-Ibn Khaldūn histories might be analytically moti-

vated. And if these same histories provided the information for IbnKhaldūn, economic issues must be part of that analysis. A quick glanceinto a primer in economics—in this caseEconomics and Economic Change: Macroeconomics 25—suffices to make one aware that medieval historianssuch as al- ̣abarī were indeed occupied with the same basic economic fac-tors as modern economists, i.e. the ow of money, goods, and servicesbetween households, ‘rms’ (farms, industry, trade), and the state—includ-ing, not least, the role of the law for directing these ows. Tus, to borrowthe words of arif Khalidi, our task is not only to repeat what Ibn Khaldūn

did—to bring out of the medieval sources ‘the nature and appeal of powerand religion to differently ordained segments of [. . .] society’26—but alsoto show how the authors of medieval sourcesanalysethis appeal in termsof the political economy. Te historical sources thus contain informationthat is already part of an analysis which in its turn is shaped by each histo-

25) Dawson et al., 2006: 324-5.26) Khalidi, 1994: 227.


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Introduction 127

rian’s perception of the political economy, its problems, and the solutionsto these problems.27

In the opening article, ‘Economic Performance and Economic Growthin the Early Islamic World’, Maya Shatzmiller argues that the growinginterest in the economic theory of institutions and their role in economicgrowth has been detrimental in the Islamic case. It shifted the scholarlymethodology from the need to scrupulously provide empirically basedresearch, to theoretical models which favoured sweeping generalizations,e.g. about the negative roles of the Islamic state and legal institution. Teapproach proposed by Shatzmiller is to make more accurate, empiricallybased examinations of both the process and the role of Islamic institutionsin periods of economic growth, than the theoretical and model-orientedapproach currently in vogue. Shatzmiller asserts that economic growth wasvisible in the key indicators of the Caliphate’s economy in the periodca. 750 to ca. 1100, and she supports the claim by pointing to an increasein monetization, money supply and circulation, formation of credit insti-tutions; development and elaboration of state scal institutions with anefficient system of tax collection; creation of legal institutions to upholdproperty rights; limited demographic growth from the internal population

but one offset by importing of slaves and internal migration; increasedoutput in the manufacturing sector as a result of increased division oflabour and literacy of the workforce; an increased volume of trade, efficientmarkets, commercial techniques and the development of efficient transac-tions costs. Te conclusion is that there was nothing intrinsic to Islamicinstitutions that impaired economic growth.

Te second article, ‘Te Papyrus Industry in the Early Islamic Era’, byMatt Malczycki, critically explores the state of the art in research on thepapyrus industry in early Islamic Egypt. Te pioneering works of Kara-

bacek and Grohmann remain the standard in the eld, with their claimthat just as in Ancient and Byzantine times the Islamic state (ruled fromBaghdad, in this case) maintained a monopoly over Egyptian papyrus pro-duction. While little new evidence has come to light, Malczycki arguesthat existing evidence can be re-interpreted so as to yield more nuancedresults. Malczycki concludes that there is no evidence for monopoly overpapyrus production by the Abbasid—or even the Umayyad—state. Instead,

27) For early statements of problems pertaining to treating medieval historians as merelytransmitters of neutral facts, see Hodgson, 1968; Waldman, 1980.


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documents show that even as Egypt as province was becoming increasinglyindependent of the central Abbasid state, the Abbasids maintained a con-tract with Egyptian papyrus producers which secured a high price for theproducers in return for the best quality papyrus. Tis contract was notimposed but a mutually benecent business agreement, and it did notimply Abbasid control over papyrus production and the market. Tere wasanother, equally free market where the general public bought cheap, lowerquality papyrus. Malczycki’s approach produces quite a different picture ofthe Abbasid state’s involvement in production and selling of papyrus thanthat which emerges from Karabacek’s and Grohmann’s works.

While Shatzmiller and Malczycki are thus concerned with the real polit-ical economy, the two remaining articles are more historiographical,exploring the political and economic analysis expressed in the medievalsources. Al- ̣abarī’s History of the Messengers and the Kings is one of themost consulted sources for Sassanid and Islamic history to 915 A.D. Exist-ing studies agree that al- ̣abarī’s History is primarily ‘religious’ and con-tains no socio-economic analysis of history. In ‘ “It’s the economy, stupid”:al- ̣abarī’s analysis of the free rider problem in the Abbasid caliphate’,Ulrika Mårtensson makes a twofold argument to the contrary. Firstly, she

holds that al- ̣abarī’s provided a free rider-analysis of which policies intaxation and law that strengthened or weakened the imperial states’ con-trol over their territories in relation to tribal landlords, and secondly that,in the History , he perceived religion as the legal norm required to uphold‘rule of law’. Te conclusion is that al- ̣abarī saw themisāh ̣a tax systemand ‘rule of law’ as necessary policies for any state aspiring to imperialscale, but that he was pessimistic about developments during his own timesince his favoured policy was not applied. Tus theHistory already consti-tutes an answer to questions asked by modern historians, such as, why did

the Abbasid state crumble, and what was the role of religion in the politicaleconomy?Michele Campopiano’s study ‘Land ax: aʿlā l-misāh ̣a and muqāsama

Legal Teory and Balance of Social Forces in Early Medieval Iraq (6th-10th Centuries)’ is a forceful argument for the need to ground any analysisof tax policies in the given society’s specic ‘mode of production’. Conse-quently, approaches such as those of Ghazanfaret al. which compare medi-eval Islamic economics with modern counterparts easily overlook factors

which are peculiar to the whole political economy and which are the mostsignicant motivators for policy decisions. Campopiano demonstrates thisthrough a detailed analysis of the political deliberations which motivated a


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number of Muslim jurists and historians between the late 700s and early900s (especially prominent gures such as AbūʿUbayd, Abū Yūsuf andQudāma Ibn J ̠a ʿfar) to recommend to the Abbasid caliphs the opposite taxsystem tomisāh ̣a , namelymuqāsama . Campopiano analyses the jurists’ taxpolicy in terms of John Haldon’s concept of ‘tributary mode of produc-tion’, the economic organization based on a system of surplus extractionfrom peasant production ultimately reliant on coercion. ax and rent arethe two possible forms taken by this coercive surplus extraction. Temuqāsama , as described by the jurists who promoted it, favoured a newredistribution of surplus between the state (‘tax’) and the landowners(‘rent’), in order to improve political relations between the Abbasid dynastythat had just come to power, and the absentee landlords on whom the statedepended politically. Tus, just as in the case of al- ̣abarī’s promotion ofmisāh ̣a , these Abbasid jurists’ recommendations are based on their analysisof what economic forces might best serve their political considerations.

aken together, these four studies provide snapshots of the economyand the political economy under the Abbasid caliphate. While Shatzmillerprovides hard facts about the economy and the law as part of a critique ofcontemporary ‘decline theories’, and Malczycki dismantles the classic the-

ory about state monopoly over papyrus production and sales, Mårtenssonand Campopiano provide different examples of how misleading it mightbe to treat the sources as containers of neutral information, when in facttheir authors were making particular analytical points. All four contribu-tions thus complicate easy applications of the label ‘Islamic’ to the forcesinvolved in the political economy of Muslim societies. Regarding the roleof Islam, the articles show that while religion provides ethical norms forrulers and subjects, the laws associated with Islam were no obstacle toproduction and a free market. While the medieval historian al- ̣abarī did

establish causal connections between the degree to which rulers and subjects adhered to Islamic norms and the development of the political econ-omy, it is equally clear that he reckoned the economy to be the historicallydecisive force. If his main question was how to manage the economy, hesaw adherence to Islamic norms as crucial for success. Al- ̣abarī concludedthat Islamic norms werenot adhered to, neither by rulers, administratorsor landlords, and that this circumstance had a decisive negative impact onthe caliphate’s political economy. Tus, if one uses al- ̣abarī’s History asone’s main source of information while assuming that Islam determinedthe development of the political economy, one needs to consider al- ̣abarī’sown analysis, that it was theabsenceof Islam as norm—not law—that


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determined what he perceived as a negative development of the politicaleconomy. And he conceived of the economy as distinct from religion: theeconomy depended on such matters as land tax and the particular admin-istrative system for levying, collecting and redistributing tax revenue. Reli-gion mattered only in so far as it provided the norm that would make oneprefer one tax system over another.

Other factors that complicate assigning to Islam a denable causal rolefor the political economy are the issues of historical continuity, regionalidentities and loyalties, and social conict. In some contexts the medievalhistorians and jurists conceived of Islam as the continuation of regionalgovernmental and administrative norms, whereas in other contexts Islam

was portrayed as a break with regional practices and norms, for example incontexts of conict between the imperial state and a provincial governor ora tribe. Both the historians themselves and the political actors they reportedabout dened Islam as the norms that supported their particular politicaland economic concerns, which shows that Islam simultaneously refers toseveralconicting political theories and interest groups. From this view-point, the main problem with seeing Islam as determinant of political andeconomic development and of the workings of institutions is that the com-

plex medieval Islamic societies and economies are reduced to a holisticorganism and thought-mode.

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Documents

Introduction Materialist Approaches to I