Why did the same economic dynamism [of the West] fail to prevail in Islamdom?
Mahmood Ibrahim, professor of Islamic history at California State Polytechnic University, has a compelling theory that offers a possible answer. He starts by showing what we have observed so far: The Rationalists, particularly the Mutazilites, constituted an economic class. Most were merchants, others were “artisans or were associated with artisans.” Their opponents, the Traditionists, were led by the opposite class: the landlords. So the war of ideas between these camps was “not merely a theological or doctrinal dispute, but a social conflict fought on an ideological plane.”
Politically speaking, the turning point of this dispute, as noted in the previous chapter, was the arrival of al-Mutawakkil, the Abbasid caliph who ended the brief pro-Mutazilite policy of his direct predecessors and supported the Traditionists. But there was also an economic side to this change. Quite tellingly, al-Mutawakkil established a new economic system that elevated the role, and the revenues, of the landlords. This system, called iqta, was a form of land grant. The caliph would temporarily grant a piece of land to a landlord who could then tax the peasants who lived on the land. The landlord, to make sure that the peasants continued to produce crops for him, would recruit many soldiers.
The resulting system increased the power of landowners and the soldiers they employed—at the expense of the merchants. The caliphs after al-Mutawakkil would continue to prefer this system, for they could tax land, as visible wealth, more easily than they could tax merchants’ profits. The role of the soldiers would be further consolidated in the face of the threat posed and the destruction caused by the Crusaders and the Mongols in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
According to Dr. Ibrahim, this transition in Islamdom from “a commercially based capitalistic period” to “an agrarian based semi-feudal one beginning with the Caliphate of al-Mutawakkil” was quite fateful. It was the very infrastructure of the transition from Rationalism to Traditionism.
A study on labor in medieval Middle East also reveals this structural shift. Between the eighth and eleventh centuries, the formative period of Islamic law, the Arab-Islamic lands stretching from Iraq to Spain harbored 233 distinct commercial occupations. Later, between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, there was a slight decline in this number, whereas the occupations in the bureaucracy and the military tripled. There was, clearly, a rise in military and state power, but “inertia in regard to commercial organization.”
This periodization in the history of Islamdom suggests that the obstacle to economic progress in this part of the world was not Islam itself, as some essentialists believe. “It was not the attitudes and ideologies inherent in Islam which inhibited the development of a capitalist economy,” notes Sami Zubaida, emeritus professor of sociology at the University of London, “but the political position of the merchant classes vis à vis the dominant military-bureaucratic classes in Islamic societies.”
In the later centuries (from the twelfth onward), stagnation would deepen as Islamdom became more and more isolated and as trade, the main engine of dynamism in the Orient, gradually shifted elsewhere. First came “the loss of the Mediterranean,” due to the Crusaders’ occupation of the whole eastern and northeastern coastline of this commercially vital sea. This, argues the great French historian Fernand Braudel, is probably the best explanation for “Islam’s abrupt reverse in the 12th century.” In the thirteenth century, the Mongol catastrophe would impose a much more abrupt, and tragic, reversal.
The final blow would come in the fifteenth century with the Age of Discovery, during which Western Europeans found direct ocean routes to India, China, and elsewhere. Consequently, world trade routes would rapidly shift to the oceans, enriching Western Europe. Not only did this further impoverish the Middle East, it even made the Mediterranean a backwater. This whole northwestern movement of “world capital” between the twelfth and the eighteenth centuries explains, in the apt title of one of Braudel’s essays, “the greatness and decline of Islam.”
Mahmood Ibrahim, professor of Islamic history at California State Polytechnic University, has a compelling theory that offers a possible answer. He starts by showing what we have observed so far: The Rationalists, particularly the Mutazilites, constituted an economic class. Most were merchants, others were “artisans or were associated with artisans.” Their opponents, the Traditionists, were led by the opposite class: the landlords. So the war of ideas between these camps was “not merely a theological or doctrinal dispute, but a social conflict fought on an ideological plane.”
Politically speaking, the turning point of this dispute, as noted in the previous chapter, was the arrival of al-Mutawakkil, the Abbasid caliph who ended the brief pro-Mutazilite policy of his direct predecessors and supported the Traditionists. But there was also an economic side to this change. Quite tellingly, al-Mutawakkil established a new economic system that elevated the role, and the revenues, of the landlords. This system, called iqta, was a form of land grant. The caliph would temporarily grant a piece of land to a landlord who could then tax the peasants who lived on the land. The landlord, to make sure that the peasants continued to produce crops for him, would recruit many soldiers.
The resulting system increased the power of landowners and the soldiers they employed—at the expense of the merchants. The caliphs after al-Mutawakkil would continue to prefer this system, for they could tax land, as visible wealth, more easily than they could tax merchants’ profits. The role of the soldiers would be further consolidated in the face of the threat posed and the destruction caused by the Crusaders and the Mongols in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
According to Dr. Ibrahim, this transition in Islamdom from “a commercially based capitalistic period” to “an agrarian based semi-feudal one beginning with the Caliphate of al-Mutawakkil” was quite fateful. It was the very infrastructure of the transition from Rationalism to Traditionism.
A study on labor in medieval Middle East also reveals this structural shift. Between the eighth and eleventh centuries, the formative period of Islamic law, the Arab-Islamic lands stretching from Iraq to Spain harbored 233 distinct commercial occupations. Later, between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, there was a slight decline in this number, whereas the occupations in the bureaucracy and the military tripled. There was, clearly, a rise in military and state power, but “inertia in regard to commercial organization.”
This periodization in the history of Islamdom suggests that the obstacle to economic progress in this part of the world was not Islam itself, as some essentialists believe. “It was not the attitudes and ideologies inherent in Islam which inhibited the development of a capitalist economy,” notes Sami Zubaida, emeritus professor of sociology at the University of London, “but the political position of the merchant classes vis à vis the dominant military-bureaucratic classes in Islamic societies.”
In the later centuries (from the twelfth onward), stagnation would deepen as Islamdom became more and more isolated and as trade, the main engine of dynamism in the Orient, gradually shifted elsewhere. First came “the loss of the Mediterranean,” due to the Crusaders’ occupation of the whole eastern and northeastern coastline of this commercially vital sea. This, argues the great French historian Fernand Braudel, is probably the best explanation for “Islam’s abrupt reverse in the 12th century.” In the thirteenth century, the Mongol catastrophe would impose a much more abrupt, and tragic, reversal.
The final blow would come in the fifteenth century with the Age of Discovery, during which Western Europeans found direct ocean routes to India, China, and elsewhere. Consequently, world trade routes would rapidly shift to the oceans, enriching Western Europe. Not only did this further impoverish the Middle East, it even made the Mediterranean a backwater. This whole northwestern movement of “world capital” between the twelfth and the eighteenth centuries explains, in the apt title of one of Braudel’s essays, “the greatness and decline of Islam.”
