by Kevin Reilly
The advantage of a class of slave soldiers and officials to the ruler was that such “foreigners” were not beholden to any clan or tribal leaders; their only loyalty was to the sultan or emir who “owned” them. Further, as slaves, they were generally prevented from having families of their own and adding to the number of competing clans. In fact, on a few occasions, former slaves revolted and created dynasties of their own. One of these was the Mamluk (literally “slave”) dynasty of Egypt (1250-1517), in which Turkic and Circassian17 slaves came to power though more through palace revolt than inheritance.
In Place of Government . Ironically, the medieval Muslim tradition of government as mainly a military matter created a civilization that unleashed numerous creative energies and granted Muslims a wide range of freedoms. Slave dynasties and military governments left a good bit of daily life unattended. Without a centralized bureaucracy, many matters normally regulated by government were left to other agencies.
Matters of family life were regulated by religious law and authority. In lieu of legislative bodies, Muslims followed the shari’a, the body of law that emerged from the Muslim community since the time of Muhammad’s governance of Medina. Muslim scholars interpreted these traditions or made pronouncements based on them. Muslim courts administered and enforced the law, relying on families and clans when necessary.
Islam was a decentralized religion. There were no popes, cardinals, bishops, and church councils as there were in Christianity. The Muslim community needed little supervision because it had God’s law in the Quran. Every Muslim thereby had access to the most important elements of his or her religion. The centrality of the Quran meant a high level of literacy among Muslims, at least in Arabic. Schooling in Quranic literacy was private and pervasive. Individual scholars and masters of Islam formed schools and took students. Universities, like Cairo’s Al Azhar, the world’s oldest (founded in 970), subsidized students from all over the Muslim world with the aid of donations.
Charity was an intrinsic part of Islam. Giving to the poor was one of the five central “pillars” of the faith. This zakat was collected from all Muslims and directed to the needs of the poor, infirm, and recently converted. Various private charities, called waqf, provided for hospitals, education, housing, welfare, burials, and other needs, public and private.
Non-Muslims were relieved of the zakat but instead paid a defense tax called the jizya, which Muslims were not required to pay. In general, non-Muslims, like Jews and Christians, were governed by their own laws, courts, and authorities.
It is important to recognize that no medieval society treated people as individuals. For instance, Jews in Muslim and European societies were treated as a corporate group. They generally lived in separate areas, pursued separate occupations, and sometimes were expected to wear clothing that established their separate identities. Freedom from arbitrary persecution was purchased with the jizya, but Jews and Christians in Muslim society were no more equal to Muslims than Jews and Muslims were equal to Christians in medieval Europe. Limited or military government opened more opportunities for Muslims than others, but Jews and Christians were rarely persecuted.
Muslims, Merchants, and Markets
A Merchant’s Religion . Like modern America, the medieval Muslim world used markets to carry out many activities normally assumed by governments. More than any of the great religions, Islam sanctioned trade and the work of merchants. The Quran may be the only one of the world’s holy books that deals explicitly with matters of trade, and the merchant was a cultural model. Not only had the Prophet of Islam been a merchant, but merchants were particularly well placed to follow the demands of the faith. They could afford to give generously to the poor, they could make the pilgrimage to Mecca as part of their business travel, and they could make the necessary arrangements to pray five times a day and fast during the month of Ramadan.
Islam not only began as a merchant’s religion but also facilitated the needs of merchants as it developed and expanded. Muslims shared a common set of values across what would later be many national boundaries. A comparison with Europe is enlightening. Christianity was also a universal religion, asserting common brotherhood and shared values, but Christians identified themselves as much with their particular nation, city, and church (e.g., Roman, Greek, and Nestorian) as they did with fellow Christians. Muslims had a wide-ranging network of good faith to support longdistance trade and exchange.
Certain ideas and institutions that were essential to the development of capitalist society were created or refined in this context. Banks, checks, insurance, third-party payments, accounting and bookkeeping procedures, shares of ownership, leasing contracts, the partnership, and the corporation were all refined in the Islamic world. Some of these had pre-Islamic roots but became more sophisticated under the Dar al-Islam. Virtually all of them pre-dated European ideas and instruments by a couple of centuries. Many entered Europe through Italian traders, especially from Venice and Genoa, in Cairo and Constantinople, and some, like tarifah (tariff) and sakk (check), with echoes of their Arabic names intact.
The one exception underscores the flexibility of the Islamic financial system. While Christians were forbidden to charge usurious or excessive interest, the Quran specifically forbid Muslims from charging any interest at all. Consequently, Muslims were nonstarters in the development of interest-bearing loans and the computation of variable time-sensitive interest rates. Nevertheless, with the precision of a modern American mortgage banker who charges a borrower “points” to get a loan, Muslim bankers figured in processing costs and fines for late payment (as Islamic banks still do today).
Cairo . The heart of the Muslim market economy in the centuries after 1000 was Cairo. Located close to the remains of ancient Egyptian Memphis and Giza, Cairo was actually a new city in the Muslim period—or, rather, a series of new cities along the Nile (separate then but today all a part of huge metropolitan Cairo).
Cairo’s golden age (1294-1340) had military roots. Within a brief time, the new Turkic Mamluk slave dynasty of Egypt defeated the Mongols (1263) and reoccupied Syria and Palestine, including the Crusader states (1291). After military consolidation, the Mamluks encouraged the expansion of trade across North Africa and the Muslim heartland but especially along the southern maritime route to India, the Spice Islands, and China.
Much of our information about the merchants and advanced market economy of Cairo comes from a most unusual and fortunate source. At the end of the nineteenth century, scholars of medieval Judaism discovered a treasure trove of documents, letters, sacred and formal writings, and everyday jottings that detailed life in medieval Cairo for centuries. Because in Jewish tradition it was considered irreligious to destroy anything with the name of God written on it—and virtually any piece of writing might refer to God—a Jewish synagogue in Fustat (old Cairo) collected all discarded paper and other materials with any writing on them. The synagogue deposited every piece of writing in a storage room called a geniza. This pile of writings had reached the top of the attic hundreds of years before it was rediscovered in 1896. The geniza yielded books and sacred writings previously unknown, intricately detailed accounts of Jewish life in medieval Cairo and a dense array of materials for reconstructing the entire kaleidoscope of Cairene life for 1,000 years, especially during the period between the ninth and thirteenth centuries.18
S. D. Goitein, who devoted a long life of scholarship to the Cairo geniza documents, concluded that they revealed a world that, especially in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, combined “free enterprise, a monetary economy, and fluid forms of cooperation” in a “comparatively salutary” society.19 Indeed, the many records of correspondence and travel in the Cairo geniza show that not only Cairo but also much of the Islamic world, from Morocco and Spain to Iraq and Iran, was not unlike a modern free trade zone where one could travel without a passport, buy a home or secure employment in a foreign country, and make a contract with or send money to a stranger 1,000 miles away by means of a p
iece of paper. Goitein wrote,
To sum up: during the High Middle Ages men, goods, money and books used to travel far and almost without restrictions throughout the Mediterranean area. In many respects the area represented a free trade community. The treatment of foreigners, as a rule, was remarkably liberal. . . . How is all this to be explained? To a certain extent by the fact that the machinery of the state was relatively loose in those days. . . . At the root of all this was the concept that law was personal and not territorial.20
The golden age of Cairo lasted until about 1340. In the 1320s, Ibn Battuta described it as the “Mother of Cities”: “Mistress of broad provinces and fruitful lands, boundless in multitudes of buildings, peerless in beauty and splendor.”21 And, of course, he had been almost everywhere.
In 1347 (as Ibn Battuta was returning from China), an Egyptian ship sailed from the Black Sea bringing slaves and grain to Alexandria and Cairo. In the grain, it also carried at least one rat and fleas infected with the plague that had already swept across central Asia. The ship left with 332 on board. It arrived in Egypt with 45, all of whom died before they could leave the port.22 The death toll was 1,000 people per day in Cairo in 1348. Normally crowded streets were empty except for funeral processions. But the difference that began to emerge between cities like Cairo and the cities of Europe was that in Cairo the plague kept returning. Between 1347 and 1513, the plague struck Cairo 50 times—once every three years on average.
The great world historian Ibn Khaldun, who lost both his parents to the plague in Tunisia, came to Cairo to understand and to help others make sense of the great catastrophe. He offered his conclusions in the last volume of his multivolume world history.
Civilization in both the East and the West was visited by a destructive plague which devastated nations and caused populations to vanish. It swallowed up many of the good things of civilization and wiped them out. It overtook the dynasties at the time of their senility, when they had reached the limit of their duration. It lessened their power and curtailed their influence. It weakened their authority. Their situation approached the point of annihilation and dissolution. Civilization decreased with the decrease of mankind. Cities and buildings were laid waste, roads and way signs were obliterated, settlements and mansions became empty, dynasties and tribes grew weak. The entire inhabited world changed.23
Islam in Africa
The Black Death did not bring an end to civilization, not even to Muslim civilization. The very size of the Dar Al-Islam by 1350 made it able to resist even pandemics.
Islam in West Africa . In its golden years, Cairo had many visitors besides Ibn Battuta. There were years when the Mamluk sultan held welcoming parades for what seemed a new visiting dignitary each day. But for years afterward, Cairenes remembered the spectacular entrance in 1324 of Mansa Musa from the West African kingdom of Mali. The Muslim king of Mali was on a pilgrimage to Mecca. He arrived in Cairo with a retinue estimated at over 60,000 with 80 camels carrying two tons of gold. People said that he gave away so much gold as gifts that the price of the precious metal did not recover for years afterward. This would not be surprising since Mali in the fourteenth century produced about two-thirds of the world’s gold exports. By 1324, Islam had not only spread to sub-Saharan Africa but also won many followers. Ibn Battuta visited Mali 30 years later and remarked, “On Fridays, if a man does not go early to the mosque, he cannot find a corner to pray in, on account of the crowds.”24
Camel caravans had crossed the western Sahara for 1,000 years before 1324, as long as the camel had been domesticated in the Sahara. Christian North Africans and then Arabs and Berbers crossed the wide expanse of desert by camel train for gold, slaves, and ivory. In return, the northerners provided horses and precious salt, which they (or, more often, their slaves) dug from the desert salt mines in the northern Sahara, an area that had been under water during the Pleistocene epoch 10,000 to a million and a half years ago. At first, the northerners raided and traded with black Africans, coming into increasing contact in the market cities along the Niger River like Timbuktu. With the influence of Muslim merchants and scholars in the towns and the local initiative of ambitious tribal leaders, Islam spread from the towns to the courts of kings. Mansa Musa was one of many.
Increasingly between 1000 and 1450, sub-Saharan Africa became fully integrated into the Muslim trade network. Just as trade began while black Africans were still pagan, it continued after their conversions. Raids continued especially after 1000, when Berber tribes became more numerous in the Sahara, raising and breeding camels and competing for scarce resources. But even as clashes became more frequent, the forestlands south of the Sahara became a permanent part of the Dar al-Islam.
Some elements of Islam took root in West Africa better than others. The allowance of monarchial polygamy in African society corresponded with Arab traditions, though the Muslim practice was restricted by the example of the Prophet’s limit of four wives. On the other hand, Middle Eastern traditions of veiling women played poorly in African societies that prized fertility above modesty in dress. Ibn Battuta was scandalized on his visit to Mali by the sight of naked women in public.
Swahili Culture . In fact, the people of West Africa were relatively latecomers to the Dar al-Islam. The people of East Africa were involved from the beginning. East Africa is only about 100 miles across the Red Sea from Mecca. Long before Muhammad, Arab ships sailed back and forth between Arabia and Africa. In the ninth and tenth centuries, African villages on the offshore islands and east coast of Africa grew wealthy by trading with Arab Muslims. Initially, they traded African tortoiseshell, rhinoceros horn, and ivory elephant tusks, which were highly valued in Asia for jewelry and medicinal purposes. By the tenth century, gold mined in southeastern Africa became a profitable addition. Villagers whose livelihood had been based on fishing and farming became city merchants, steeped in Arab market culture and Islam. Their language and culture blended Arabic with their ancestral Bantu, forming something called Swahili (after the Arabic for “coastal”), and this new hybrid language became the common tongue of the East African coastlands.
In East Africa, as in Spain, the Balkans, and the Holy Land, Islam encountered Christian peoples, kings, and clerics. In Ethiopia, the Christian church was older than any in Europe, with ties through the Coptic church of Egypt dating back to the first century of Christianity. In conflict and peaceful exchange, the Afro-Eurasian network stretched down both the eastern coast and the western interior of Africa, integrating African peoples, products, and cultures with their own.
A Single Ecozone . The linking of sub-Saharan Africa to the Eurasian zone was also ecological. Crops and animals were exchanged with salt and gold, and eventually so were wives, and genes, and germs. Historians are not sure to what degree this had occurred by 1350. Ibn Battuta makes no mention of the plague while traveling in Mali in 1352, leading most historians to conclude that the disease did not cross the expanse of the Sahara Desert. Recent research, however, points to population decline in this period, a possible outcome of new diseases.25
Certainly by 1500, the people of western Africa had become part of the same biological regime as Europeans. After the European attempt to enslave American Indians failed largely because the American Indians had no immunity to European smallpox, Europeans used West African slaves almost exclusively. Clearly, West Africans had been part of the same world of microbes and diseases long enough to have developed immunities to smallpox. But the Bantu-speaking Africans of the western sub-Saharan grasslands had little contact with the Khoi Khoi San-speaking people of southern Africa, many of whom were annihilated by European diseases when Europeans settled the southern tip of Africa in the seventeenth century. The descendants of those same Europeans, however, had no immunity advantage over the Bantu-speaking Zulu and Xhosa people, whose ancestors had come down from West Africa with Afro-Eurasian microbes. As a consequence, while European settlers in the Americas largely annihilated American Indians, the Europeans who settled in South Afr
ica faced Bantu peoples with immunities similar to their own.
Islam in India and Indonesia
While Islam began as an Arab religion, the conversion of Persians, Europeans, Africans, central Asians, and Turks changed the ethnic balance of the faithful by 1000. During the next 500 years, Islam spread throughout South and Southeast Asia as well. As a consequence, today Muslim Arabs constitute only about 20 percent of the world’s Muslims (about 10 percent of Arabs are not Muslims). The majority of Muslims today live in the Indian subcontinent and Indonesia. Those countries that today have the largest Muslim populations are Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and India.
Muslim expansion in India and Indonesia occurred in each of the three stages we have chronicled for other areas of the world. First, Arab armies brought Islam as far as the Indus River by 750. Then, around 1000, Turkic and other central Asian tribal armies brought Islam to what is today Pakistan and northern India. And finally, from the seventh century on, especially after 1000, Muslim merchants brought Islam to southern India and Indonesia. Each of these made different demands. The early Arab armies sought to govern rather than convert. The Turks wanted both control and converts. The merchant communities sought neither, but their religious piety and economic power made them a force to be followed. In addition, Muslim merchants were often accompanied by devotees of Sufism, a form of Islam that stressed rigorous spiritual exercises while teaching love of God and respect for other faiths. The great Sufi poet Rumi (1207-1273) wrote,
