Journal of the Economic and

Social History of the Orient 54 (2011) 117-131

brill.nl/jesh

Introduction:
Materialist Approaches to Islamic History
Ulrika Mrtensson*

Both patrimonialism and neo-tribalism lie behind what most of all dierentiated
Islamic from European political thought: the absence of the concept of public oce,
of the state as separate from individual rulers, and of a distinction between private and
public. The notion of the state, being abstract, was alien to [tribal] narrative thinking.
The idea of an explicitly secular political authority could not take hold because political language had been determined by religious ilm.
Anthony Black, The History of Islamic Political Thought1

Anthony Blacks claim that behind all the individual things that separate
Islamic and European political thought and history lays Islamic jurisprudence
and theology (religious ilm) is a paradigmatic example of approaches
that this special issue seeks to challenge. The origin of the special issue
was the panel Challenging Culturalism: Materialist Approaches to Islamic
History, which was organised by Ulrika Mrtensson (Religious studies
and Islam) and Steve Tamari (Islamic and World history) for the 2008
annual convention of the Middle East Studies Association. The panel concept was simple. We claimed that the discourse of Islamic dierence from
the West, an extreme version of which is the clash-of-civilization-theory
propounded by Bernard Lewis2 and Samuel Huntington3 as well as by

*) Ulrika Mrtensson, Department of Archaeology and Religious Studies, The Norwegian

University of Science and Technology, ulrika.martensson@hf.ntnu.no. I am indebted to the
other contributors, and especially Michele Campopiano, for constructive comments on
this Introduction.
1)
Black, 2001: 350.
2)
Lewis, 1990.
3)
Huntington, 1993.
Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2011

DOI: 10.1163/156852011X586796

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U. Mrtensson / JESHO 54 (2011) 117-131

radical Islamists,4 can also be found, in a milder form, in studies of Islamic

history and societies which emphasise the systemic dierence between
Islam and Western civilisations. This not-clashing-but-dierent-theory is a
discourse about Islamic history which attributes greater signicance to the
religion Islam for historical developments than to such universal and material historical factors as modes of production, trade, industry, law, social
conict, and regional identities and loyalties.5 If these factors are considered materialas opposed to religious and culturalthey would bring
out the decisive elements involved in historical developments, which in
turn would bring to light the similarities between Islamic and Western
thought about social institutions, political economy, and economy proper.
Such was the panels concept. However, as the discussant Elton Daniel
pointed out, proper historians always consider material factors. The problem as perceived by the panel organisers thus pertains not to the discipline
of history as applied to Islamic societies, but more narrowly to Islamic
studies or other applied sciences (such as political science) which from the
outset have assigned to Islam a causal role for the development of politics
and 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. In
the case of Islamic history, such studies have tended to apply broad theoretical models instead of conducting empirical research. The result has
often 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 therefore
became a challenge to produce a special issue which would combine economic history, complex assessments of the religion Islams role in historical
institutional developments, and historiography in the sense of dening
economic analysis in the medieval source material itself.
The 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 anities between Islamism and culturalist approaches to Islam
and the West, see Al-Azmeh, 1993/1996.
5)
For surveys of this historical approach, see Aziz al-Azmehs collection of reprinted essays,
The Times of History: Universal Topics in Islamic Historiography (2007). For al-Azmeh, the
most important recent exponents of this approach are Patricia Crone, Medieval Islamic
Political Thought (2004; a US edition of which is entitled Gods Rule: Government and
Islam), and Anthony Black, The History of Islamic Political Thought from the Prophet to the
Present (2001).

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119

Abbasid caliphate. During this period economic growth coincided with

the rise and decline of the Abbasid dynastic state, ultimately signied by
the ascent of the Buyid and Seljuk dynasties to sulta (rule) in Baghdad.
This is also the period when Islamic jurisprudence and theology (ilm) were
systematized into the classical schools and the legal system matured into
the institutional division between on the one hand siysa (government
administration) and shurta (the police), and on the other shara (literally,
the straight path [of Islam]).6
Siysa refers to legal procedures, judgments and punishments carried
out by agencies and tribunals other than those of a qd, i.e. siysa justice
was institutionally independent of shara but theoretically bound by its
legal principles.7 Since siysa was the rulers sphere, it can be seen as a precursor to the later medieval qnn laws which were issued by the rulers,
not by the shara jurists. Shurta was a function of siysa and refers to the
upholding in the public space of law and order by apprehending oenders,
bringing them to justice, judging and punishing them:8
[The] siysa form of justice and penal procedure was general to Muslim polities
throughout their history. Princes and governors held court and decreed punishments
in major cases, especially ones with political signicanceof rebellion, subversion and
other challenges to authority. But for the common everyday infractions of robbery,
murder, injury, aray, drink, fornication and other moral infractions, it was the shurta
which was responsible for maintaining order and punishing the crimes.9

According to Sami Zubaida, at many points in the history of Muslim

polities criminal and penal matters were dealt with predominantly in
accordance with siysa justice, by administrative authorities, typically the
shurta.10
While siysa and shurta were institutionally distinct from sharathe
law administered by the religious scholars (al-ulam and al-fuqah) and
judges (qudt, sing. qd)the two legal systems nevertheless dealt with a
6)
The following descriptions of the two legal systems is based on Sami Zubaidas recent
study, Law and Power in the Islamic World (2003), which in its turn relies on Emile Tyan,
Histoire de lorganisation judiciaire en pays dIslam (1960). See also Dominique Sourdel,
Gouvernement et administration dans lOrient Islamique jusquau milieu di XIe sicle,
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 oences. However, while siysa and
shurta could apprehend and bring oenders to justice, the shara was limited to cases brought in by litigants. Compared with shara and its strict
requirements of proof and testimony-based evidence, the criminal justice
of siysa and shurta was more vulnerable to arbitrariness and corruption.11
The professional class of secretaries or scribes (ktib, kuttb) played an
important role concerning siysa, and it was from their top ranks the viziers
(or prime ministers) were drawn. As Yassine Essid points out, the secretaries constituted a link between the Byzantine and Sassanid administrative
traditions and the Islamic states, transmitting both theoretical and practical knowledge. The economy of the Abbasid caliphate was administered
through three main functions: The function of directionabsolute
embodied in the ruler; the highly precarious function of delegation devolving upon the wazr; and, lastly, the function of execution, carried out with
skill and self-sacrice by the secretary.12 Among the secretaries duties were
land surveying, land registry, real estate tax collection, and calculation of
revenues and expenditures, writing and correspondence.13
Siysa and shara came together at the apogee of state justice, signied
by the court of appeal, or mazlim (grievances). The mazlim court was
instituted in the early Abbasid caliphate and was initially presided over by
the caliph himself as supreme dispenser of justice. The cases brought before
the court could concern miscarriages of justice from both siysa and shara
courts, in the vast majority of cases against members of the lower classes.
As the mazlim court became increasingly bureaucratised the caliph was
often substituted by the vizier or the chief judge (qd) who, although
always a shara scholar, was appointed by the caliph.14
As we have seen, siysa and shara had in common criminal law and
public oences. Another important issue over which they coincided was
the land tax (kharj), the main source of revenue for the state and an
important factor in the power politics between the imperial government
and the provincial governors. As the contributions to this special issue aim
to show, the fuqah provided the legal foundations for various administrative policies on land tax. Signicantly, the fuqah framed their approaches
to land tax in terms of divine justice. However, in spite of this common
11)
12)
13)
14)

Ibid.: 57-8.
Essid, 1995: 15.
Ibid.: 15.
Zubaida, 2003: 51-6.

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121

religious frame of reference, they reasoned very dierently about the land
tax itself and the dierent available systems. Our contributions show that
their reasoning depended rst and foremost on their personal political and
economic analysis, rather than on any presumed evident implication of the
religion Islam and shara. Since these scholars analysis diered so signicantly, it is hard to see how they can be made to t into one model of how
Islamic legal thought aected the political economy, even though their
arguments were all framed in religious terms. It is suggested here that the
religious framework reected their institutional aliation, shara, which
self-consciously identied itself with the divine principles set out in the
sacred scriptures (Qurn and h adth), as distinct from the state administration (siysa), rather than a specic way of thinking about the political
economy. By analogy, the correspondence between form (religious framework) and substance (analysis) exists only on the most general level, as a
concern with justice, legal and social; i.e. where the secretaries saw justice
as primarily related to the institution of kingship, the fuqah saw it as
primarily related to God, whose guidance was a prerequisite for justice to
be reected in the human sovereigns rule. Apart from this, however, the
religious framework spans several competing and contradicting analysis.
As indicated above, the economy as a whole did well under the legal
institutions of siysa and shara, while the fortunes of the ruling dynasties
followed a pattern of ascent and decline recognizable from other parts of
the world as well. In line with this special issues ambition to show what
unites Islamic and Western thought, the contributors have explored the
objectives and agendas that might have motivated the medieval historians
whose works we use as sources of information, and that are expressed as the
historians eorts to analyse the causes of decline of state power. While this
approach concerns historiography rather than history proper, it has consequences for historical research as it raises our awareness of the fact that the
medieval Islamic historians information is analytical, not neutral and, as
such, more than personal. In this respect our contributions agree with
Yassine Essids important work A Critique of the Origins of Islamic Economic
Thought (1995), in which the author demonstrates that Islamic economic
thought was a continuation and development of Hellenistic (Greek and
Persian) economic thought, and that the secretaries and fuqah who wrote
about macro- and micro-economics from the early Abbasid caliphate
onwards did so with a clear analytical sense. By doing so, Essid also falsies
the dominant Western scholarly perception that Islamic economic thought
began with Ibn Khaldn (d. 1406).

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Essids approach is highly similar to that expressed in S.M. Ghazanfars

recently published volume of reprinted articles, Medieval Islamic Economic
Thought: Filling the Great Gap in European Economics (2003). Ghazanfars
thesis addresses the prominent economic historian Joseph Schumpeters
(d. 1950) claim, put forth in his posthumously published History of Economic Analysis (1954), that after the classical Greeks and the elaboration of
their thought in late antiquity, no constructive analytical economic thought
was done until Thomas 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 thinkers
to European scholasticism and, eventually, the Renaissance; indeed, Thomas and other early scholastics explicitly referred to the works of Ibn Sn
(d. 1037), al-Ghazzl (d. 1111) and Ibn Rushd (d. 1198).15 Aristotle is
thus the common link that connects Greek, Islamic and Latin European
economic thought and provides their common denominator: private property rights.
Ghazanfars approach is controversial not only because he compares
Islamic and Western, and pre-modern and modern economic thought, but
also because he breaks up the rmly established distinction between religious and secular thought. Exploring the jurist-theologian al-Ghazzls
economic thought through the terms of modern economics, Ghazanfar
argues that such issues as demand and supply, prices, prots, market behaviour, production, barter, money, currency devaluation, and public nances,
can all be identied in his writings and amount to a pre-modern economic
theory.16 Naturally, Ghazanfar has critics. Paul Oslington, for example,
argues that it is impossible to compare medieval Islamic thought with
modern economics because Islamic thought is religious and holistic and
therefore does not make the modern Western distinction between compartments such as religion and economics. Oslington is representative of
the Islam-centric approach which, as Al-Azmeh has pointed out (1993),
holds modern Islamismhere represented by Sayyid Qutb, Mawdd,
Khurshid Ahmad, and Sharatto be the true representation of Islam as
opposed to secular, modernist understandings. The following quotation
from Oslington illustrates this:

15)
16)

Ghazanfar, 2003: 1-22; Ghazanfar and Islahi, 2003: 23-44; 49.

Ibid.: 23-44.

Introduction

123

The main point here is not just that Ghazanfar and Islahi have misinterpreted
al-Ghazzl, but that their interpretative lens prevents them from coming to terms
with the nature of al-Ghazzls writings. A dierent approach is needed to understand
al-Ghazzls economicsif indeed he conceived of economics in a meaningful way
given the modern conception of economics. Before considering what this dierent
approach might be, it is worth mentioning another group of Islamic thinkers from the
twentieth centurythe Egyptian Sayyid Qutb, the Pakistanis Abu al-Al Mawdd
and Khurshid Ahmad, and the Iranian Ali Shariat, who have received little attention
so far from Western economists. These writers are associated with the Islamic revival
movement that has struggled with Islamic modernism throughout this century. While
they have received some attention from historians and students of religion, the economic aspects of their writings have not had such attention, despite their work representing one of the strongest living economic traditions outside the West. It has perhaps
made so little impact of Western economic journals because the interpretative approach
exemplied in the Ghazanfar and Islahi article does not deal with a nonsecular
approach to economics. [. . .] The most fruitful alternative approach in my view would
be for economists, whether they be Muslim or non-Muslim, to use a broader interpretative framework when analysing Islamic religious texts. [. . .] This broader framework
would see the modern secular position as one among many and would be open to
negative evaluations. [. . .] [It] might tell us more about another way of doing economics and yield some interesting insights into the nature of modern secular economics
itself.

Ghazanfar and Islahi responded to Oslingtons critique by pointing out

that rather than overlooking the religious-theological framework that
encompasses al-Ghazzls thought, their point is that this framework
includes the same secular economic concepts that are found in modern
economics, as was indeed also the case with European scholastics like
Aquinas.17 This implies that, even though the frameworks are dierent,
there are similarities in problem-areas and concerns between medieval
Islamic and modern Western economics, as micro- and macro-economics
present specic problems which transcend temporal and cultural boundaries.
If one agrees with Ghazanfars claim, that even though medieval Islamic
thought was carried out within a theological and even teleological framework, it was a form of pre-modern economic thought, then we should not
consider everything produced within an Islamic religious or theological
framework as intrinsically non-secular and non-Western. While the majority of the medieval Muslim economic thinkers did indeed postulate that
causality ultimately was subject to divine omnipotence, and while their
concepts of social and redistributive justice were sanctioned by reference to
17)

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

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U. Mrtensson / JESHO 54 (2011) 117-131

divine justice, it is equally evident they analysed specic, problem-related

causes and eects in terms of objective, empirical mechanisms. The religious or theological frameworks are thus of general formal but not particular substantial and analytic signicance for medieval Islamic economic
thought.
Ghazanfars claim that there was economic theory in the works of medieval Muslim jurists and theologians has concrete methodological implications for how we should approach Islamic historical sources. In studies of
Islamic history and historiography, there is an interesting divergence
regarding whether the medieval sources are analytical. The only Muslim
historical writer accredited with an explicitly dened analytical model is
Ibn Khaldn in the Muqaddima, the methodological part of his history of
states and dynasties, in which he developed his famous model of power
relations between states and tribes. Ibn Khaldns predecessors, i.e. the
earlier medieval Muslim historians, are not accredited with analysis in the
sense of explaining historical developments through economic theory or
through a theory of society and political power, as Ibn Khaldn did in the
Muqaddima.18
However, even though there is broad consensus that only Ibn Khaldn
can be accredited with developing an abstract analytical model, scholars
perceptions of the relationship between the substance of Ibn Khaldns
model and the thought of previous thinkers and historians dier signicantly. Regarding Ibn Khaldns economic thought, Ghazanfar has pointed
out that while Joseph Spengler saw him as part of an established Arabic
literary body of economic thought, David Boulakia concluded that he was
without predecessors and without successors.19 Similarly but from the
perspective of history, Franz Rosenthal and Chase Robinson have described
Ibn Khaldns 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-Azmeh
in his critical essays does not attribute economic or social theory to medieval Muslim historians, 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 Spenglers claim through the several studies of pre-Ibn Khaldun
economic thinkers included in his edited volume.
20)
Rosenthal, 1968: 115-8; Robinson, 2003: 102. Robinson in particular has described the
entire 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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125

al-Azmeh and Tarif Khalidi emphasise instead that Ibn Khaldns analytical model was not the appearance out of nowhere of a modern sociological
theory, but that he drew in all essentials on the medieval historical discipline and its focus on the state and the preconditions for political power.21
In particular, Khalidi has pointed out that Ibn Khaldn relied on al-Tabars
(d. 923 A.D.) History of the Messengers and the Kings for his account of the
early caliphate; in Khalidis words, the main dierence between the two
historians was:
Where Tabar accumulates akhbr, layer upon layer of transmission which the reader
is left to judge for himself with only minimal hints from the author, Ibn Khaldn
projects the [historical] events [. . .] onto a far larger tableau where the nature and
appeal of power and religion to dierently ordained segments of a given society must
be taken into account in any attempt to understand the signicance of events.22

However, even though Khalidi points out that there is a relationship

between al-Tabars history and Ibn Khalduns analytical model in terms of
historical information and focus on political power, he still does not
accredit al-Tabar with historical analysis along the lines of Ibn Khaldn.
Here more will be made of the relationship between the two historians. It
is suggested that since the facts which form the basis of Ibn Khaldns
analysishow power is acquired, how it is maintained and how it is lost,
including the economic preconditions of each state concerned23are contained in al-Tabars history, al-Tabars work reects political economy to
the same degree as Ibn Khaldns Muqaddima does. The most signicant
dierence between the two works is thus formal, not substantial: the former
provides analysis framed in narrative form while the latter is discursive;
this dierence in form is also expressed in Ibn Khaldns own oeuvre, as
only the Muqaddima is discursive while his history proper is narrative, like
all the other earlier medieval histories.24
historians who are seen asand saw themselves astransmitters of historical information
rather than creative writers; ibid.: 83-102. From Robinsons perspective, Ibn Khalduns
independent and analytical approach appears as individualistic in a manner that is exceptional compared to his predecessors.
21)
Al-Azmeh, 2003: 9-42; Khalidi, 1994.
22)
Ibid.: 227.
23)
Ibid.: 225.
24)
Concerning the formal dierence between Ibn Khalduns Muqaddima and his history,
see al-Azmeh, 2003: 9-11, esp. 10.

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U. Mrtensson / JESHO 54 (2011) 117-131

This is not to reduce the novelty of Ibn Khaldns analytical model, only
to suggest that it should be seen as part of an evolving science. Boulakias,
Rosenthals and Robinsons approaches imply that Ibn Khaldns Muqaddima came out of nowhere as far as its analysis is concerned. Al-Azmehs,
Khalidis, and Ghazanfars 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-Tabars history and the other universal histories of
the ninth and tenth centuries also constituted a landmark in the development of Islamic history, as they subsumed the available historical information at the time into histories of imperial government and religion, from
ancient Persia to the Islamic caliphates. Ibn Khaldn in his turn was able
to develop his model because he had at his disposal a plethora of universal
and local histories produced until his own day. Since Ibn Khaldn had
access to this corpus, he would have been able to identify patterns across
the historical sources to an even greater extent than the earlier historians.
Al-Azmehs and Khalidis insight that Ibn Khaldns Muqaddima is a
discursive expression of the facts contained in his history implies that
even the narrative pre-Ibn Khaldn histories might be analytically motivated. And if these same histories provided the information for Ibn
Khaldn, economic issues must be part of that analysis. A quick glance
into a primer in economicsin this case Economics and Economic Change:
Macroeconomics25suces to make one aware that medieval historians
such as al-Tabar were indeed occupied with the same basic economic factors as modern economists, i.e. the ow of money, goods, and services
between households, rms (farms, industry, trade), and the stateincluding, not least, the role of the law for directing these ows. Thus, to borrow
the words of Tarif Khalidi, our task is not only to repeat what Ibn Khaldn
didto bring out of the medieval sources the nature and appeal of power
and religion to dierently ordained segments of [. . .] society26but also
to show how the authors of medieval sources analyse this appeal in terms
of the political economy. The historical sources thus contain information
that is already part of an analysis which in its turn is shaped by each histo-

25)
26)

Dawson et al., 2006: 324-5.

Khalidi, 1994: 227.

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127

rians perception of the political economy, its problems, and the solutions
to these problems.27
In the opening article, Economic Performance and Economic Growth
in the Early Islamic World, Maya Shatzmiller argues that the growing
interest in the economic theory of institutions and their role in economic
growth has been detrimental in the Islamic case. It shifted the scholarly
methodology from the need to scrupulously provide empirically based
research, to theoretical models which favoured sweeping generalizations,
e.g. about the negative roles of the Islamic state and legal institution. The
approach proposed by Shatzmiller is to make more accurate, empirically
based examinations of both the process and the role of Islamic institutions
in periods of economic growth, than the theoretical and model-oriented
approach currently in vogue. Shatzmiller asserts that economic growth was
visible in the key indicators of the Caliphates economy in the period
ca. 750 to ca. 1100, and she supports the claim by pointing to an increase
in monetization, money supply and circulation, formation of credit institutions; development and elaboration of state scal institutions with an
ecient system of tax collection; creation of legal institutions to uphold
property rights; limited demographic growth from the internal population
but one oset by importing of slaves and internal migration; increased
output in the manufacturing sector as a result of increased division of
labour and literacy of the workforce; an increased volume of trade, ecient
markets, commercial techniques and the development of ecient transactions costs. The conclusion is that there was nothing intrinsic to Islamic
institutions that impaired economic growth.
The second article, The Papyrus Industry in the Early Islamic Era, by
Matt Malczycki, critically explores the state of the art in research on the
papyrus industry in early Islamic Egypt. The pioneering works of Karabacek and Grohmann remain the standard in the eld, with their claim
that just as in Ancient and Byzantine times the Islamic state (ruled from
Baghdad, in this case) maintained a monopoly over Egyptian papyrus production. While little new evidence has come to light, Malczycki argues
that existing evidence can be re-interpreted so as to yield more nuanced
results. Malczycki concludes that there is no evidence for monopoly over
papyrus production by the Abbasidor even the Umayyadstate. Instead,
27)
For early statements of problems pertaining to treating medieval historians as merely
transmitters of neutral facts, see Hodgson, 1968; Waldman, 1980.

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U. Mrtensson / JESHO 54 (2011) 117-131

documents show that even as Egypt as province was becoming increasingly

independent of the central Abbasid state, the Abbasids maintained a contract with Egyptian papyrus producers which secured a high price for the
producers in return for the best quality papyrus. This contract was not
imposed but a mutually benecent business agreement, and it did not
imply Abbasid control over papyrus production and the market. There was
another, equally free market where the general public bought cheap, lower
quality papyrus. Malczyckis approach produces quite a dierent picture of
the Abbasid states involvement in production and selling of papyrus than
that which emerges from Karabaceks and Grohmanns works.
While Shatzmiller and Malczycki are thus concerned with the real political economy, the two remaining articles are more historiographical,
exploring the political and economic analysis expressed in the medieval
sources. Al-Tabars History of the Messengers and the Kings is one of the
most consulted sources for Sassanid and Islamic history to 915 A.D. Existing studies agree that al-Tabars History is primarily religious and contains no socio-economic analysis of history. In Its the economy, stupid:
al-Tabars analysis of the free rider problem in the Abbasid caliphate,
Ulrika Mrtensson makes a twofold argument to the contrary. Firstly, she
holds that al-Tabars provided a free rider-analysis of which policies in
taxation and law that strengthened or weakened the imperial states control 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. The conclusion is that al-Tabar saw the mish a tax system
and rule of law as necessary policies for any state aspiring to imperial
scale, but that he was pessimistic about developments during his own time
since his favoured policy was not applied. Thus the History already constitutes 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 political
economy?
Michele Campopianos study Land Tax: al l-mish a and muqsama
Legal Theory and Balance of Social Forces in Early Medieval Iraq (6th10th Centuries) is a forceful argument for the need to ground any analysis
of tax policies in the given societys specic mode of production. Consequently, approaches such as those of Ghazanfar et al. which compare medieval Islamic economics with modern counterparts easily overlook factors
which are peculiar to the whole political economy and which are the most
signicant motivators for policy decisions. Campopiano demonstrates this
through a detailed analysis of the political deliberations which motivated a

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129

number of Muslim jurists and historians between the late 700s and early
900s (especially prominent gures such as Ab Ubayd, Ab Ysuf and
Qudma Ibn Ja far) to recommend to the Abbasid caliphs the opposite tax
system to mish a, namely muqsama. Campopiano analyses the jurists tax
policy in terms of John Haldons concept of tributary mode of production, the economic organization based on a system of surplus extraction
from peasant production ultimately reliant on coercion. Tax and rent are
the two possible forms taken by this coercive surplus extraction. The
muqsama, as described by the jurists who promoted it, favoured a new
redistribution of surplus between the state (tax) and the landowners
(rent), in order to improve political relations between the Abbasid dynasty
that had just come to power, and the absentee landlords on whom the state
depended politically. Thus, just as in the case of al-Tabars promotion of
mish a, these Abbasid jurists recommendations are based on their analysis
of what economic forces might best serve their political considerations.
Taken together, these four studies provide snapshots of the economy
and the political economy under the Abbasid caliphate. While Shatzmiller
provides hard facts about the economy and the law as part of a critique of
contemporary decline theories, and Malczycki dismantles the classic theory about state monopoly over papyrus production and sales, Mrtensson
and Campopiano provide dierent examples of how misleading it might
be to treat the sources as containers of neutral information, when in fact
their authors were making particular analytical points. All four contributions thus complicate easy applications of the label Islamic to the forces
involved in the political economy of Muslim societies. Regarding the role
of Islam, the articles show that while religion provides ethical norms for
rulers and subjects, the laws associated with Islam were no obstacle to
production and a free market. While the medieval historian al-Tabar did
establish causal connections between the degree to which rulers and subjects adhered to Islamic norms and the development of the political economy, it is equally clear that he reckoned the economy to be the historically
decisive force. If his main question was how to manage the economy, he
saw adherence to Islamic norms as crucial for success. Al-Tabar concluded
that Islamic norms were not adhered to, neither by rulers, administrators
or landlords, and that this circumstance had a decisive negative impact on
the caliphates political economy. Thus, if one uses al-Tabars History as
ones main source of information while assuming that Islam determined
the development of the political economy, one needs to consider al-Tabars
own analysis, that it was the absence of Islam as normnot lawthat

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U. Mrtensson / JESHO 54 (2011) 117-131

determined what he perceived as a negative development of the political

economy. And he conceived of the economy as distinct from religion: the
economy depended on such matters as land tax and the particular administrative system for levying, collecting and redistributing tax revenue. Religion mattered only in so far as it provided the norm that would make one
prefer one tax system over another.
Other factors that complicate assigning to Islam a denable causal role
for the political economy are the issues of historical continuity, regional
identities and loyalties, and social conict. In some contexts the medieval
historians and jurists conceived of Islam as the continuation of regional
governmental and administrative norms, whereas in other contexts Islam
was portrayed as a break with regional practices and norms, for example in
contexts of conict between the imperial state and a provincial governor or
a tribe. Both the historians themselves and the political actors they reported
about dened Islam as the norms that supported their particular political
and economic concerns, which shows that Islam simultaneously refers to
several conicting political theories and interest groups. From this viewpoint, the main problem with seeing Islam as determinant of political and
economic development and of the workings of institutions is that the complex medieval Islamic societies and economies are reduced to a holistic
organism and thought-mode.
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