4. A Word on the Islamic Impact in the Field
First, return must be made to Constable and the subject of Funduqs seen above. Once the Muslims had borrowed and transformed the institution, then, there happened the crucial shift: the West (and in this case Byzantium, too) borrowing from Islam that same item, and then drawing the full benefits out of it.
Constable resumes:
Meanwhile, pandocheions became less common in regions still under Byzantine rulers. In the eleventh century, however, a new commercial and regulatory facility called the foundax appeared in Byzantium. This was modeled on the contemporary Arabic fonduq rather than on the earlier Greek pandocheion, and it demonstrates the ongoing ability of words and institutions to be transferred back and forth across linguistic and cultural borders.
Western European merchants encountered the fonduq when they began to do business in Muslim markets in the eleventh and twelfth centuries…The arrival of foreign Christian traders led to the development of specialized facilities (fondacos), modeled on the fonduq, to accommodate, regulate, and segregate western business in Islamic ports. These new fondacos facilitated commercial exchange, profit, and taxation, provided space for foreigners’ lodging and storage, ensured security for both Europeans and local communities, and gave foreign communities autonomy under the oversight of Muslim authorities. Although fondaco buildings were owned and maintained by local administrations, western merchants were allowed to practice their faith, follow their own customs.
Western fondacos in Muslim cities were critical elements in enabling the cross-cultural exchange that fueled the medieval commercial revolution in Europe, and their presence helps to explain why European Christians were able to operate in an Islamic context… Christian traders found it both profitable and congenial to do business in Muslim markets…. In contrast, European cities were not well adapted to providing for the needs of non-Christian traders. With few exceptions, a visiting Muslim in Mediterranean Europe would have had nowhere to stay that was acceptable to him and to the local population, nor any of the religious and dietary facilities necessary to make his visit comfortable.
Starting in the eleventh century, at the same time as Christian commercial growth in the Mediterranean world, Christian political and military expansion in Spain, Sicily, and the Latin east brought Islamic cities and their urban institutions (including the fonduq) under new Christian governments. Christian rulers, like their Muslim counterparts, immediately perceived the utility of fonduqs and judiciously preserved elements of their fiscal and regulatory function…. In the Iberian Peninsula, through the late thirteenth century, Ferdinand III and Alfonso X of Castile, and their contemporary James I of Aragon, incorporated albondigas and fondechs within the economic administration of their newly expanded kingdoms…. Similar integration occurred in the wake of political change in Sicily and south Italy, where rulers from Robert Guiscard to Frederick II took a vantage of preexisting fonduqs by reforming them to fit current needs. In the Crusader states too, fondes and fondacos in Acre, Tyre, Antioch, and other cities played an important role in the commercial and fiscal administration of the realm.”[146]
Whilst Islam borrowed and improved, and then passed on, there were also, as is very often forgotten, or disregarded, specific elements of modern sciences and civilization which were purely Islamic from the first to the last, directly inspired by the faith in particular, the life and deeds of the Prophet, and also, to some degree, the Arab milieu. Let’s look at the subject of trade, and how the whole matter would have never been the same without Islam, and how Islam stands at the very centre of the rise of modern trade. Of course, a whole book would be necessary if a detailed analysis was made. As mentioned a few headings above, such books such as by Gene Heck, and Paul Egon Hubinger already exist and cover a great deal. Here is only the briefest of outlines.
Beginning with the Qur’an, which, is full of summons encouraging Muslims to trade as to mention commercial profit under the name of ‘God’s bounty’ (62: 9-10).[147] The Prophet is also reported to have said:
Merchants are the messengers of this world as well as the trusted servants of Allah on earth.”
“The trustworthy merchant will sit within the shadow of Allah’s throne on Judgment Day.”
Cahen points out to some interesting issues:
Islam was born in a mercantile milieu. Muhammad was a merchant and was not troubled by it. Several of his companions were merchants, and if evidently certain practices of the surrounding states were unknown to them, the reverse was perhaps also true.[148] In any case there was no question of a basic Muslim incapacity to trade.”[149]
The recording of business transactions is a central element in the Qur’an (surah II, verse 282 ff). This practice of recording was bound to impact on commercial relations. This, Lieber insists, was one most important contribution of the Muslim world to medieval economic life, as it led to the development of commercial methods based on writing and recording.[150] This was made possible by the high degree of literacy of the Oriental merchant of that time, which, in its turn, was encouraged by the fact that relatively cheap writing materials had long been available in this part of the world.[151]
Islam did not just revive and stimulate trade it also provided the very fundamentals and mechanisms of modern trade. Chance, Braudel holds, has preserved letters of Jewish traders of Cairo from the times of the First Crusade (launched in 1095), which show that all methods and instruments of credit, and all forms of trade associations were known already, and were not invented subsequently in Europe as was asserted by many.[152] Udovitch insists on the fundamental point that it is Islamic law and the customary practice in the Muslim world, which provided merchants and traders with the commercial techniques to structure and facilitate trade and exchange.[153] Long before the West, Udovitch adds, Muslim merchants had at their disposal accepted legal mechanisms for extending credit and for transferring and exchanging currencies over long distances.[154] The “credit transfer” (hawalah) was a highly flexible monetary instrument. Often used in conjunction with the mudarabah, the medieval Muslim investor could employ it as a debt transfer mechanism as well as a credit documentation tool, using it to empower an agent to collect a loan repayment from one of his debtors, and then immediately committing the proceeds to a mudarabah investment, thereby creating a hybrid “debt/credit” commercial contract.[155] Al-Shaybani explains that a business agent could legitimately employ such a document because it was part of “conventional merchandising practice,” and it also appears to have been a highly effective instrument for facilitating capital flows in international trading as well.[156]
The burgeoning demands for credit occasioned by very rapid commercial expansion led the function of “money-changer” (sarraf) to evolve into that of full-fledged banker (jahbadh).[157] Such bankers were not only involved in financing private sector economic ventures, it seems, but also in providing “tax anticipation notes” to government – advancing large sums to pay current bureaucratic expenses secured by future tax revenues.[158] During the rule of Harun al-Rashid (r. 786-809), under a highly developed system, a Muslim businessman could cash a cheque in Canton on his bank account in Baghdad.[159] The main role was played by Jewish bankers who, in the entourage of both Caliph and ministers in Baghdad, were entrusted with the keeping of both the jewels of the crown and prisoners of the state.[160] The title of Court bankers (Jahabidhat al-Hadra) was granted by the state chancellery under Caliph Muqtadir to two or three Jewish bankers in Baghdad.[161] In fact the development of international banking,[162] Massignon explains, has origins with that Jewish element serving the Abbasid Caliphate in the 9th century.[163] This was about five centuries before a banking system of worth appeared in Western Christendom.[164]
Islamic banking impacted directly on the West via the commercial transactions between the East and the Christian world.[165] The Jewish communities took their practice from the Muslim milieus into that of their communities in the Christian West, especially as Jewish bankers associated themselves with others from their own community[166] to form groups of investors willing to support large ventures that included regular caravan journeys and maritime expeditions to Africa, India and China.[167]
Very early in Islam, business was generally conducted through the medium of brokers or agents, who were well versed in the trading usages of the place. It was essential to obtain advice concerning the trustworthiness of local merchants, since sales were often on credit, or goods were purchased for future delivery.[168] These brokers sometimes enjoyed a semi-official status, according to Al-Muqaddasi, who wrote in the 10thcentury[169] While in the Eastern world the services of a broker were mandatory for the foreign merchant in his dealings with the customs authorities and with local traders, the appointment of a dragoman and broker for the local Italian communities was, by custom, subject to Italian approval.[170] The brokers, known as simsar in Arabic, were organized in powerful guilds. The institution was taken over by the Italians, together with its name, and although the first reference is to a censarius, in Genoa in 1154, henceforth the brokers were generally known as sensali.[171] In Venice the Germans had to transact all their business through the sensali, on whose appointment, however, they had no influence.[172] The Arab commodity broker dealing in such risks, the simsar has, thus, become the sensali, whose function, to sell products at public auction, in Arabic called halqah, became in Italian galega.[173]
 Figure 6. Title page of an Arabic manuscript copy of al-Khwarizmi’s Kitab al-jabr wa-‘l-muqabala (Source) |
There is a rich Muslim literature dealing with commerce, which eventually was at the source of similar Western (Italian, primarily, literature). Rosen in his 19thcentury translation of al-Khwarizmi’s (780-850) algebra, makes the point that al-Khwarizmi intended to teach:
What is easiest and most useful in arithmetic, such as men constantly require in cases of inheritance, legacies, partition, lawsuits, and trade, and in all their dealings with one another…”[174]
Leonardo Fibonacci’s Liber Abaci of 1202, which was largely inspired by al-Khwarizmi is divided into fifteen chapters, some chapters dealing specifically with, as follows: Chapter 8: Prices of goods; 9: Barter; 10: Partnership; 11:Alligation; 12: Solutions to Problems.[175]
During the 12th century the Pisans, Florentines, Genoese, Venetians, and Sicilians had trade establishments in the main city ports of the Maghrib including the Algerian city of Bejaia.[176] Genoa had in 1164 appointed a regular official at Bejaia to supervise trade there; he, perhaps, acting as the first ‘colonial official’ of modern times.[177] Pisa immediately followed suite. The Pisan office had an important repercussion on European culture, for in 1175 its holder was one Bonacci.[178] It was his son Leonardo (c. 1170-1248) who was to show himself the most gifted mathematician of the Middle Age.[179] Leonardo wrote Liber abacci in 1202 where he advocates the Arabic system, which was the first European scientific appreciation of the method.[180] In his Liber abacci Leonardo gives, amongst his examples, a method for calculating the capacity value of alum in a cargo.[181] Arabic numerals were first used in Europe precisely around that time by notaries charged with drawing up commercial contracts for use in the Islamic world.[182]
Al-Khwarizmi’s is hardly the sole treatise dealing with the issue. Sarton mentions four Spanish Muslim works on mu’amalat (Commercial Dealings Involving Arithmetic) that include works by Al-Majriti (d 1007) wherein it is said that he wrote a book on the whole of the science of numbers which is called among us al-mu’amalat. Al-Zahrawi (936-1013), al-Majriti’s contemporary, wrote Kitab sharif fi’l mu’amalat al tariq al-burhan (the Noble Book on Mu’amalat in the Demonstrative Manner). The other two were Al-Tunbari (d. 1025) and Ibn al-Samh.[183] Sarton insists that due to the fact that all four works came from Spanish Islam, they might well have been very influential on the development of medieval commerce and the transmission of Muslim commercial methods to the Christian world; a transmission which is very much substantiated by the presence of many Arabic words in the Spanish vocabulary.[184]
There is also a considerable amount of Muslim writing defining, economic activity, besides establishing early known economic laws. As Gene Heck points out, Muslim writers such as Muhammad B. Hassan al-Shaybani in Kitab al Iktisab fi al-Rizk al-Mustalab and al-Dimashki in Kitab Al-Ishara Ila Mahasin al-Tijara began formulating then very novel and profound free market economic precept-economic theories that would shape the then known intellectual world- and then, more than half a millennium later, would be invented by Adam Smith and others in the Renaissance reformationist Christian West.[185] Al-Dimashki’s guide: Kitab al-Ishara (The Book of Guidance)[186] begins with an essay on the true nature of wealth, and then proceeds to discuss the necessity of money; how to test a currency; how to evaluate commodities; their prices; how to discern good from defective merchandise; investment in real estate; handicrafts and manufactures; advice for salespeople; the advantages of business; the different types of merchants and their duties; how to avoid fraud; how to keep records, wealth protection, and so on and so forth….[187] Lewis, in this respect, remarks:
It would be easy to assemble other traditions, and writings of ascetic tendency, that say just the opposite and condemn commerce and those engaged in it. It is, however, noteworthy that centuries before Christian writers were prepared to defend and define the ethics of commerce against ascetic criticism, Muslim writers were willing to do so, and that even a major theologian like al-Ghazali (d.1111) could include, in his religious writings, a portrait of the ideal merchant and a defence of commerce as a way of preparing oneself for the world to come.”[188]
Amongst these Muslim writers who had an impact on subsequent Western (Italian) authors is Al-Dimashki, whose Kitab al-Tijara shows a very close relationship, in technique and approach to the subsequent Pegalotti’s Practica della Mercatura.[189] A great deal of the merchandise mentioned is the same, as is a lot of the technical terminology, the advice to businessmen, and many of the forms of business relationships.[190]
One instance of Islamic impact was through the office of the State Inspector the Muhtasib. The Spanish Christian the mustasaf was a carbon copy of the muhtasib whom he emulated in duties, judicial procedure, and jurisdiction.[191] Indeed, in those crafts-and there were many whose technologies were derived from the Islamic world the mustasaf continued to enforce exactly the same regulations as Andalusi muhtasibs had centuries before.[192] To cite only one example, the specifications for manufacturing cork-soled shoes, called alcorques, were the same in the Book of Hisba composed by the Malagan muhtasib al-Saqati in the 11thcentury as in the 14th century regulations of the mustasaf of Valencia.[193]
In the East, during the crusades, the same institution was borrowed by the Christians. The regulation of the markets was put by the crusaders under an official called a mathesep, from the Arabic Muhtasib.[194] He had charge of the standard weights and measures, inspected streets and bazaars, and regulated the trade of bakers, butchers, cooks, and other food sellers, besides inspecting doctors, oculists, and chemists, horse surgeons, money changers, the slave market, and the market for horses and mules.[195]
The description of the Cyprus official gives a more precise definition of the duties of the office:
The office of mathessep is that he ought to go in the morning to the market places and to see to it that no fraud be done by the sellers . . [And he should see to] the weight of the bread; … And then he ought to make a turn through the town, looking out for the above-mentioned things and [seeing] that no misdemeanours be done, such as rapes and thefts and brawls, which he ought to find and resolve.”[196]
The mathessep of Cyprus carried out the market and moral-police functions characteristic of all muhtasibs. He appears not to have had the power of summary punishment, however, but had instead to bring offenders before the viscount.[197] The office survived into the time of Venetian rule (1489- 1570), when the mathessep was entrusted with the “superintendence of the markets, prices, and correctional police.”[198] The muhtasib, Glick points out, would appear to have been well suited to the requirements of medieval town life. Europeans of various cultures were quick to adopt the office and make it serve different social needs admirably.[199]
The manner Muslim rulers managed public affairs in Spain, Durant claims, was the most competent in the Western world of that age, maintaining rational and humane laws, effective administration and a well-organized judiciary.[200] The conquered, in their internal affairs, were governed by their own laws and their own officials, whilst towns were well policed; markets, weights and measures were effectively supervised, and a regular census of population and property was kept.[201] It is from that era, Letourneau notes, that a large Castilian vocabulary borrowed from Arabic came about to describe administrative functions, technical details, and other matters of civilisation.[202] Over a six-hundred-year period, Glick observes, the borrowing of terms related to social and administrative institutions by the Christians in Spain was pre-eminent in the process, an indication, in the first two periods, of the modelling of a less highly structured society after a more highly structured one.[203]
Many Muslim social practices and customs also affected the West considerably. Castro has made a lengthy study of such an impact on Spain, which will be seen further on. Here, it is worth noting with Howard how aspects of the development of Piazza San Marco in Venice hint at Eastern inspirations.[204] Later chroniclers attributed to the generosity of Doge Sebastiano Ziani (1172-8) the enlargement of the space of the Piazza in front of the Church of San Marco to serve a variety of civic, religious and charitable functions, such as a hospital, inns, shops and lodgings, as if imposing the ideal of the Islamic waqf (or legal endowment) on the memory of this act of beneficence by a committed merchant.[205]
It would require a vast amount of space to study the role Muslim scholarship had in shaping many of our modern ideas. Al-Farabi, Al-Ghazali, Ibn Khaldun, and others, are, indeed, behind many of our supposedly Western concepts. Here, we examine briefly the contribution of one of Islam’s great scholars: Al-Razi, better known for his medical and chemical works. Al-Razi, Myers observes, is noted for his The Spiritual Physic, which shows him a thoughtful psychologist and outstanding physician.[206] Some of his ideas have a strikingly modern ring:
Mutual helpfulness is closely related to division of labour. Each man must eat, be clothed, have shelter and security, though he may contribute directly to only one of these activities. The good life is thus attained by division of labour and mutual helpfulness. Each labours at a single task and is simultaneously servant and served, works for others and has others work for him. As a healthy and effective social organization is possible only on the basis of cooperation and mutual help, it is every man’s duty to give assistance to his fellow man in one way or another and to work to the best of his abilities to that end, avoiding at the same time the two extremes of excess and deficiency.
If he toils all his life to earn more than he requires or needs for his old age without disposing of his earnings in such ways as will yield him comfort, he is really the loser and has enslaved himself; for he will have given away his own energy without obtaining in return a proper compensation. Such a man has not bartered toil against toil and service against service; his toil will have yielded profit only to his fellows, while their toil on his behalf will have passed him by.
The man who follows this rule in earning his living will have received in exchange toil for toil and service for service.”[207]
Figure 7. al-Razi’s Kitab fi ‘l-jadari (Source)
Al Razi’s expressions “cooperation,” “mutual help,” “mutual assistance”, Myers points out, have had a revival in Pëtr Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid, published in 1902 as refutation to Darwin’s theory of the survival of the fittest.[208]While the Darwinists declared competition and struggle for existence to be the governing law of nature, Kropotkin, like al Razi, emphasized the principle of mutual aid in which he no less saw a fundamental law of nature.[209]
In this respect, return, however, must be made to Ibn Khadun and these very interesting lines by Alfred Gierer:
Ibn Khaldun’s notes agree surprisingly well with more elaborate and formalized modern concepts on the roots of human cooperation in descent, familiarity, reciprocity, and empathy. The agreement cannot be contingent, but results from a combination of intelligence, exceptionally wide and diverse experiences, social and political expertise, and a capability for conceptual generalization. In terms of philosophy of science, it is remarkable to which extent basic anthropological and socio- logical insights can be obtained by this combination. Though Ibn Khaldun could not draw on modern evolutionary theory or on experimental sociology and psychology, his style of thought favoured a systems approach in a rather modern sense of the term, combining what we call biological and social aspects of human nature. It is this capability and willingness to integrate that, in retrospect, appears as his most creative contribution to understanding human cooperativeness.”[21
