For
this post, instead of giving reflections on research or on writing in Indian
Ocean legal history, I thought I’d write about something lots of us do and talk
about: teaching. It is, after all, that time in the semester, isn’t it? I mean,
is it ever not that time in the semester? Okay, truthfully, it’s not that time
in the semester for me – I’m on sabbatical. But it would probably normally be
that time of the semester!
Seeing
as it could be “that time” of “the semester,” I thought I’d share some thoughts
about a course I designed a couple of years ago that has now made it into my
regular rotation at UVA; a course I call “The Economic History of the Islamic
World to c. 1800.” The challenge in designing this particular course was that
for most of Muslim history, the materials historians rely on to write economic
history – that is, data – is not readily available (if at all). The difficulty
is only compounded by the fact that the economic history of the Islamic world
is not considered a particularly vibrant field of scholarship. The tendency has
been to focus primarily on intellectual history, and to a lesser extent on
imperial and social history.
Why am
I telling readers of LHB this? It’s because really, I wasn’t interested in
putting together a traditional economic history course anyway. Although I
self-identify as a historian of economic life, my approach to thinking about
these issues bears the imprint of my reading and writing in legal history. What
I wanted, then, was to teach a course that thinks about the economic history of
the Islamic world through the prism of law: to tell an economic history that is
qualitative rather than quantitative, and to take law seriously as a component
of economic life in the region. The goal was in part to get students to
appreciate (and hopefully engage with!) the range of different legal materials
there are for telling the history of production, exchange, consumption,
taxation, etc. in the Islamic world. The other goal, though – and for many of
my students, the principal outcome – was to get them to more fully embrace (and
also engage with!) the link between law and economic life, in and beyond the
Islamic world.
The
course unfolds over four broad periods. The first covers pre-Islamic Arabia and
its links with nearby regions, and then transitions into the moment of revelation
and the economic and social formations of the earliest Muslim communities (that
is, the history of Muslims under Muhammad and his companions). During that
period, we look at the earliest sources of law in Islam (the Quran and the
Hadiths) and we see how contemporary thinkers articulated a body of legal
reasoning that sat alongside them. The history is one of uncertainty, in which
early Muslims grasped at multiple sources of “law” and tried to braid them into
a legal framework that they thought best approximated the Prophet’s vision.
The second,
much longer unit looks at early and medieval Muslim imperial expansion and the
economic and legal transformations that accompanied it. We chart the expansion
of Muslim polities across North Africa and Southern Europe on the one hand, and
into Asia on the other, and the transformations in agriculture, commerce, and
industry that accompanied that process. Alongside that, we look at texts that
grapple with basic questions of law in a period of social and political transformation.
We explore the articulation of Islamic jurisprudence and the development of institutional
structures to legal learning, but also look at the production of texts that regulate
matters of taxation, marketplace activity, sales and partnerships, and more.
These
themes carry over into the third unit, which explores the rise and development
of the three Muslim “gunpowder empires” – the Ottomans, Safavids, and the
Mughals. For this unit, the key matters are of political economy: the taxation structures
that the empires developed, and the institutional frameworks they rested on.
Here, we look at how ideas about law and political economy circulated in texts
and through mobile bureaucrats who crossed imperial borders.
And
in the final unit – really, the shortest of all, since it butts up so closely
with the end of the course – we look at the early encounters between European
travelers, companies, and consuls and this world of empire, trade, and of
course law. We read closely the texts that these individuals produced: not just
travel narratives, but translations of Islamic legal texts meant for
administration in courts in, say, East India Company territories, and we think
of those within the framework of a much longer history of the production of
legal ideas in the Islamic world.
I
stop the course at 1800 for a few inter-related reasons: the industrial revolution,
the transformation of imperial politics around the world, colonialism, and the
tremendous implications all of this had for law and economic life in the Islamic
world. All of that could – and should, and maybe will! – end up filling a
course on its own.
The
challenge of putting together a big survey course like this one has (for the
most part) been a generative one. It has forced me to think about broad narratives
in legal and economic history, and how to balance those with wanting to have
student engage with a very clearly defined body of primary sources. In a sense,
it is to think about two distinct axes of history: one on trade and empire, and
the other on the production of law, and the multiple points at which those
stories intersect – but also the times in which they don’t, and perhaps shouldn’t.
Some of my more traditionally-trained Islamic Studies colleagues will likely
recoil at the idea behind the course (thankfully nobody has said anything to me
so far!) but the experiment has been a useful one – and a popular one to boot!
Fahad Ahmad Bishara
