Debt: The First 5000 Years - autonomous learning

THE MIDDLE AGES 271
The Near West:
Islam (Capital as Credit)
Prices depend on the will of Allah; it is
he who raises and lowers them.
-Attributed to the
Prophet Mohammed
The profit of each partner must be in
proportion to the share of each in the
adventure.
Islamic legal precept
For most of the Middle Ages, the economic nerve center of the world
economy and the source of its most dramatic financial innovations was
neither China nor India, but the West, which, from the perspective of
the rest of the world, meant the world of Islam. During most of this
period, Christendom, lodged in the declining empire of Byzantium and
the obscure semi-barbarous principalities of Europe, was largely insignificant.
Since people who live in Western Europe have so long been in
the habit of thinking of Islam as the very definition of "the East,"
it's easy to forget that, from the perspective of any other great tradition,
the difference between Christianity and Islam is almost negligible.
One need only pick up a book on, say, Medieval Islamic philosophy
to discover disputes between the Baghdad Aristoteleans and the neo­
Pythagoreans in Basra, or Persian Neo-Platonists-essentially, scholars
doing the same work of trying to square the revealed religion tradition
beginning with Abraham and Moses with the categories of Greek
philosophy, and doing so in a larger context of mercantile capitalism,
universalistic missionary religion, scientific rationalism, poetic celebrations
of romantic love, and periodic waves of fascination with mystical
wisdom from the East.
From a world-historical perspective, it seems much more sensible
to see Judaism, Christianity, and Islam as three different manifestations
of the same great Western intellectual tradition, which for most of
human history has centered on Mesopotamia and the Levant, extending
into Europe as far as Greece and into Africa as far as Egypt, and
sometimes farther west across the Mediterranean or down the Nile.
Economically, most of Europe was until perhaps the High Middle Ages