Debt: The First 5000 Years - autonomous learning

THE MIDDLE AGES 275
since the dawn of recorded history. Finally, Islam strictly forbade usury,
which it interpreted to mean any arrangement in which money
or a commodity was lent at interest, for any purpose whatsoever.68
In a way, one can see the establishment of Islamic courts as the
ultimate triumph of the patriarchal rebellion that had begun so many
thousands of years before: of the ethos of the desert or the steppe,
real or imagined, even as the faithful did their best to keep the heavily
armed descendants of actual nomads confined to their camps and palaces.
It was made possible by a profound shift in class alliances. The
great urban civilizations of the Middle East had always been dominated
by a de facto alliance between administrators and merchants, both
of whom kept the rest of the population either in debt peonage or in
constant peril of falling into it. In converting to Islam, the commercial
classes, so long the arch-villains in the eyes of ordinary farmers and
townsfolk, effectively agreed to change sides, abandon all their most
hated practices, and become instead the leaders of a society that now
defined itself against the state.
It was possible because from the beginning, Islam had a positive
view toward commerce. Mohammed himself had begun his adult life as
a merchant; and no Islamic thinker ever treated the honest pursuit of
profit as itself intrinsically immoral or inimical to faith. Neither did the
prohibitions against usury-which for the most part were scrupulously
enforced, even in the case of commercial loans-in any sense mitigate
against the growth of commerce, or even the development of complex
credit instruments.69 To the contrary, the early centuries of the Caliphate
saw an immediate efflorescence in both.
Profits were still possible because Islamic jurists were careful to
allow for certain service fees, and other considerations-notably, allowing
goods bought on credit to be priced slightly higher than those
bought for cash-that ensured that bankers and traders still had an
incentive to provide credit services.70 Still, these incentives were never
enough to allow banking to become a full-time occupation: instead,
almost any merchant operating on a sufficiently large scale could be
expected to combine banking with a host of other moneymaking activities.
As a result, credit instruments soon became so essential to trade
that almost anyone of prominence was expected to keep most of his
or her wealth on deposit, and to make everyday transactions, not by
counting out coins, but by inkpot and paper. Promissory notes were
called sakk, "checks", or ruq' a, "notes." Checks could bounce. One
German historian, picking through a multitude of old Arabic literary
sources, recounts that: