Debt: The First 5000 Years - autonomous learning

THE MIDDLE AGES 279
the highest expression of the human freedom and communal solidarity,
and thus to be protected assiduously from state intrusion.
There was a particular hostility to anything that smacked of pricefixing.
One much-repeated story held that the Prophet himself had
refused to force merchants to lower prices during a shortage in the
city of Medina, on the grounds that doing so would be sacrilegious,
since, in a free-market situation, "prices depend on the will of God."82
Most legal scholars interpreted Mohammed's decision to mean that
any government interference in market mechanisms should be considered
similarly sacrilegious, since markets were designed by God to
regulate themselves. 83
If all this bears a striking resemblance to Adam Smith's "invisible
hand" (which was also the hand of Divine Providence), it might not
be a complete coincidence. In fact, many of the specific arguments and
examples that Smith uses appear to trace back directly to economic
tracts written in Medieval Persia. For instance, not only does his argument
that exchange is a natural outgrowth of human rationality and
speech already appear both in both Ghazali (ws8-1n1 AD), and Tusi
(1201-1274 AD); both use exactly the same illustration: that no one has
ever observed two dogs exchanging bones.84 Even more dramatically,
Smith's most famous example of division of labor, the pin factory,
where it takes eighteen separate operations to produce one pin, already
appears in Ghazali's Ihya, in which he describes a needle factory, where
it takes twenty-five different operations to produce a needle.85
The differences, however, are just as significant as the similarities.
One telling example: like Smith, Tusi begins his treatise on economics
with a discussion of the division of labor; but where for Smith, the
division of labor is actually an outgrowth of our "natural propensity to
truck and barter" in pursuit of individual advantage, for Tusi, it was
an extension of mutual aid:
Let us suppose that each individual were required to busy
himself with providing his own sustenance, clothing, dwellingplace
and weapons, .first acquiring the tools of carpentry and
the smith's trade, then readying thereby tools and implements
for sowing and reaping, grinding and kneading, spinning and
weaving . .. Clearly, he would not be capable of doing justice
to any one of them. But when men render aid to each other,
each one performing one of these important tasks that are beyond
the measure of his own capacity, and observing the law
of justice in transactions by giving greatly and receiving in
exchange of the labor of others, then the means of livelihood