Debt: The First 5000 Years - autonomous learning

280 DEBT
are realized, and the succession of the individual and the survival
of the species are assured.86
As a result, he argues, divine providence has arranged us to have
different abilities, desires, and inclinations. The market is simply one
manifestation of this more general principle of mutual aid, of the
matching of, abilities (supply) and needs (demand)-or to translate it
into my own earlier terms, it is not only founded on, but is itself an
extension of the kind of baseline communism on which any society
must ultimately rest.
All this is not to say that Tusi was in any sense a radical egalitarian.
Quite the contrary. "If men were equal," he insists, "they would
all perish." We need differences between rich and poor, he insisted, just
as much as we need differences between farmers and carpenters. Still,
once you start from the initial premise that markets are primarily about
cooperation rather than competition-and while Muslim economic
thinkers did recognize and accept the need for market competition,
they never saw competition as its essence87-the moral implications are
very different. Nasruddin's story about the quail eggs might have been
a joke, but Muslim ethicists did often enjoin merchants to drive a hard
bargain with the rich so they could charge less, or pay more, when
dealing with the less fortunate.88
Ghazali's take on the division of labor is similar, and his account
of the origins of money is if anything even more revealing. It begins
with what looks much like the myth of barter, except that, like all
Middle Eastern writers, he starts not with imaginary primitive tribesmen,
but with strangers meeting in an imaginary marketplace.
Sometimes a person needs what he does not own and he owns
what he does not need. For example, a person h s saffron but
needs a camel for transportation and one who owns a camel
does not presently need that camel but he wants saffron. Thus,
there is the need for an exchange. However, for there to be an
exchange, there must be a way to measure the two objects, for
the camel-owner cannot give the whole camel for a quantity
of saffron. There is no similarity between saffron and camel
so that equal amount of that weight and form can be given.
Likewise is the case of one who desires a house but owns some
cloth or desires a slave but owns socks, or desires flour but
possesses a donkey. These goods have no direct proportionality
so one cannot know how much saffron will equal a camel's
worth. Such barter transactions would be very difficult.89