Debt: The First 5000 Years - autonomous learning

438 NOTES
to the merchant, but a disordering of the
natural order of things" (Essid 1995:153).
83. Only very limited exceptions were
made, for instance in times of disaster,
and then most scholars insisted it was
always better to provide direct relief to
the needy than to interfere with market
forces. See Ghazanfar & Islahi 2003, Islahi
2004:31-32; for a fuller discussion of Mohammed's
views on price formation, see
Tuma 1965, Essid 1988, 1995.
84. Hosseini 1998:672, 2003:37: "Both
indicate that animals, such as dogs, do not
exchange one bone for another."
85. Hosseini 1998, 2003. Smith says he
visited such a factory himself, which may
well be true, but the example of the eighteen
steps originally appears in the entry
"Epingle" in Volume 5 of the French Encyclopedie,
published in 1755, twenty years
earlier. Hosseini also notes that "Smith's
personal library contained the Latin translations
of some of the works of Persian
(and Arab) scholars of the medieval period"
(Hosseini 1998:679), suggesting that
he might have lifted them from the originals
directly. Other important sources
for Islamic precedents for later economic
theory include: Rodison 1978, Islahi 1985,
Essid 1988, Hosseini 1995, Ghazanfar
1991, 2000, 2003, Ghazanfar & Islahi
1997, 2003. It is becoming more and more
clear that a great deal of Enlightenment
thought traces back to Islamic philosophy:
Decartes' cogito, for example, seems
to derive from Ibn Sina (a.k.a. Avicenna),
Hume's famous point that the observance
of constant conjunctions does not itself
prove causality appears in Ghazali, and
I have myself noticed Immanuel Kant's
definition of enlightenment in the mouth
of a magic bird in the fourteenth-century
Persian poet Rumi.
86. Tusi's Nasirean Ethics, in Sun
2008:409.
87. Ghazanfar & Islahi 2003:58; Ghazanfar
2003:32-33.
88. So for example among Ghazali's
ethical principles, we find "the buyer
should be lenient when bargaining with
a poor seller and strict when transacting
with a rich seller," and "a person should
be willing to sell to the poor who do not
have the means and should extend credit
to them without the expectation of repayment"
(Ghazali Ihya Ulum a/ Din Il:7