A Brief History of Commercial Capitalism by Jairus Banaji;

Author:Jairus Banaji;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781642592115
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 3)
Published: 2020-07-29T22:46:47+00:00

Appendix: Islam and Capitalism

The title of this essay is borrowed from the title of a famous book that the French Arabist Maxime Rodinson published in France in 1966. When Rodinson wrote Islam and Capitalism, the traumatic defeat of Nasser and the Arab states at the hands of Israel was still roughly a year away. But, as we know, that defeat was a major watershed both politically, precipitating the demise of Arab nationalism and the discrediting of the “secular” leaderships that touted it, and in a wider cultural sense because “the defeat” (as it came to be called) led to decades of bitter introspection and to the sustained if gradual expansion of a new political force throughout the Muslim world. What I shall do in this essay is start from the problematic that Rodinson grappled with in his seminal book, namely, whether, or, more correctly, in what sense, we can speak of capitalism in the Islamic world, and then expand the notion of capitalism to include the culture of modernity that Marx saw as central to what (to him in the Communist Manifesto at least) was still a new and revolutionary mode of production. The essay is thus divided into two rather distinct parts, the link between them being established by what I shall call “the indigenous form of capitalism” that characterized much of the Middle East at least till the economic revolution that swept through the Gulf in the 2000s.

Rodinson belonged to a generation when the largely formalist debates that dominated Marxism from the seventies had obviously made no special impact. Historians like Subhi Labib,1 Halil Inalcik,2 ‘Abd al-‘Aziz Duri,3 Robert Mantran,4 and Braudel5 spoke of capitalism and capitalists in the Islamic world, since these seemed like the best way of characterizing the activity and economic structures connected with large-scale merchants and banking groups who were not discernibly different from their counterparts in medieval Italy. But those of them who were familiar with the Arabic sources also knew that a notion of “capital” was frequently discussed both in the various schools of Islamic law and by writers like Ibn Khaldūn. Al-māl could of course have the generic meanings of “wealth,” “property,” “possessions,” and so on but in the juristic discussions and numerous passages elsewhere it had the more correct meaning of a commodity or mass of commodities. By the tenth century the term māliyya, derived from it, came to mean “commercial exchange value,” while the term māl mutaqawwim was a commodity whose exchange value was guaranteed by the law “against destruction, damage, or unauthorized appropriation. . . .”6 Though māl by itself was often shorthand for capital (that is, for a sum of value earmarked for investment), rās māl was the proper term for “capital” and was frequently used in the plural to mean several distinct capitals (individual capital in Marx’s sense), as when al-Wāqidī reports that the Qurayshi merchant Safwān b. Umayya complained that as long as Muhammad enforced his blockade of the coastal road to Gaza and

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.