Today's Economic History: Eduardo Manzano on Mulk and Ulama
: Why Did Islamic Medieval Institutions Become so Different from Western Medieval Institutions?: "There is a pattern here; a pattern that shows Western Medieval institutions...
...as more recognizable, more prominent, more assertive than their Islamic counterparts. Obviously, this does not mean that Islamic institutions did not exist: there was no central religious organization, but religious dogma and rituals were consistently shared by a huge number of believers; socio-political institutions were somehow foggy, but coercion was exerted in Islamic social formations; town or city halls were never built, but Medieval Islamic cities expanded and worked successfully, integrating large populations. So, institutions certainly did exist in Islamic societies. The challenging issue is that they seem to have been consistently different from the ones we find in the Medieval West....
In the medieval Near East and North Africa... people were required to ask for new documents from the new sovereigns »since the privileges the documents confirmed rested on the relationship between individual rulers and their subjects and were not automatically transferred by legacy«.... [In] the Latin West... changes of dynasties or successions might have fostered the necessity of confirming previous documents, but did not usually entail such a degree of »archival violence«.... [In the Middle East] »even at the peaceful accession of an heir, the old documents lost their value and one had to petition the new ruler for the old privileges«.... The intriguing question remains as to why this was the case....
The answer that I want to propose... arises from two propositions... the separation between power and authority that emerged at an early and critical stage in the Islamic polity... [and] the distinctive notion of community that emerged as a result of this and helped to shape the self-definition of Muslim societies....
Early ninth/second century Baghdad witnessed a bitter theological dispute over the issue of the createdness of the Qur’an, in which religious scholars supported the divine essence of the revealed text and strongly disputed the idea that it had been created by God, an opinion held by the so-called Mu‘tazilites, who were supported by most of the early ‘Abbāsid caliphs and particularly by al-Ma’mūn.... The victory of the religious establishment was so complete that later Sunni caliphs had their sway seriously curtailed and had no role in the doctrinal definition of Islam: the bulk of religious authority was in the hands of the ‘ulamā’, scholars who based their social standing on the monopoly of knowledge and drew their prestige from recognition by their peers.... What really cemented the unity of the umma was the acceptance of the religious law... »it was to the sharī‘a, not to the imām or the caliph, that the believer owed its allegiance«....
The historical narrative that supported these claims insisted that only the first four caliphs who succeded the prophet Muḥammad – the so-called rāshidūn or orthodox caliphs – had truly held the prerogatives of the imamate, whereas later caliphs had corrupted their power by turning it into worldly kingship (mulk). The long term result was that the sunni ‘ulamā’ »did not admit the existence of the state as an institution on its own right and considered the emergence of a temporal state as a separate institution to be a usurpation due to the intrusion of elements of corruption into the community«.... Based on a strongly hierarchical and basically secular structure, power in Islamic polities always faced a deficit of legitimacy, a permanent tension with the non-hierarchical authority of the umma represented by the ‘ulamā’, who appealed directly to the Qur’an and the Sunna of the Prophet as a basis for their legal, political or moral judgments. This tension may explain the widespread tendency of medieval Islamic rulers to build ex-novo palatine cities away from their former capitals, where the grip of the religious establishment was always very strong....
It is my contention that the state’s deficit of authority and the community’s lack of power were a decisive factor in the peculiar configuration of Islamic institutions. Social regularities which gave rise to institutions were always constrained either by the lack of legitimacy of rulers, or by the absence of coercive tools on the part of the community. This deficit of power or authority marked institutional shaping in the dār al-islām: institutions that emanated from political, administrative or social power were based, at best, on de facto political, administrative or social praxis; at worst, on practices that incorporated highly disruptive elements, like violence (including archival violence); those that derived from authority were rooted, at best, on moral principles, on the values that held together the community, on the consensus that was advocated by the ‘ulamā’; at worst, on religious interpretations that were open to controversy and, therefore, to sectarianism.
This is why Islamic medieval institutions usually look less recognizable, less prominent, less assertive than their European counterparts to western eyes moulded on institutional models where such deficit rarely occurred. In contrast, western medieval institutions were characterized by a blend of authority and power, whose balance varied enormously depending on time and place, but which was always present in their historical shaping....
Authority increasingly met power throughout the western Middle Ages. When facing such a complex resource as land (and the people who lived and worked on it) power was powerless without the unfettered backing of authority. Marc Bloch expressed this with striking clarity when he stated that the feudal system »extended and consolidated these methods whereby men exploited men, and combining inextricably the right to the revenues from the land with the right to exercise authority, it fashioned from all this the true manor of medieval times.«
In contrast to the land-based polities, tax states could be run on power resulting from a combination of coercion, administrative control, and collaboration or identification of the wealthy and locally powerful with government officials. Authority was not an indispensable asset here, because in any case most of the taxes raised by the Islamic states were blatantly illegal from the point of view of religious orthodoxy. The wealthy and locally powerful were legitimized by their partnership with the central government, and as for the administrative control, it only required an experienced bureaucracy. Authority resided elsewhere: in the circles of ‘ulamā’ who devoted their lives to study legal and religious disciplines and whose loathing of the impious fiscal practices of the government contributed to increase their social standing, as they could weave their own identity, which portrayed an ideal (but not always real) independence from the state....
My thesis is that the institutions that emerged in the dār al-islām always had a deficit either of power or of authority, as a result of the manifest divergence between these two notions within the Islamic polity from the early ninth/second century onwards. Institutions that emanated from political or social power were based on a de facto praxis that was enough to levy resources, but had no authority as it was consistently denied by holders of legitimacy: scholars and men of religion who could claim their role as custodians of the religious legacy enshrined in moral principles. In contrast, the Medieval West produced institutions, which combined varying degrees of power and authority notwithstanding their character or origins. This was the result of the institutional crystallization of social relations which, in the last analysis, were always land-based and localized and, therefore, needed a combination of power and legitimacy to enforce their rule successfully. The result was that the community became stronger in the dār al-islām and was able to perform distinctive institutions like the ḥisba, which enshrined principles of moral economy that have proved extremely resilient up to the present day.
