Islamic Economics in the Late Ottoman Empire: Menâpirzâde Nuri Bey's Mebâhis-i İlm-i Servet

Abstract

The existing literature on Islamic economics suggests that Islamic economics is a twentieth-century phenomenon with its roots in medieval Islamic intellectual and theological history, thereby leaving a centuries-long gap in the history of Islamic economic thinking. This study aims at taking a first step towards filling this gap by examining a nineteenth-century example of Islamic economics in late Ottoman economic literature. Suggesting a broader definition of Islamic economics, this article investigates a prominent Ottoman intellectual's efforts to define, reveal, and revive a tradition of Islamic economics in historical and intellectual context.

Keywords:

• Islamic economics
• Islamism
• Ottoman Empire
• Ottoman economic thought
• Ottoman intellectual history

JEL Codes:

• B12
• B31
• N01
• P40

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ For detailed analyses of Islamic economics of the twentieth-century, see Kuran (2004). For an overview of the history and basic premises of Islamic economics, see Chapra (2014).

² See, for example, Ghazanfar and Islahi (1990, 1997, Hosseini 1995, Soofi 1995, Ghazanfar 2000).

³ This is a claim that was later elaborated by many revisionist historians of Islamic economics in the twentieth century. For a collection of works on this subject, see Ghazanfar (2003).

⁴ The translation of the verse is by Abdelhaleem (2004, p. 348).

⁵ In his survey of the history of Islamic economic thought, Sabri Orman (1997, p. 24) adopts even a more comprehensive definition: “The term ‘Islamic’ is used here in the widest possible sense to denote texts produced by all those who can be associated with Islam and its intellectual tradition.” This broad definition, however, is not shared by other scholars of Islamic economics. The literature on this subject is dominated by an understanding of Islamic economics as a shari'a-based alternative to Western strands of economics, as can be seen below.

⁶ For a discussion on twentieth-century Islamic economics as an alternative to “the Marxian paradigm of socialism and the market economy paradigm of capitalism,” see Arif (1985). Umar Chapra (2014, p. 30) puts the distinction as follows: “The worldviews of both disciplines [i.e. the worldviews of Islamic and conventional economics] are radically different. The Islamic worldview is not secularist, value-neutral, materialist, or social-Darwinist… It gives primary importance to moral values, human brotherhood, and socio-economic justice and does not rely primarily on either the state or the market for realizing its vision.”

⁷ Toseef Azid (2010, pp. 168) notes that Islamic economics “is still in its transitory phase so one cannot find a well-established definition in current literature.” However, after quoting various definitions from several scholars, he concludes: “The nucleus of all the above-mentioned definitions is the same and have the gist that all the economic activities of this life are governed by the fundamental injunctions of Shari'ah and not by the human desires and experiences. And the ultimate objective of Shari'ah is to achieve falah [happiness, well-being], and seeking the pleasure of Allah (swt). How this objective can be achieved that is based on the degree of God fearing (taqwa) and the cooperation among all the economic agents” (Azid 2010, p. 169).

⁸ For the prescriptive nature of Islamist economics, see Kuran (2004, pp. 55–81).

⁹ For a review of the early industrialization efforts in the Ottoman Empire, see Clark (1974).

¹⁰ For a birds-eye-view of the transformation of the Ottoman economy in the nineteenth century, see Hanioğlu (2008, pp. 89–93, 135–8).

¹¹ The latter is a book based on lecture notes from Münif Pasha's courses at the Faculty of Law, compiled and edited by one of his students, Mahmud Esʿad (1855–1918).

¹² Şemseddin Şeker gives the date as 22 Jumada al-Awwal 1297 (2 May 1880), but indicates the year mistakenly as 1881 (Şeker 2012, p. 18). According to Mehmet Zeki Pakalın (2008, p. 108), the date is 30 June 1880.

¹³ The prime example, which inspired others, was Jean-Baptiste Say's Catéchisme d’économie politique (1815).

¹⁴ The Turkish Prime Ministry Ottoman Archives, Yıldız Esas Evrakı (Yıldız Palace Collection), document no. 38/1/1, 15/Za/1291.

¹⁵ For the impact of Ibn Khaldun in the Ottoman-Turkish intellectual sphere, see Fındıkoğlu (1953, Okumuş 2000).

¹⁶ Cf. the words of Ibn Khaldūn (1859, p. 43) and Nuri (1882, vol. 1: 5).

¹⁷ “The science of household and city management” is rendered simply as “politics” in the modern English translation. Cf. “It is also not politics, because politics is concerned with the administration of home or city in accordance with ethical and philosophical requirements, for the purpose of directing the mass toward a behavior that will result in the preservation and permanence of the species” (Ibn Khaldûn 2005, p. 39). In its original Arabic, Ibn Khaldun defines “politics” (‘ilm al-siyasa al-madaniya) as “the management of the household and/or the city” (tadbir al-manzil aw al-madina) (Ibn Khaldūn 1867, p. 31).

¹⁸ This thesis later gained a wide acceptance among the historians of economics. Ibn Khaldun's economic thought and his work as an example of medieval Islamic economics have been acknowledged and studied by many scholars especially in the second half of the twentieth century (Spengler 1964, Boulakia 1971, Weiss 1995). Also, see Ghazanfar (2003), for various references to Ibn Khaldun in the same context.

¹⁹ şehirde sâkin olanlar birbirleriyle mu’âmelede ve ticâretlerinde…

²⁰ Subhi Paşa was then the Minister of the Ottoman Imperial Pious Foundations (Evkaf-ı Hümayûn Nazırı).

²¹ The book had been translated into Turkish a few years before Nuri's book: Tūnisī (1879).

²² For the Ottoman case, see İnalcık (1970).

²³ Hisba is a “non-Kur'anic term which is used to mean on the one hand the duty of every Muslim to ‘promote good and forbid evil’ and, on the other, the function of the person who is effectively entrusted in a town with the application of this rule in the supervision of moral behaviour and more particularly of the markets; this person entrusted with the hisba was called the muhtasib” (Cahen and Talbi 1986, p. 485).

²⁴ The word “iktisad” or “iqtisad” is currently used in Turkish, Arabic, and Persian to denote “economics.” Therefore, “muktesid” should be translated literally as “economist”. However, in the 1880s, there was still no consensus in the Ottoman Empire on the name of the discipline. Süleyman Sûdi refers to economics as “the science of wealth of nations” (ilm-i servet-i milel), while he uses “iktisad” for public finance. Therefore, “muktesid” in this context refers to a finance official, not an economist in the usual sense.

²⁵ This brings to mind the famous “Das Adam Smith Problem” in nineteenth-century German economic thought. However, Nuri does not seem to be aware of these discussions, since he does not refer to any German source for any discussion (including this one) throughout the book. The “Smith Problem” extended beyond the German-speaking world later than Nuri's book, especially in the 1890s, so it is also unlikely that he had read about this particular problem in French or English.

²⁶ See Chapra (2014) for an extensive examination of the subject.

²⁷ Of course, medieval Islamic thinking regarding the state intervention was not monolithic. For a review of varying approaches of medieval Sunni jurists particularly to the question of price control for the public interest, see Sabra (2003).

²⁸ We observe a similar pattern in the nineteenth-century Muslim-Arab world. In a recent study on the economic ideas of nine representative nineteenth-century Arab-Muslim intellectuals (Islahi 2015), we see that only two (Al-Tahtawi and Al-Kawakibi) of the nine intellectuals adopted an openly negative stance against an interest-based economy, although the author of the study claims otherwise (Islahi 2015, p. 135).

²⁹ Such as Ermiş (2013, Islahi 2015, Kılınçoğlu 2015).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Middle East Technical University-Northern Cyprus Campus, Research Projects Fund [grant number SOSY-14-D-4].