Maya Shatzmiller

Plagues, Wages, and Economic Change in the Islamic Middle East, 700–1500

This study establishes long-term trends in the purchasing power of the wages of unskilled workers and develops estimates for GDP per capita for medieval Egypt and Iraq. Wages were heavily influenced by two long-lasting demographic shocks, the Justinian Plague and the Black Death and the slow population recovery that followed. As a result, they remained above the subsistence minimum for most of the medieval era. We also argue that the environment of high wages that emerged after the Justinian Plague contributed to the Golden Age of Islam by creating demand for higher income goods.

Marriage, Family, and the Faith: Women's Conversion To Islam

This article studies what conversion to Islam meant in legal terms for women and how it affected their marriage, conjugal rights, children, and property rights in two circumstances: one, when conversion was of their own volition, and the other, when it was not their own decision, but that of their husbands or fathers. A cluster offive conversion documents-three for Christian, Jewish, and pagan males, and two for Christian and pagan females—from a notarial manual composed in tenth century Cordoba is used here to place the results of the investigation within the analytical framework of the study of Muslim womens legal status, and beyond, into the emotional and psychosocial environment of womens conversion and its significance as a life event.

Economic Performance and Economic Growth in the Early Islamic World

The author argues that in the case of Islamic history, the growing interest in the economic theory of institutions and their role in economic growth has shifted the scholarly methodology from empirically based research, to theoretical models which favoured sweeping generalizations about the negative roles of the Islamic state and legal institution. Shatzmiller’s examinations of the role of Islamic institutions in periods of economic growth show that economic growth was visible in the key indicators of the Caliphate’s economy between ca. 750 and ca. 1100. The conclusion is that there was nothing intrinsic to Islamic institutions that impaired economic growth.

Women and Wage Labour in the Medieval Islamic West: Legal Issues in an Economic Context

The evidence of the late medieval period, 11th-15th centuries, indicates that womens participation in the labour market was both considerable and diversified. This paper studies whether and how womens wage labour was affected, controlled and regulated by laws, courts and judges, by using an array of the Mālikī legal sources from Muslim Spain and North Africa. It shows the existence of a legal approach straddling a strict application of the law of the ijāra , with adjustments to family law and admission of customary law, but more importantly, an approach inspired and adapted to the framework of womens property rights and therefore beneficial to them.

Women and Property Rights in Al-Andalus and the Maghrib: Social Patterns and Legal Discourse

This essay focuses on the implementation of womens property rights in al-Andalus and the Maghrib in the period between the tenth and fifteenth centuries, as reflected in legal sources. An examination of Islamic property and family law, judicial practice, and the attitude of jurists toward women indicates that the majority of Muslim women owned property independently at some point in their lives, that women acquired property at every stage of the life-cycle, and that women played an important role in the intergenerational transmission of property and in keeping familial property intact. At the same time, the legal institutions of guardianship ( wilāya ) and interdiction ( ḥajr ) placed constrains on the ability of women to exercise effective control of their property during adulthood. The implementation of womens sharʿī property rights by qādīs and muftīs had important consequences for womens relationships with their families, especially their husbands. That male domination was never complete in propertied families calls into question the characterization of the Muslim family as “patriarchal” and points to the need for a new social, cultural, and economic explanation of the nature of the Muslim family.

Aspects of Women's Participation in the Economic Life of Later Medieval Islam: Occupations and Mentalities

T should be unnecessary, even redundant, to explain the need to linvestigate the question of womens participation in the economic life of medieval Islam. Women constituted half of the potentially productive power in an economy correctly perceived as prosperous and sophisticated in comparison with its contemporaries. Finding out if and how much women contributed to this prosperity seems imperative, and so are other questions related to it, such as the nature of their participation, the sectors in which they participated and the attitude of society towards their participation. The last question is even more relevant as one would certainly refuse to acknowledge norms of behaviour for women imposed on us by modern Islamic legislators who claim certain restrictive measures to be those of medieval Islam. At the present state of our knowledge however, these and other related questions remain unanswered, as the importance of the topic stands against the problematic nature of the documentation. All historians, as well as other islamicists, have encountered in their work scattered information about women in different economic capacities, but none of the categories of sources currently available, except the Geniza which is a case upon itself, offers enough information for a coherent historical picture. Moreover, the scope and the complexity of the topic seem to have discouraged, any but a full interdisciplinary investigation in all its dimensions. As an illustration of this paucity of sources we can cite a recent thesis devoted to the study of women in the Mamluik period (thirteenth to sixteenth centuries) in Egypt 1. While this period is

The Adoption of Paper in the Middle East, 700-1300 AD

The adoption of paper in the Middle East changed literacy practices and improved economic performance, yet current accounts remain unhelpful for understanding why and how it happened. This paper offers a new analysis of the long-term factors behind the adoption of paper in the Middle East, combining insights from economic theory, economic history and evidence from quantitative studies. The paper establishes a long-term trend in the price of writing material and books in the Middle East, and suggests an explanation based on economic factors which led to a decline in the price of inputs in paper production.

Labour in the Medieval Islamic World.

This is an extensive study of labour in the social and economic life of Islamic communities around the Mediterranean in the medieval period, 9th-15th century. Based on a large number of primary and secondary sources, it contains a comprehensive dictionary of trades and occupations practised by both men and women, followed by a statistical and textual examination of the division of labour, the distribution of the labour force, occupational structures and the role of labour in the Islamic economy. It also describes ethnic divisions of labour, social status and image. A group of literary sources yields evidence that Muslim theologians, mystics and philosophers gradually formulated a doctrinal framework for labour. This book will prove a valuable resource for any student of medieval Islamic economic and labour history.