In an untitled poem, Iranian Shu’ubi intellectual Bashbar B. Burd laments the anti-materialism and anti-traditionalism that Islam brought to the remains of the Persian Empire. As a descendant of the great kings of classical civilization, Burd (or the poem’s speaker) demands the life of luxury of which Islam’s unconventional tenets deprive him. The speaker says, “How many a forebear I have, whose brow was encircled by his diadem,/ haughty in his court, to whom knees were bowed,/ Coming in the morning to his court, clothed in blazing gems,/ one splendidly attired in ermine, standing within the curtains,”[1] and so on. This paper will argue that the origins of Islamic economic and material philosophy were more complex than Burd’s speaker understands, and that this anti-materialist dogma was in fact justified in the contexts of Islam’s evolution and society of origin.
To understand Islamic views on wealth and materialism, we must first understand the pre-Islamic views on those concepts. In pre-Islamic Arabia, many groups practiced idol worship. Daniel Madigan says “Islamic historical tradition has elaborated a great deal on the little there is in the [Qu’ranic] text explicitly about idols”; meaning that Islamic historians usually take for granted that the frenzied cult of idol worship had all but consumed the Arabian Peninsula in the time before Muhammad.[2] Madigan argues it would be a mistake to assume that idol worship had reached the destructive fevered pitch that these Islamic scholars assumed. But it is undeniable that some form of idol worshipping was commonly practiced pre-Islam, and it is this exact adulation of material goods (idols) that Islam was born in reaction to. The first Pillar of Islam, called the Shahada, reads “There is no God but God.” It by definition precludes the worship of anything else besides God, for Muhammad and his followers believed that to do so was to ignore the true path of righteousness. God is not an idol; He is not a material. To assume that an idol, a mere object, could represent God is blasphemy. Additionally, according to Jonathan Brown, “the idols and gods worshipped by Arabs provided them with no ethics or morals. They merely wanted sacrifices and ritual invocations.”[3] While they did have other sources of morality, the founders of Islam nevertheless found it problematic that they did not derive this morality from God. This is the philosophy from which Islam was born.
But there was a more practical side to early Islam’s anti-materialism. Occupants of the rather resource-starved region that was pre-Islamic Arabia were constantly embroiled in wars for ownership over the limited wealth that allowed them to survive. According to Seyed Kazem Sadr, author of The Economic System of the Early Islamic Period: Institutions and Policies, “This way of life automatically led to the advent of superstition, isolationism and a struggle for individual and clan supremacy…the hardship of life led to crimes such as robbery, looting from the other tribes, murder or…revenge.”[4] It is an understatement to say the social climate of the Arabian Peninsula was quite unstable. It might be too convenient to say that Islam was created in direct response to this instability (for historical actors like Muhammad would not have had the top down view we have as historians), but it is nevertheless clear that this tenuously structured environment would have shaped Muhammad’s perceptions of and desires for the world. And while Islam by no means brought a perfect peace to that world, it did bring an unprecedented stability with centralized law, morality, and social structure.
But how, then, did Islamic leaders put anti-materialism into practice after the religion took hold in the Peninsula and beyond? The variety of answers to this question could fill many books, but this paper will focus on one particular aspect of Islamic law: the one-fifth/four-fifths division of the spoils of war between Islamic leaders and soldiers, respectively. During the century of the Islamic Empire’s rapid expansion to Central Asia in the East, and West Africa up into Spain in the West, Islamic leaders put into place the policy that the rank-and-file soldiers of the Islamic armies could keep four-fifths of all wealth plundered from the conquered cities for themselves, while the remaining one-fifth would go to local or upper-level administrators as a kind of tax. Why was the portion allocated to the lowly soldiers so generous? One reason is that in Islam as well as Christianity and all other religions, it is the administrators, the leaders of society, who have to abide most strictly by the dogmas of their faith. Given the inherent anti-materialism of Islam’s founding beliefs, it is then not surprising that the leaders could not simply take all the wealth for themselves. To do so would be avaricious and, therefore, un-Islamic. But the rank-and-file, more distant from the law and philosophy that governed the empire, needed a reason to fight for the empire, and leaders knew that, as the empire expanded, faith alone could provide the motivation.
But what Islamic leaders did with the one-fifth of booty that they were allocated was perhaps more revealing of Islam’s anti-materialism. They did not simply take it as a prize and keep it for themselves, as Bashbar Burd may have wished them to do. According to the Fiscal Rescripts of Caliph Umar II (717-720), “God has said: ‘Whatsoever God gives as booty unto His apostle from the people of the settlements, it belongs to God and to the Apostle, and to the near of kin, the orphans, the destitute, and the wayfarer’ (Q 59:7); and so likewise God ordained the distribution of the Fifth.”[5] Umar and other Islamic leaders believed that it was not they, but the needy, who God had entitled the one-fifth of the spoils not taken by the soldiers. This set up a support network for the impoverished that, while imperfect, strove for greater societal stability than the Muslim leaders believed would have been possible in the chaotic pre-Islamic world. Additionally, Umar’s Fiscal Rescripts state, “wherefore we hold that [the Fifth] should be put together and applied as booty for the benefit of the Muslims, and that it should not be appropriated as private property to the detriment of the Muslims, nor become ‘a commodity circulating among those of you that are rich.’” (Q 59:7)[6] The passage is telling of the Islamic view of wealth; whereas Burd would argue that the Fifth should be appropriated as private property for the rich, Umar believed that wealth should benefit all.
Finally, Islam’s greatest weapon against materialism was its dogmatic value of intention. According to Thomas Cleary’s Wisdom of the Prophet, “the Prophet said, ‘all works depend on intention, so everyone gets what he intended. Thus the emigration of those whose emigration was for God and God’s Prophet was for God and God’s Prophet; and the emigration of those whose emigration of those whose emigration was for worldly gain or for a woman to marry was for what they emigrated for.’”[7] This rather tautological statement is nevertheless revelatory of the importance of intention for Islam. Those who act simply to experience greater pleasure in the temporal world will get that greater pleasure; but they will not benefit from the infinite salvation and wisdom that God can provide. This meant that the intention of acquiring wealth could not lead one to God. If a leader wore luxurious robes every day, dined on only the finest hand-picked meats and fruits, and otherwise demanded opulence in life, it would be obvious that his intentions were ungodly. And in a society like early Islam’s, where the leader derived all ability from his direct connection to the Prophet and the holy power that gave him, for that leader to go down an ungodly path was unimaginably destructive.
Most representations of ancient or historical rulership that we see in our contemporary society involve clear displays of wealth: kings sitting on golden thrones, wielding bejeweled scepters, feasting on the finest food in the land. The rulers of the early Islamic Empire may, in practice, have fit some of these stereotypes. But the founding tenets of Islam commanded that good Muslims avoid the worshipping and seeking of material goods, because these goods were not God. This anti-materialism follows a narrative running from pre-Islamic Arabia into the Islamic Empire. It was the desire for material prosperity that the founders of Islam believed caused the instability and chaos of pre-Islamic society. Only God is God; to lust for Him was to find eternal salvation, but to lust for something else was to lose track of Him forever.
Bibliography:
Shu’ubi poem by Bashshar b. Burd (trans. A.F.L. Beeston)
“Fiscal Rescript of Umar b. Abd al Aziz.” Trans. H.A .R Gibb. “The Fiscal Rescript of Umar II,” Arabica 2 (1955), 1-16,2-7.
Egger, Vernon. A History of the Muslim World to 1405: The Making of a Civilization. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2004. Chapters 1-2.
Brown, Peter. The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph and Diversity, A.D. 200-1000. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2003.
Kalbī, Hišām Ibn-Muḥammad Al-, and Nabih Amin. Faris. The Book of Idols. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Pr., 1952.
File Lewis Conquest documents 29 to 37
Sadr, Seyed Kazem. The Economic System of the Early Islamic Period: Institutions and Policies. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.
Markus Gross –, Karl-Heinz Ohlig –, Volker Popp –, Christoph Luxenberg –, translated by Markus Gross — Ignaz Goldziher, Markus Gross, and Karl-Heinz Ohlig. Early Islam: A Critical Reconstruction Based On Contemporary Sources. Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, 2013.
[1] Bashbar Burd, Shuubi Poem
[2] Madigan, 84
[3] Brown, 6
[4] Sadr Seyed Kazem. The Economic System of the Early Islamic Period: Institutions and Policies, 6
[5] Fiscal Rescripts, 2
[6] Fiscal Rescripts, 2
[7] Cleary, 39
Aidan Lilienfeld, for “Islamic Thought and Literature” at the University of Chicago, November 2016
Haus Lilienfeld 