False Economy - Alan Beattie [72]
Unlike European cities, Muslim cities were not allowed to develop into autonomous entities, or to pioneer ideas of personal and commercial freedom. They remained centers of religious piety. The Islamic empires did not develop states that were primarily interested in technological progress or productivity. They spent more time fighting over what they already had or trying to seize more through invasion.
But this had a lot more to do with accidents of geography and history than with the theology or "management structure" of the prevailing religion. It was perhaps Islam's misfortune to have been born in the Middle East and maintain its centers of political power there, originally in Mecca and Baghdad. (It may well remain a misfortune today, given the deleterious effect of oil on economic growth, discussed in the previous chapter, but this bad luck somewhat predates the petroleum economy.)
Being in the Middle East meant bad luck on the resource front: shortages of minerals and timber made the transition to a manufacturing market economy much harder than it was in Europe. And, then as now, it was bad for peace. The Islamic world was plagued by destructive raids by marauders that frequently threatened to knock stable, sustained economic development off course. In particular, the growing threat of the Mongols in Central Asia realized its destructive capacity under the rule of Genghis Khan in the thirteenth century. The Mongol invasion laid waste to cities across the Islamic world.
Baghdad, one of the great centers of Islamic rule and culture, fell after a single battle. The Mongols did not destroy Islam: though their East Asian heartlands tended toward Buddhism, they had no specific religious agenda to advance. In fact, by the beginning of the fourteenth century, the Mongols controlling Central Asia and parts of the Middle East had converted to Islam. They rebuilt the cities and rejuvenated them as centers of learning and culture.
But they did demand complete obeisance to an absolutist monarch, and the result was that the empires were run with literally army discipline. The Mongol law code, attributed to the most famous of the Mongol autocrats, Genghis Khan himself, was a restricted military system. The state was run from the center with the help of a large nomadic army that owed personal allegiance to the chieftain. The Mongol empires declined in the second half of the fourteenth century, but they left a legacy that combined a perpetual fear of invasion with attachment to military strength to repel or preempt it. As we will see later, this post-Mongol centralizing absolutist tendency also took hold in Christian Russia, with unfortunate results.
Those Muslim leaders who were able to stand up to the Mongols, or take over once the Mongol empire began to retreat, had to be tough military rulers. Islamic regimes were characterized by extending themselves through military conquest, or fending off the threat of same. The Mamluk sultanate that managed to hold back the Mongols from Egypt and Syria was based on soldiers who were bought as slaves, mainly from the Caucasus and around the Black Sea. The Mamluks, whose regime was dominated by a landowning military elite, taxed their cities heavily to raise money for the state.
The Islamic world, notably the Mamluk regime, was hammered quite hard in the fourteenth century by the Black Death (bubonic plague), which the Mongols had inadvertendy helped to spread around the world by securing the overland trade route from the East. And each of the three great Islamic empires that arose after the Mongols—the Ottomans, the Saffavids, and the Moghuls—was centralized and militarized. When necessary, their rulers used Islamic institutions as a means of shutting down debate, or at least they stopped all discussion that threatened the status quo.
By the fourteenth century, Islam was becoming