Reading Notes:
Trade and Faith
William J Bernstein’s new book, A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World, is a paradigm-shifting book if there ever was one. In all the hoo-ha that we have had to listen to about Islam in the past seven years, no one has gotten to the heart of the matter more clearly than Mr Bernstein does here:
Alone among the world’s religions, Islam was founded by a trader. (Muhammed’s immediate successor, the cloth merchant Abu Bakr, was also a trader.) This extraordinary face suffuses the soul of this faith and guides the historical events that ricocheted over the land routes of Asia and the sea-lanes of the Indian Ocean through the next nine centuries. It’s traces are visible in today’s world, from the modern colonies of Muslim Indians in East Africa to the Lebanese merchants still active in West Africa to the “Syrians” who populated the third-world outposts of Graham Greene’s novels.
The most sacred texts of Islam resonate with the importance of commerce, as in this famous passage from the Koran: “O you who believe! Do not devour your property among yourselves falsely, except that it be trading by your mutual consent.” The most important passages on trade and commerce, however, are found in the hadith, the collected stories of Muhammed’s life, which offer advice on the conduct of trade from the general … to the specific.
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Within a very few decades, the new creed would sweep from Mecca to Medina and back, next across the Middle East, and then west to Spain and east to India. In a commercial sense, early Islam can be thought of as a rapidly inflating bubble of commerce; outside lay unbelievers, and inside lay a swiftly growing theological and institutional unity.
Mr Bernstein goes on to hazard a quickly-sketched explanation of Islam’s very rapid spread that makes it sound rather more like a Lions’ Club than a world religion.