The Islamic Lands
Coins and Money in Daily Life and Trade
Copper coins formed the basic currency for everyday purposes, a point
emphasized in Maqrizi's fifteenth-century treatise on coins, in which he says 'fulus
[copper coins] were not used to purchase expensive items but only used for local
transactions'. As elsewhere, there were in the Islamic world wide discrepancies
between the earnings of the rich and the poor and their associated spending
power. In eleventh-century Egypt, for example, a servant might earn one dinar
per month while a judge might earn a hundred. A dinar at this time would have
bought 100 kg of wheat, while an expensive embroidered coat from Damietta might cost up to 1,000 dinars.
On special occasions, such as the end of the Ramadan, the month of fasting,
rulers might distribute coins amongst the people as largesse. In Fatimid Egypt
the caliph specially minted 10,000 gold kharubas -
tiny gold coins the weight of a carob seed -for distribution to state servants on a feast day known as
Thursday of the Lentils. In present-day Iran coin-like tokens are frequently distributed at weddings.
Coins were often pierced and sewn onto women's clothes or headdresses. The range and amount of
these would be an obvious status symbol for the woman's family, but they were also the woman's
own property which she could add to or dispose of at will.
Trade was another source of wealth both for individuals and the state. The
government could exact large sums from merchants in the form of harbour and
customs duties, as happened in Yemen in the 1420S when the Rasulid sultan
al-Nasir imposed such a high tariff on the goods coming in on the ocean-going
vessels arriving at the port of Aden that they boycotted Aden and sailed
directly to Jeddah. During the Abbasid period long-haul voyages across the
Indian Ocean had regularly taken place between China and the Islamic world;
at the key port of Siraf in the Persian Gulf Chinese coins have been excavated.
Finds of hoards from this period can provide us with a fascinating insight into
the ways in which coins were used in trade. The Sinaw hoard, for instance,
which was buried in the Oman interior about AD 840, consists of 900 coins and
fragments, the earliest of which are Sasanian coins of the sixth century. The rest
of the coins, mostly Umayyad arid Abbasid dirhams, represent a remarkable
fifty-nine mints across the Islamic world from North Africa to Transoxiana. The
hoard may have been the savings of a local inhabitant or, perhaps more likely,
the property of a merchant involved in the lucrative Indian Ocean trade. This
and other hoards of the period show that Islamic coins had a virtually
unlimited circulation range as a result of their uniformly high silver content and also
provide an image of a world uninhibited by political frontiers.
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