International Trade and the

Abstract

Tb STUDY OF THE MEDIEVAL. Islamic countryside, and of the silent majority that inhabited it, is enveloped by a considerable obscurity with only occasional and partial clearings. Our familiarity with the medieval Egyptian (and, more generally, Middle Eastern) countryside is vague and imprecise. Fundamental issues remain unclarified and unstudied. We are bereft of some of the most basic notions and concepts to describe, understand, and analyse the agricultural and rural history of the Islamic Middle East. Abhorring this vacuum, historians of the premodern Middle East have slowly begun to mobilise to fill in some of the voids in our knowledge. If we exclude for the moment research and publication on fiscal and administrative issues pertaining to agriculture in the early centuries of Islam, most of this work has been produced during the past twenty-five years. In his superb bibliographic survey of Middle Eastern historical studies that appeared in 1991, Stephen Humphreys already found it possible to devote an entire chapter to ‘The Voiceless Classes of Islamic Society -The Peasantry and Rural Life’. This chapter contains a fairly comprehensive survey and review of the literature on agriculture and rural life in the Middle East published through 1988, and covers the area extending from Iran through North Africa and Muslim Spain during the pre-modern period. Humphreys points to the penury of our sources, regrets the fact that ‘in medieval Islamic culture, the peasant seems both voiceless and invisible’ and laments the absence (with one notable exception for North Africa) of any comprehensive work on pre-modern rural society. He concludes that ‘in the end, our neglect of the peasant in Islamic studies is a failure