Paying, trading and giving

This lesson asks you to describe the advantages and disadvantages of ways of paying for goods and services, and to describe trading, lending, borrowing and donating as ways of distributing resources. The museum offers records on trade, on written payment orders and on endowments; lending and borrowing your class adds. ¹

For each method you can name, say what a seller must trust and what a buyer must trust. Then list one advantage and one disadvantage.

A historian gives one scene as evidence of how widely the hawala was used. In Tarikh al-Islam, Hasan Ibrahim Hasan writes that the boatmen who ferried the Seljuk sultan Malikshah and his armies across the river Jayhun received bills of exchange from his vizier Nizam al-Mulk. They collected their value from the Seljuk agent in Antioch ². The record presents the sakk and the hawala as this one author presents them, and adds that the Arabic hawala remains the origin of the word awal in Urdu ².

How did the jurists treat the endowment of cash? The TDV Encyclopedia, as the record on waqf gives it, says the early Hanafis did not accept it, though a view allowing it was attributed to Zufar. It adds that it became official, binding practice in the Ottoman state after the Shaykh al-Islam Ebussuud issued a fatwa and an order permitting it in 1548 ³. The record reports both and decides nothing.

Hasan Ibrahim Hasan offers the boatmen as evidence of how widely the hawala was used. Is one scene enough to show that a practice was widespread, and what else would you want to see before you agreed, and why?

• The sakk and the hawala: the written order that names those entitled to payment, and the bill collected from an agent.
• Waqf: how an owner locks the capital away and gives the yield to a good cause.
• Trade in Islam: what al-Maraghi, quoting Ibn Khaldun, says surrounds buying and selling, from exact measure to false oaths.
• Nizam al-Mulk: the vizier named in the scene.

Read the records on the sakk and the hawala, and on waqf. For each, say who gives, who receives, and what is handed over.