Under Islamic Law, any type of interest is considered usury and therefore illegal. How did banks and companies under Islamic empires (e.g. Persia, the Ottomans, Mamluks, etc.) go about making money if interest wasn't an option?

by MrMineHeads

Follow up: How were their wars financed? If they loaned money from foreign banks, did they adhere to their interests?

MoroccanMonarchist

Finally, my time to shine. Now, I'll be speaking about Morocco as that's where I'm knowledgeable but let's start with the most interesting before going to the main question.

How were Morocco's wars financed?

Morocco didn't have much of a banking industry due to Islamic rulings and poverty, as a result the way wars were fought in Morocco differed on the time period but generally the Military history of Morocco can be divided into 3 main periods:

11th to 16th century: the Era of the Tribal Armies

From the 11th until the 16th century, Morocco paid its armies in promises of land and wealth. It was very common in campaigns for the Sultan to confiscate the lands and wealth of rebels and enemy forces as a result this was the payment that was given to the Tribes that agreed to provide soldiers to the Sultan in his conflicts. For example, 11th century Moroccan sources described the acquisition of "mountains of gold" during the conquests in Spain.This wealth wouldn't be kept the by the Sultan, generally they followed an Islamic ruling which was that a share of it (usually 20%) is given to the Sultan while the remaining 80% is distributed among the warriors.

Meanwhile there's land that Morocco took from rival Muslim rulers in Spain and the Spanish Christians, this land was simply distributed among the Tribes that fought with the Chiefs gaining large tracts of land in Spain which they can either use a source of wealth, bringing in peasants to farm it, or better yet by having their entire tribe move there.

To use another more modern example, in 1830 the Sultan Abderrahmane tried to take the city of Tlemcen from the Ottomans (exploiting the momentary weakness of the Ottomans due to the French invasion) using an army composed of tribal warriors. When the Ottomans put up a stern resistance, Sultan Abderrahmane abandoned his project but let his men plunder the outskirts of Tlemcen and neighboring settlements since this was the only way he could now pay his army since he wouldn't be able to take the city itself and have them confiscate money from the Ottoman treasury or take the land owned by the Ottoman notables.

This is how wars were financed in the early era of Morocco, by promising to distribute any land and wealth captured during campaigns. Of course there are exceptions.

There aren't reports of the early Almohads paying , or offering to pay, their soldiers. Instead the early Almohad armies fought of religious conviction and not monetary gain as the Almohad dynasty was founded by an Islamic Scholar, Ibn Tumart, who proclaimed himself the Mahdi, a divine figure in Islam. Thus the Almohads did not need to finance their war as its army lived off the land and wasn't paid in money but rather in first class tickets to heaven.

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16th to 19th century; The era of the Slave Armies

While the Saadian dynasty took power in the 16th century using religious motivated Sufi warriors and monetarily motivated Arab warriors, the dynasty decided to instead adopt the Middle Eastern practice of Slave Armies using their share of the spoils of conquest during their campaign to unify Morocco (starting in 1500 and ending in 1554) to purchase large numbers of African and European youths whom they spent years transforming into the perfect soldiers.

The Saadians used their slave army in West Africa to great success, deploying several thousand slave soldiers under Judar Pasha, himself a slave, across the arid Sahara desert and fight the Songhai Empire to take its Gold and Salt mines. Unlike the tribal armies, the Slave army wasn't able to plunder the mines and instead sent all the treasure it captured back to the Sultan making him very very rich and perpetuating the slave soldier system.

The main appeal of the Slave army was its staunch loyalty and its low cost as the Sultans never paid the Slaves a salary or even gave them a share of plunder. Instead, the Slaves were "paid" in freedom when they reached a certain age, usually in their 40s. They were also given a small plot of land in Morocco, generally land that the Sultan owned himself rather than the spoils of conquest.

In the 17th century, Morocco slipped into civil war. During which the Alaouite family led by Moulay Ismail (r. 1672-1727) copied the Saadians and sent agents to West African slave markets to purchase young African boys for his army for the same purpose. This massive slave army that the Alaouites (then just a Noble family rather than a ruling dynasty) built became legendary in Morocco and is known to this day as Abid al-Bukhari or "Slaves of Bukhari". This institution became a vital part of Moroccan politics well into the 19th century. But that's off-topic.

Again, the Slaves were not paid so the Sultans didn't need to finance their wars.

In the 19th century, the concept of the National Army was adopted

Citing the figure given by C.R Pennell in Morocco Since 1830 a National army with 6,000 men was founded in the 1850s but this was financed by taxes as the Sultan Mohammed V introduced many of them.

Which brings us to your question on Lending

Until the 20th century, Morocco didn't have banks or organized lending as there was never really a need for it. The Peasantry was too poor for it and the Sultan was too rich and had ways of getting around needing loans.

There are instances of wealthy Moroccans lending each other money, the Alaouties themselves were a powerful land-owning family before taking power and they did have ties to the merchants of Fes who undoubtedly lent the family money to purchase more land, but this wasn't done for profit or with interest but rather to curry favor and ensure they stayed on the good side of Morocco's influential actors.

Lending , as we now know it, was introduced to Morocco by the French and it wouldn't really take off until the economic liberalization of King Hassan II (r. 1961-1999).

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Sources

Histoire des Alaouites (History of the Alaouites) by Jacques Benoist-Méchin, I used this for all discussion on the Alaouite dynasty

Histoire du Maroc (History of Morocco) by Michel Abitbol , I used this for discussing the Tribal Armies and the Slave Armies

Morocco since 1830 by C.R Pennell, I used this to discuss the modern example of a Tribal army and the rise of a National Army

The Almohads: The Rise of an Islamic Empire by Allen Fromherz, I was referencing this book when giving the short summary on the Almohad dynasty

Edit:

I fixed some grammar mistakes, changed some words and added a new paragraph in the discussion of the Tribal Armies.

mymainismythrowaway1

I asked a similar question a year or so ago, and received this answer from u/MockOnVoltaire. It focuses mainly on banking in the later periods of ottoman rule.

ParkSungJun

The current answer makes some sense in the context of Morocco, perhaps, but it doesn't explain several things that were common in the Early Modern empires of Islam: namely, that if they were so poor and promised essentially dreams, then why is it that they were centers of massive amounts of wealth and prosperity? Alexandria, for instance, was a trade port that put Venice to shame up until the 1600s: Constantinople was the City of the World's Desire: and the Mughal Empire was extremely wealthy and many merchants flocked both to and from India. Indonesia would not have converted to Islam, for that matter, were it not for large amounts of Islamic traders that journeyed back and forth across the treacherous Indian Ocean.

The answer is simple: much like any other restriction, people who were desperate enough for money (read: most people) would find a workaround. And so they did.

The Ottoman Empire, for instance, was notorious for its use of tax farming. Armies were expensive, especially for Empires at war fairly often. To pay for them, the Ottoman Empire would sell the right to collect taxes in a particular area in exchange for an upfront payment that was discounted from the expected tax revenue of that particular area. If this sounds like a government bond, it basically is, except there's "no interest" changing hands even if practically speaking it is financially identical to one. This right to tax farm could in turn be securitized and subcontracted so that many people could get a cut of the pie.

Another method was by providing "zero interest loans," which did not charge interest, but usually had some kind of profit-sharing mechanism (for instance, the lendee would make a donation from profits to local institutions essentially on behalf of the lendor). This is financially similar to a convertible bond in some aspects.

There was also heavy abuse of arbitrage in the markets. The reason why Constantinople and Alexandria were so wealthy was because they controlled the spice trade to Europe, and merchants were able to buy spices cheaply before selling them to Europeans at a much higher price. These higher prices were what drove Europeans to find their own way to India in hopes of bypassing the traditional routes through Egypt and Anatolia.

All-in-all, there was plenty of opportunity to make money even without being able to rely on interest as an option. There is a reason why the European powers ended up imperializing much of the Middle East and Asia after all, and it certainly wasn't because there was no money for them to make there.