Commerce and Commentary: Muslim Scholar-Merchants of the Spice Trade

Muslim scholars during in the 13^th-16^th centuries often led second lives as prosperous merchants, researching and transmitting knowledge as they shipped commodities across distant ports along the spice route. Did these worlds of commerce and commentary intersect in meaningful ways? To what extent were the dynamic aims, norms, and practices of Islamic knowledge entangled with the commercial and cultural lives of spice-trade merchants? And to what extent did the widening flows of capital, goods, people, and disease along the spice trade transform the way Muslim scholars related to the Islamic tradition and their knowledge of the world more broadly?

This paper—a preview of a larger book project—will take up these questions, opening with the example of Ibn Ḥajar al-ʿAsqalānī (d. 1449), a learned master of prophetic traditions (hadith) and a high-ranking judge in Cairo. Ibn Ḥajar was active among transregional networks of textile and pepper traders who linked the Indian Ocean to the Mediterrenean, and I will situate his case among other examples of merchant-scholars and their writings from Málaga to Malacca. That Muslim scholars like Ibn Ḥajar took up perennial problems concerning risk, trust, taxation, inflation, navigation, long-distance travel, smuggling, bribery, poverty, charity, and disease in this period should come as little surprise. And yet, as I argue, these problems took on a fresh urgency in this era, and the strategies and modes of ingenuity, translation, and discovery that scholars employed to address such problems reflect their embeddedness in an expanding world of trade.

These examples not only illustrate the way that the spice trade generated funds for the patronage for Islamic scholarship and multiplied the ports and pathways through which such knowledge flowed.