The late 12th and 13th centuries AD in the southern Levant were a period of increasing political centralization, ending the political instability caused by the fragmentation of the ‘Abbasid Empire in the 10th century AD. While the 11th and early 12th centuries are marked by near-constant shifts in political sovereignty, by the 13th century control of the inland areas was contested primarily between the Ayyubid rulers of Cairo and Damascus. A third center — Karak, in central Jordan — was, however, able to achieve political autonomy, if only briefly, during the 13th century, largely by maintaining economic autonomy. The elites of Cairo and Damascus recognized and attempted to disrupt this economic autonomy, but with only limited success. This paper presents evidence from recent archaeological research at one of the “nodes” of this economic strategy, the copper ore resource district of Faynan, in southern Jordan, where copper production saw a brief revival during the 12th and 13th centuries AD. These excavations are discussed in the context of regional archaeological surveys in order to the provisioning systems to which the Faynan copper industry belonged. Considering the historical archaeology of the southern Levant more broadly, I suggest that the Faynan copper industry was revived by the Ayyubid amra’ of Karak as part of a strategy to replace imported copper needed by the sugar industry in the Dead Sea lowlands and Jordan Valley ghawr, which expanded dramatically during this period. This strategy of maintaining political and economic autonomy is also compared to several strategies that have been archaeologically observed in the Levant both earlier and later in the Islamic periods in order to determine why this strategy was viable in the early to mid-13th century, but not in the period following this.

Though Italian maritime states were engaged in trade with Islamic Egypt and North Africa in the early middle ages, the crusades of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries greatly intensified commercial contacts between Muslims and Latin Christians in the eastern Mediterranean. The same Genoese, Pisan, and Venetian ships that transported pilgrims and crusader armies to the East also transported spices and commercial goods to the West. These intensified commercial relations between Italian maritime states and Islamic dynasties gave rise to new institutions and commercial practices to accommodate the increased volume of both goods and merchants in the ports of the eastern Mediterranean. Recent work on the development of the funduq/fondaco has greatly advanced our understanding of the spatial contexts of cross-cultural trade and the legal and social conventions that sustained and constrained trade between Muslims and Latin Christians in this period. However, if we know more than ever about how particular institutions (like the fondaco and the diwan) helped merchants negotiate the religious and cultural barriers to trade, we still know very little about how these merchants negotiated the ever-persistent language barrier between Muslim and Latin Christian merchants. How was language mediated in this moment of intensified trade between Islamdom and Christendom? Who was tasked to bridge the language barrier between Italian merchants and Muslim merchants and customs officials? In most studies of eastern Mediterranean trade in the crusader period, the problem of language and translation is rarely addressed. It is merely assumed that (nameless) translators must have been involved somehow. It is the aim of this paper to find out how by examining the roles of three officials affiliated with the diwan in this period—the katib, the tarjuman, and the simsar. Though they had different functions in the diwan, each official had a significant linguistic component to their job—whether drafting bilingual documents, ratifying sales between Italian and Muslim merchants, or acting as the middleman between foreign merchants and locals at the auction. Employing both Latin diplomatic treaties and Arabic fiscal treatises, I will reconstruct the translation practices and personnel of the Islamic diwan in the crusader period and reflect on the crucial—and often neglected—role of translators in facilitating the movement of goods and people in the medieval eastern Mediterranean.

Eighteenth century Islamic legal theory does not distinguish kinship from commercial networks. In practice, both networks were intertwined, and housed in bayts (houses), which therefore violated every distinction between altruistic and interested; private and public; and familial and commercial, in a manner that had significant impact on gender relations. One century later, houses were bifurcated and alongside the kinship-based altruistic family emerged the corporation. Legal codes reflected this bifurcation: commercial and family codes emerged as distinct bodies of law. The disciplinary dictates and boundaries of social sciences, as well as the ‘universality’ of these emergent categories, offered ways to remain silent about their genealogy, and hence offered no explanation (except perhaps a teleological one) for this bifurcation of bayts. It takes fore granted the aforementioned binaries, and therefore obscures any questions on the conditions that allowed separating the previously indistinguishable commercial and familial networks. Instead of taking this distinction between family and corporation, or kinship and economy, as the starting point of analysis therefore, this paper takes it to be the uncertain outcome of a complex historical process, at the heart of which was the transformation of credit relations. The intensified presence of European long distance traders and the Ottoman system of capitulations in the mid-nineteenth century led to the legalization of commerce. This in turn transformed (or reduced) debt into a quantifiable financial obligation, giving rise to an apparatus of capture that pumped more labor out of just about everyone. The weakening of Egypt rulers’ apparatuses of capture on the one hand and their indebtedness to European powers on the other necessitated assembling new apparatuses of capture; ones that led to the rise of both the corporation and modern family. While tracing this bifurcation, the paper focuses on debt with its impact on both gender relations with the family, and the structures and genres of Islamic legal theory

The thesis of this paper is that while Islamic banking is working nowadays globally in a more de-ideologized environment, on the national level, political considerations play a significant role, taking the Turkish interest-free participation banks as an example. The analysis, based on data of the Turkish Participation Banks Association and the development of participation banking sector, is interpreted in the light of political programmes and statements, changing government support and state regulations for participation banks. In Turkey, the foundation of interest-free banking in the 1980s was in line with the politics of the Turkish-Islamic synthesis of the Özal era. While Islamic bankers in Turkey were acting in a pragmatic way, the oppositional conservative Refah party called for an interest-free economy, evaluating interest as a part of the “köle düzeni” (slavery system), and leading to the economic exploitation of Turkey. Since the 1990s and especially in the 2000s, a change of attitude towards Islamic finance can be observed globally. Islamic and conventional bankers saw Islamic finance mainly as an ordinary business, which satisfies legitimate consumer demands. In this de-ideologized environment, political support just aimed at creating a plain level field of competition, in order to strengthen financial centres like London. Throughout the late 1990s, the laicist government of Turkey fought against “green capital”, which means companies who had a close connection with Islamist political groups or parties. With such a tense atmosphere, even regular Islamic banks faced several problems that slowed down their progress and prosperity. After AKP’s elections win in 2002, the political scene was again favourable towards participation banks (as Islamic banks were renamed then). In the recent years, there has been a new initiative of the Turkish government to increase participation banking’s share from 5% to 15% till 2025, and to make Turkey an international hub of Islamic finance. This paper argues that this policy is not purely an economic instrument to attract Gulf investments or to increase the savings rate, but it is embedded in an again more ideologized rhetoric. Conventional banks are attacked by the president for taking interest rates deemed too high and blamed for the economic difficulties that Turkey has been experiencing recently. Boosting interest-free state participation banks, therefore, legitimizes the AKP’s government as being based on conservative Islamic values and partially exonerates the government from the responsibility for the recent economic problems.