Historians recognize a country's currency as a source shedding light on nation-building projects. Issues of national currency are means by which states inculcate in audiences--domestic and foreign--specific ideas about the nature of their rule and the land and citizens within their borders. Jordan is no exception; the Hashemites have heavily utilized portraits of monarchs with ancient and modern landmarks to represent Jordan pictorially. Although Jordan's nation-building project after independence toed a fraught line in the face of leftist Arab nationalism, it had reason to undertake self-promotion by means of antiquities. Unlike the case of its neighbors, no ancient relics falling within its first borders had been co-opted into an identity framework by a colonial or mandatory regime. Between 1927 and 1952 Jordan undertook a massive program, designed by the British, of institutionalizing its land. In State, Land and Society in Jordan (2000), Michael Fischbach demonstrates that this land program proved instrumental in building an effective bureaucracy by which citizens interacted with the state, securing their loyalty to the state and imparting the reality of a Jordanian nation upon them. Jordan simultaneously organized a currency board, a central bank and a process for producing currency. The landscape into which Jordan's citizens were organized was often the subject chosen for its minted currency. Jordan's elastic borders and fluctuating populations have created special problems for efforts to offer the mind's eye a definitive conception of the nation. The antiquity of Jordan's landscape has thus been consistently juxtaposed with its modernity and portraits of kings, demonstrating continuity, change and legitimacy, all for the good of the nation. This focus on Jordanian currency was for a dissertation--now a manuscript in progress--exploring the role antiquities have played in cultivating unified or competing identities among Jordanians throughout the country's history. The paper I propose for MESA's 2010 conference argues that the choice of iconography for Jordanian currency has been calculated with the domestic audience in mind. Such choices have been made based on Jordan's needs within its political or socioeconomic context at any given time. These conclusions are based on primary and secondary literature regarding Jordan's banking system and the minting of its currency, interviews with persons having first-hand knowledge of the design of Jordan's currency and examination of the currency itself for careful consideration of its elements within the context of events in Jordan's history.

This paper examines the use of early Islamic coins as symbols on present-day currencies issued by Iraq, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Syria. I argue that the imprint of an historic Islamic coin lends legitimacy on several levels to the paper currency of these modern nations. Politically, the coin references the power and reach of the umma, in Umayyad dynastic terms, for modern inheritors of this shared political and religious culture. As for religion, it gives a stamp of approval to the Sunni interpretation of Islam. In addition, the coin's image echoes the reliability of precious metal as an economic base. Hence, I suggest that the coin of the umma on a nation's currency defines a metanumismatics, whereby currency displays an awareness of itself, its place in social interactions, and its exchange value in cultural, political, and economic terms. The coin's image also raises questions about the relationship between symbol and substance. The coin most frequently depicted is the gold dinar that the caliph, `Abd al-Malik b. Marwan [reg. 685-705 A.D.] minted in Damascus in 696 A.D. It is often referred to as the first true Arab-Islamic dinar. Previous practice imprinted the Islamic testimonial/shahada on existing coins with Byzantine and Sasanian iconography. By contrast, this coin demonstrated a break with the past, and independence from non-Muslim numismatic representations. In addition, this coin was the Umayyad caliph's response to challenges from rivals who fought with the metal, not of swords but of their own coins, namely, `Abdullah b. Zubayr and the Shurat/Kharijite leader, Qatari b. Fuja'a. `Abd al-Malik's dinar proclaims the triumph of the mainstream umma. Neither this historical moment nor this coin has been forgotten. The coin's image may in fact provide a hedge against money as a simulacrum, in Baudrillard's terms, since it reminds the user of precious metal's material value. But its presence also poses questions about convergences of imperialism and modernity, religious and secular models of governance, continuity with and disruptions of past structures, and issues as to who can claim to inherit the umma. I argue that the coin's image constitutes a unifying factor, where the shadow of the umma lends a deeper legitimacy socially and politically, just as the metal of its coins lends a firmer legitimacy economically. I bring together evidence from primary sources on Islamic history, secondary sources on history and numismatics, and literature theorizing money as a cultural construct.