Before Oil, How Did Islamic States Get Rich?

Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Libya are all among the world’s top oil producers, and mega-rich oil sheikhs have been a fixture of the international cultural landscape for decades. But there were wealthy and powerful Islamic states before anyone had need for massive quantities of petroleum, and the way that they became wealthy and powerful should make Western political leaders think carefully about their foreign and domestic policies. Not that they will actually do so, of course.

The wealthy and powerful Islamic states of the past, including the great caliphates as well as the Mughal empire in India and others, weren’t great centers of manufacturing or agriculture, or of mercantile acumen. Rather, they gained their wealth and power through jihad. The Qur’an tells Muslims to fight unbelievers, including the “people of the book” (that is, primarily Jews and Christians): “Fight against those who do not believe in Allah or the last day, and do not forbid what Allah and his messenger have forbidden, and do not follow the religion of truth, even if they are among the people of the book, until they pay the jizya [a poll tax] with willing submission and feel themselves subdued.” (Qur’an 9:29)

The people who were thus subdued were called dhimmis, protected people, but this was not a benign title; the idea resembled more the Mafia sense of paying protection than of the defense of the weak and vulnerable.

Umar ibn al-Khattab, who according to Islamic tradition became in the year 634 the caliph, Muhammad’s successor as the spiritual, political and military leader of the Muslim community, told his people to be sure to collect that poll tax, the jizya, for the Muslims depended upon it for their livelihood: “I advise you to fulfill Allah’s Convention (made with the Dhimmis) as it is the convention of your Prophet and the source of the livelihood of your dependents (i.e. the taxes from the Dhimmis.)” The Muslims lived not on farming or trading, but on plundering and taxing the people they conquered.

Muslims throughout the 1,400-year history of Islam have heeded Umar’s advice. As The Tragedy of Islam: Failure and Excuses explains in detail, Islam has no work ethic. Its ideal society features non-Muslims working and supporting the Muslims, who do not work. Muslims tended to find manual labor distasteful, and as a curse. Slaves and non-Muslims worked, and provided for the upkeep of the Muslims, “the best of peoples” (Qur’an 3:110).

But the host cannot indefinitely continue to support the parasite. And so it’s inevitable: Islamic states go into decline, and have to wage jihad anew, so as to find more non-Muslims to support them. This can be seen clearly in the rise and decline of the last caliphate and one of the most successful Islamic states in history, the Ottoman Empire.

The Ottoman Empire was depended upon the jizya when the jizya when it was at its height. By the mid-sixteenth century, when the Ottoman Empire was striking terror in the hearts of Christians all over Europe, the tax on Jews and Christians was its largest revenue source.

The jizya was the source of the power that allowed the sultan Suleiman the Magnificent to conquer Belgrade in 1521 and Rhodes the following year. In 1529, revenue from the jizya equipped the Ottoman force that besieged Vienna, but had to withdraw, not because Ottoman forces had been bested on the battlefield, but because Suleiman’s supply lines were stretched to the breaking point. He did, however, take Algiers that year, and Tripoli in 1551. All the while, the jizya was the empire’s principal source of income.

However, high taxes can have catastrophic consequences. The Ottoman Empire grew great and powerful on the confiscated wealth of the subjugated Jews and Christians, but once those taxes had rendered the Jewish and Christian communities impoverished, the empire went into an irreversible decline. By the seventeenth century, the jizya was no longer the empire’s principal source of income, and no revenue source could replace it entirely or revive the faltering empire.

Why did the jizya cease to be the empire’s primary income source? Because one cannot get blood from a stone. The laws for dhimmis required that Islam’s supremacy be maintained; while some Jews and Christians were able to attain positions of power and influence and amass great wealth, for the most part their communities were gradually and steadily impoverished as they continued to pay the tax.

The Ottoman Empire was thus caught in a downward spiral. Its decline had one specific cause: Islam. As The Tragedy of Islam shows, the very thing that made for its success led to its downfall. And Islamic law has not been reformed. It still calls upon Islamic states to collect the jizya from subjugated peoples. It is not collected today due to a variety of historical circumstances, but would be revived in any restored caliphate. (And restoring the caliphate is the primary goal of jihad groups worldwide.)

Today’s Western leaders, meanwhile, are ignorant of these historical facts and are busy setting the stage for a new Islamic conquest, which could lead to a new repetition of this history, from the conquest to the subjugation to the taxation, and the concomitant Islamic imperial growth and then decline. None of this had to be so. But the Western left is insisting upon it.