Agriculture

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The author of the following article is Salah Zaimeche, BA, MA, Ph.D., of the “Foundation of Science, Technology, and Civilization.” For the full article, please use the link below: http://www.muslimheritage.com/topics/default.cfm?ArticleID=227

History books in schools usually convey the notion that the agricultural revolution took place recently, through crop rotation, advanced irrigation techniques, plant improvements, etc. Some of these changes occurred only in the last couple of centuries in Europe, and more recently as well. These revolutionary changes supported Europe’s growing population.

It also freed vast numbers from the land and allowed agriculture to produce a surplus of capital. That surplus was invested in industry, driving the Industrial Revolution of the 18th-19th centuries. This understanding was accepted wisdom until scholars studying Muslim agriculture discovered that such changes took place over ten centuries ago in the Muslim world. These changes were the foundations of much of what we have today.

In particular, Watson, Glick, and Bolens show that Muslim farmers and scholars achieved breakthroughs through their treatises on the subject. Thus, as with other issues, prejudice distorts history, and Muslim achievements of ten centuries ago have been covered up. This point was raised by the French scholar Charbonneau, who holds: “It is admitted with difficulty that a nation in a majority of nomads could have had known any form of agricultural techniques other than sowing wheat and barley.

The misconceptions come from the rarity of works on the subject. If we open and consult the old manuscripts, many views would change, and many prejudices would be destroyed.

The Agricultural Revolution

As early as the ninth century, a modern agricultural system became central to the economic life and organization of Muslim lands. Artz explains that the great Islamic cities of the Near East, North Africa, and Spain were supported by an elaborate agricultural system. This system included extensive irrigation and expert knowledge of the world’s most advanced agricultural methods. Muslims raised the finest horses and sheep and cultivated the best orchards and vegetable gardens. They knew how to fight insect pests, use fertilizers, and graft trees and cross plants to produce new varieties.

Glick defines the Muslim agricultural revolution as introducing new crops that, combined with irrigation extension and intensification, created a complex, varied agricultural system in which a wider range of soil types were used efficiently. Fields that had yielded one crop yearly before the Muslims could now produce three or more crops in rotation. Agricultural production met the demands of an increasingly sophisticated, cosmopolitan urban population by providing towns with products unknown in Northern Europe.

For Scott, the Spanish Muslims’ agricultural system was “the most complex, the most scientific, the most perfect, ever devised by the ingenuity of man.”  “Such advancement of Muslim farming, according to Bolens, was owed to the adaptation of agrarian techniques to local needs and a spectacular cultural union of scientific knowledge from the past and the present, from the Near East, the Maghreb and Andalusia. A culmination subtler than a simple accumulation of techniques, it has been an enduring ecological success, proven by the course of human history.”

Fertilizers were used with a well-advanced methodology, while preserving the maximum amount of moisture in the soil. Soil rehabilitation was cared for continuously, and protecting the thick beds of cropped land from erosion was, according to Bolens, again, “the golden rule of ecology” and was “subject to laws of scrupulous, careful ecology.” For Scott, Islamic farming’s success also lay in this laborious enterprise. No natural obstacle was so formidable as to check the business and industry of Muslim farmers. He tunneled through mountains; his aqueducts spanned deep ravines, and he leveled with infinite patience and labored through the rocky slopes of the Sierra (in Spain).

The rise in agricultural land productivity, and sometimes in agricultural labor, was due to the introduction of higher-yielding new crops and better varieties of former crops. More specific land use, often centered on the new crops and supported by more intensive rotations, along with the concomitant extension and improvement of irrigation, also increased productivity. The spread of cultivation into new or abandoned areas and the development of more labor-intensive farming techniques also significantly increased productivity.

These changes, themselves, were positively affected by changes in other sectors of the economy: the growth of trade, enlargement of the money economy, increasing specialization of factors of production in all industries, and with the growth of population and its increasing urbanization.
From Andalusia to the Far East, from Sudan to Afghanistan, Irrigation remained central, “the basis of all agriculture and the source of all life.” “The ancient irrigation systems the Muslims inherited were in an advanced state of decay and ruin.” They repaired them and built new ones, while also devising new techniques to catch, channel, store, and lift water, and to combine available devices in ingenious ways.

Bolens points out that all of the Kitab al-Filahat (book of agriculture), whether Maghribi, Andalusian, Egyptian, Iraqi, Persian, or Yemenite, insist meticulously on the deployment of equipment and the control of water.

Water Management

Water, a precious commodity in a more Islamically aware age, was managed under stringent rules; waste was banned, and the strictest economy was enforced. Thus, in the Algerian Sahara, people used various water management techniques to use the resource as efficiently as possible. The Foggaras, a network of underground galleries, carried water from one place to another over long distances to avoid evaporation. Although the system is still in use today, overuse and water waste remain common.

In Algeria, in the Beni Abbes region of the Sahara south of Oran, farmers used a clepsydra to determine each user’s water-use duration. This clepsydra precisely regulates, day and night, the amount going to each farmer, timed to the minute throughout the year and accounting for seasonal variations. Each farmer is informed of his turn’s timing and summoned to take the necessary action to ensure his plot receives an adequate supply.

Spain operated under the same strict management. The water conducted from one canal to the other was reused. The quantity supplied accurately graduated; distributing outlets were adapted to each soil variety, two hundred and twenty-four of these, each with a specific name. A court whose judges were chosen by the farmers themselves handled all disputes and violations of water law; this court, named The Tribunal of the Waters, sat on Thursdays at the principal mosque door. Ten centuries later, the same tribunal still sits in Valencia, but at the cathedral entrance. Interesting…

The Loss of Ecological Balance

“With a deep love for nature, and a relaxed way of life, classical Islamic society,” Bolens concludes, “achieved ecological balance, a successful average economy of operation, based not on theory but the acquired knowledge of many civilized traditions.” She recognizes colonialism, which subsequently and severely upset the traditional agricultural balance to increase profitability for the colonizers. The decline of agriculture and (deleted words) other aspects of Islamic civilization began with various invaders, from the Crusaders to the Mongols, the Banu Hilal to the Normans, and Spain’s conquistadors in the West. These invasions ruined irrigation works, destroyed permanent crops, closed trade routes, and drove farmers to flee.

The Muslim farmers also became overtaxed by their new masters in Christian Spain and Sicily and were exterminated in those countries. Their system perished with them.

The later colonizers, the French, only finished off whatever was left. No better place to see that than Algeria, where the French, upon arriving in 1830, found a much greener country than the one they left 130 years later, and a population living more or less in harmony with its environment. In their devastating wars against Algerian resistance, the French destroyed the garden rings that surrounded towns and cities, cutting trees and orchards. After that, they deforested whole regions to exploit timber and took all fertile lands from their Muslim owners, forcing them to reside in arid areas and forests’ vicinity, causing their degradation.

Later, during the war of independence 1954-62, the French set millions of acres of forest land ablaze. They then departed, leaving a legacy of greenery turned to barrenness and hostility from which Algerians have not yet recovered.