This study establishes long-term trends in the purchasing power of the wages of unskilled workers and develops estimates for GDP per capita for medieval Egypt and Iraq. Wages were heavily influenced by two long-lasting demographic shocks, the Justinian Plague and the Black Death and the slow population recovery that followed. As a result, they remained above the subsistence minimum for most of the medieval era. We also argue that the environment of high wages that emerged after the Justinian Plague contributed to the Golden Age of Islam by creating demand for higher income goods.

The paper examines the institutional economic performance of the public good waqf with the intent of demonstrating the relevance of institutions to the momentous debate over Islamic backwardness and European progress and the waqf's role as supporter of learning institutions and promoter of social integration. Through the application of two sets of theoretical paradigms designed for measuring institutional behaviour, property rights and institutional arrangements, to legal cases supplied by fatwās from North Africa and Muslim Spain it will be possible to analyze and evaluate the impact of one of the major institutions of the premodern Islamic world on economic progress. L'article étudie la performance économique du waqf fiduciaire public, (waqf khairī), en tant qu'institution économique. Le but est de démontrer la pertinence de cette performance quant au débat sur la décadence économique des sociétés musulmanes par rapport au progrès que connut l'Europe. Sera étudié le rôle de l'activité économique institutionelle du waqf en général, et particulièrement dans les fonctions qui lui étaient attribuées, comme le soutien des institutions scolaires ainsi que la promotion de l'integrité sociale. Par l'application de deux paradigmes théoriques conçues pour mesurer le comportement institutionel, les droits de propriété et l'adaptation aux changements dans les conditions économiques rapportés par les documents juridiques tels les fatwās de l'Afrique du Nord et de l'Espagne musulmane, il sera possible d'analyser et d'évaluer l'impact de l'une des plus importantes institutions du monde islamique pré-moderne sur le progrès économique.

The author argues that in the case of Islamic history, the growing interest in the economic theory of institutions and their role in economic growth has shifted the scholarly methodology from empirically based research, to theoretical models which favoured sweeping generalizations about the negative roles of the Islamic state and legal institution. Shatzmiller's examinations of the role of Islamic institutions in periods of economic growth show that economic growth was visible in the key indicators of the Caliphate's economy between ca. 750 and ca. 1100. The conclusion is that there was nothing intrinsic to Islamic institutions that impaired economic growth. RésuméUn intérêt grandissant pour la théorie économique des institutions et pour le rôle de ces dernières dans la croissance économique a récemment modifié la méthodologie des historiens spécialistes de l'Islam. Les recherches empiriques ont été de plus en plus délaissées au profit de modèles théoriques favorisant les généralisations à l'emporte-pièce sur le rôle négatif joué par l'État islamique et les institutions juridiques. Examinant le rôle des institutions islamiques en période de croissance, Shatzmiller montre que les indicateurs clés de l'économie califale témoignent d'une croissance économique entre 750 et 1100 environ. Il faut en conclure que rien dans les institutions islamiques n'entravait intrinsèquement la croissance économique.

The evidence of the late medieval period, 11th-15th centuries, indicates that women's participation in the labour market was both considerable and diversified. This paper studies whether and how women's wage labour was affected, controlled and regulated by laws, courts and judges, by using an array of the Mālikī legal sources from Muslim Spain and North Africa. It shows the existence of a legal approach straddling a strict application of the law of the ijāra, with adjustments to family law and admission of customary law, but more importantly, an approach inspired and adapted to the framework of women's property rights and therefore beneficial to them.

This article studies what conversion to Islam meant in legal terms for women and how it affected their marriage, conjugal rights, children, and property rights in two circumstances: one, when conversion was of their own volition, and the other, when it was not their own decision, but that of their husbands or fathers. A cluster offive conversion documents-three for Christian, Jewish, and pagan males, and two for Christian and pagan females—from a notarial manual composed in tenth century Cordoba is used here to place the results of the investigation within the analytical framework of the study of Muslim women's legal status, and beyond, into the emotional and psychosocial environment of women's conversion and its significance as a life event.Voluntary conversion in a religious age is an intriguing question for all historians, not only historians of religion. In fact conversion is a valuable topic for any well-rounded historical investigation as it incorporates legal, social, and economic aspects in addition to religion. Over the years, however, conversion was a subject that was essentially treated as a male issue in the literature. Not only was woman's voice on the subject absent, but the sources devised a historiographical debate from which the feminine perspective was omitted all together.' The answers from converts about why they converted came from men, and exclusively from those who were literate and educated. The tone of the male converts' writings was apologetic, argumentative, and couched in theological and philosophical polemics, which sent the scholarly investigation in the direction of intellectual rather than social and legal history and, in turn, further suppressed and discouraged any investigation of the female role in conversion.2 The how, why, and when women converted to Islam, and what changes conversion brought to their lives, have so far remained unanswered. The predicament of women's conversion has also helped to obscure other questions related to conversion. The