Agriculture
The author of the following article is Salah
Zaimeche BA, MA, PHD 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 in recent times in the form of rotation
of crops, advanced irrigation techniques, plant improvements,
etc... some such changes only taking place in the last
couple of centuries in Europe, and some even taking place
nowadays.
It
is explained that such revolutionary changes fed the increasing
European population, released vast numbers from the land
and allowed agriculture to produce a capital surplus,
which was invested in industry, thus leading to the industrial
revolution of the 18th-19th century.
This
is the accepted wisdom until one comes across works on
Muslim agriculture and discovers that such changes took
place over ten centuries ago in the Muslim world, some
such changes being the foundations of much of what we
have today.
Watson,
Glick and Bolens, in particular, indeed, show that the
major breakthroughs were achieved by Muslim farmers on
the land, and by Muslim scholars with their treatises
on the subject.
Thus,
as with other subjects, prejudice distorts history, Muslim
achievements of ten centuries ago covered up; a point
raised by the French scholar, Cherbonneau, who holds:
'It is admitted with difficulty that a nation in 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 took the bother to open up and consult the old manuscripts,
so many views will be changed, so many prejudices will
be destroyed.'
The
Agricultural Revolution
As
early as the ninth century, a modern agricultural system
became central to economic life and organization in the
Muslim land.
The
great Islamic cities of the Near East, North Africa and
Spain, Artz explains, were supported by an elaborate agricultural
system that included extensive irrigation and an expert
knowledge of the most advanced agricultural methods in
the world.
The
Muslims reared the finest horses and sheep and cultivated
the best orchards and vegetable gardens. They knew how
to fight insect pests, how to use fertilizers, and they
were experts at grafting trees and crossing plants to
produce new varieties.
Glick
defines the Muslim agricultural revolution in the introduction
of new crops, which, combined with extension and intensification
of irrigation, created a complex and varied agricultural
system, whereby a greater variety of soil types were put
to efficient use; where fields that had been yielding
one crop yearly at most prior to the Muslims were now
capable of yielding three or more crops, in rotation;
and where agricultural production responded to the demands
of an increasingly sophisticated and cosmopolitan urban
population by providing the towns with a variety of products
unknown in Northern Europe.
Whilst for Scott, the agricultural system of the Spanish
Muslims, in particular, 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 to `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.'
Fertilisers,
in their variety, were used according to a well-advanced
methodology; whilst a maximum amount of moisture in the
soil was preserved.
Soil
rehabilitation was constantly cared for, and preserving
the deep 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, the success of Islamic farming also lay in hard
enterprise. No natural obstacle was sufficiently formidable
to check the enterprise and industry of the Muslim farmer.
He tunneled through the mountains; his aqueducts went
through deep ravines, and he leveled with infinite patience
and labor the rocky slopes of the sierra (in Spain).
The
rise of productivity of agricultural land and sometimes
of agricultural labour owe to the introduction of higher
yielding new crops and better varieties of old crops,
through more specialised land use which often centred
on the new crops, through more intensive rotations which
the new crops allowed, through the concomitant extension
and improvement of irrigation, through the spread of cultivation
into new or abandoned areas, and through the development
of more labour intensive techniques of farming.
These
changes, themselves, were positively affected by changes
in other sectors of the economy: growth of trade, enlargement
of the money economy, increasing specialisation of factors
of production in all sectors, and with the growth of population
and its increasing urbanisation.
Irrigation,
from Andalusia to the far East, from the Sudan to Afghanistan,
remained central, `the basis of all agriculture and the
source of all life.'
The
ancient systems of irrigation the Muslims became heirs
to were in an advanced state of decay, and ruins.'
The
Muslims repaired them and constructed new ones; besides
devising new techniques to catch, channel, store and lift
the water, and making ingenious combinations of available
devices.
All
of the Kitab al-Filahat (book of agriculture), whether
Maghribi, Andalusian; Egyptian, Iraqi; Persian or Yemenite,
Bolens points out, insist meticulously on the deployment
of equipment and on the control of water.
Water
Management
Water,
so precious a commodity in a more Islamically aware age,
was managed according to stringent rules, any waste of
the resource banned, and the most severe economy enforced.
Thus, in the Algerian Sahara various water management
techniques were used to make the most effective use of
the resource.
The
Foggaras, a network of underground galleries, conducted
water from one place to the other over very long distances
so as to avoid evaporation. Although the system is still
in use today, the tendency at present is for over-use
and waste of water. Still in Algeria, in the Beni Abbes
region, in the Sahara, south of Oran, farmers used a clepsydra
to determine the duration of water use for every user
in the area.
This
clepsydra regulates with precision, and night and day,
the amount going to each farmer, timed by the minute,
throughout the year, and taking into account seasonal
variations. Each farmer is informed of the timing of his
turn, and summoned to undertake necessary action to ensure
effective supply to his plot.
In
Spain, the same strict management was in operation. The
water conducted from one canal to the other was used more
than once, 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.
All
disputes and violations of laws on water were dealt with
by a court-whose judges were chosen by the farmers themselves,
this court named The Tribunal of the Waters, which sat
on Thursdays at the door of the principal mosque. Ten
centuries later, the same tribunal still sits in Valencia,
but at the door of the cathedral.
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 on the acquired
knowledge of many civilized traditions.'
It was colonialism, she recognises, which subsequently
and seriously upset the traditional agricultural balance
in order to increase profitability for the colonizers.
The
decline of agriculture as the destruction of other aspects
of Islamic civilisation had, however, begun with the various
invaders, from the Crusaders to the Mongols, from the
Banu Hillal to the Normans and Spain's conquistadors in
the West. Such invasions caused the ruin of irrigation
works, destroyed permanent crops, closed down trade routes,
and caused farmers to take flight.
The
Muslim farmers also became over taxed by their new masters
in Christian Spain and Sicily, and were exterminated in
those countries; their system perishing with them.
The
later colonisers, the French, only finished off whatever
was left. No better place to see that than in Algeria,
where the French on arrival 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 wars of devastation 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 subside on arid lands, and in the vicinity of
forests causing their degradation.
Later,
during the war of independence 1954-62, the French set
ablaze millions of acres of forest lands; and then departed,
leaving a legacy of bareness and hostility to greenery
from which the Algerians have not recovered yet.
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