The Invention and Development of Islamic Feudalism: A Historical Review

Abstract

This paper will focus on the sophisticated discussion of the Islamic feudalism concept, as well as compare land tenure mechanisms of the 7th to 15th centuries Islamic societies. This paper critically discusses the legitimacy of the concept of medieval Islamic socio-economic structures being described as a feudal by comparing it with classical European feudalism and traces the development of the iqta system that developed during the Abbasid era as a system of revenue assignment and looks at some of the regional variations of the iqta system, including the Seljuk, Ayyubid, Mamluk and the Ottoman timar systems. Analysis the indicates that although the Islamic land tenure systems achieved links between military service and land revenues that paralleled European feudalism, there were structural poles that characterized the differences between the systems. Some of the major differences are that: Islamic law is practiced by independent judicial bodies; the separation of land rights and the collection of revenue; the separation of the religious and the military dominion over land; the non-hereditary or limited hereditary transfer of the grants; the preservation of the stronger state authority even in the periods of political decentralization. It shows that the Mamluk mechanisms of military slavery and the Ottoman timar system were involved in the Islamic institutional innovations that had no European analogs. In this article will provide the modern scholarship lays more stress on the insights of these systems in their respective Islamic legal, religious and political systems as opposed to the Eurocentric analytical categories.