Religion is significantly correlated with a range of economic and political outcomes both within and across countries. There has been growing interest in Muslim societies in recent years amongst economists and political scientists. In this study, we focus on the spread of one religion - Islam. Our analysis investigates the role that ancient trade routes have played in facilitating the spread of Islam.
Motivated by numerous case studies on the historical relationship between trade and Islam, we construct detailed data on pre-Islamic trade routes, ports, and harbors. Proximity to the pre-600 CE trade network is a robust predictor of today’s Muslim adherence in the Old World. The empirical analysis establishes that countries located closer to historical trade routes are more likely to be Muslim. We then investigate whether this empirical regularity holds at the more disaggregated level of ethnic homelands within countries.
Exploiting within-country variation has straightforward advantages. First, it allows us to test in a sharper manner whether differences in proximity to pre-Islamic trade routes are meaningful predictors of local adherence to Islam. Second, leveraging within contemporary-state variation in Muslim representation mitigates concerns related to the endogeneity of current political boundaries. Modern states, arguably, have affected religious affiliation in a multitude of ways including state-sponsored religion.
These findings are in line with a rich body of earlier work by prominent Islamicists who have extensively discussed the role of long-distance trade, noting both the diffusion of Muslims along trade routes and the importance that Islamic scriptures confer on trade-related matters. An innovation of Islam was the practice of direct trade, where Muslim merchants personally carried goods over long distances along the trade routes rather than relying on intermediaries. For example, the acceptance of Islam in most of Inner Asia, Southeast Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa is known to have occurred primarily through contacts with Muslim merchants.
In addition, the highly personal practice of exchange created preference for Muslims to conduct trade with co-religionists. Therefore, merchants converting to Islam enjoyed substantial externalities like access to the Muslim trade network, steady trade flows, and a reduction in transaction costs. Although the primary contribution of this study is to establish how proximity to pre-Islamic trade routes has influenced the distribution of Muslim communities in the Old World, we also explore whether the ecological similarity to the Arabian peninsula of a given region predicts the presence of Muslim communities.
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The Arabian peninsula has a distinct geography, mainly consisting of desert and semi-arid landscapes with a few regions of moderate fertility such as today’s Yemen and other scattered oases in the interior. On the eve of Islam, frankincense, myrrh, vine, dyes, and dates were produced in these fertile pockets. We discuss various explanations consistent with this less-well-known fact and show that groups residing along geographically unequal territories have a particular production structure (both historically and today) with pasture dominating the semi-arid landscape and farming taking place in the few relatively fertile regions.
These differences in the underlying productive endowments may generate gains from specialization and provide a basis for trade as a means of subsistence. This is indeed the case for a cross-section of ethnographic societies we examine. A complementary interpretation links geographic inequality to social inequality and predation and echoes Ibn Khaldun, one of the greatest philosophers of the Muslim world, who observed that a crucial factor for understanding Muslim history is the central social conflict between the primitive Bedouin and the urban society (“town” versus “desert”).
The argument is that long-distance trade opportunities confer differential gains to populations residing in the relatively more fertile regions, fostering predatory behavior from the poorly endowed ones. Along the same lines, contemporary scholars have noted that when farmers and herders coexisted in absence of an institutional framework coordinating their activities, their interactions were often conflictual, disrupting trade flows across these territories. We conjecture that Islam with its redistributive economic principles was a unifying force aimed at reining in the underlying inequality in exchange for security for the trading caravans.
Namely, the intensity of adoption of Islam across unequally endowed regions should increase with proximity to trade routes. Moreover, by focusing on the spread of a particular religion, our work is closely related to that of Cantoni (2012) who explores how proximity to Wittemberg, the birthplace of Martin Luther, influenced the diffusion of Protestantism.
Islam has spread at a breathless pace since the time of Muhammad. Nevertheless, the mode of expansion has differed across time and space ranging from conquests, to trade, to proselytization and migrations. During the early phase, Islam expanded mainly through conquests within a certain radius around Mecca. The initial military conquests, even if they did not entail forced conversion, eventually resulted in Muslim-majority populations occupying large swaths of land.
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These areas overlap with contemporary countries close to Mecca including the entire Arab World in the Middle East and North Africa, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, and slightly further away in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. The territories featured important trade hubs during the pre-Islamic era, particularly those along the Silk Road in Asia and the Red Sea in North Africa. Most of these lands were part of the Persian Empire, which was the largest and most important empire of the time to be conquered and concede to Islam.
The process of Islamization farther away from the birthplace of Islam was intimately linked to trade. The Islamic world came to dominate the network of the most lucrative international trade routes that connected Asia to Europe (and by sea to North Africa). With full Muslim control of the western half of the Silk Road by mid-8th century, any long-distance exchange had to traverse Muslim lands, giving trade a central role in the further propagation of the religion. Muslim merchants carried the message of Islam wherever they traveled.
This was possible because of the Muslim practice of “direct” trade, one of the most remarkable innovations of Islam. Prior to Muslim conquests, trade was conducted by a network of local merchants who traded exclusively in their homelands. In other words, they played the role of intermediary agents with goods (often spices) being transported from one carrier to another by short journeys, creating a trade-relay. Muslims instead did not rely on intermediaries and personally travelled the entire length of the journey, crucial for the diffusion of the religion along the trade routes and at the destination.
On the receiving end, the new religion appealed to the local merchants because it legitimized their economic base more than most belief systems present at that time. Proselytization was a third factor that inffuenced the spread of Islam across locations most distant to Mecca. Trade routes were also important in this process as the charismatic Sufi preachers travelled along these routes to perform missionary activities.
The historical accounts linking trade routes and Muslim adherence across countries are indicative of their importance for the spread of Islam. Nevertheless, given the power of the state to inffuence its religious composition, one may wonder whether a similar nexus between proximity to trade hubs and Muslim representation exists within countries that are not religiously homogeneous.
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In what follows, we review the historical record on the emergence of Islam for specific countries with varying religious diversity including China, Tanzania, Mali (the location of the former Ghana Empire), Indonesia, and India. Figure 1 portrays Muslim adherence at the ethnic group level and historical trade routes within five countries (1a: China, 1b: Mali, 1c: Tanzania, 1d: Indonesia and 1e: India). Muslim adherence is represented in quintiles at the level of ethnic group, where actual homelands are from the Ethnologue version 15 and data on religious affiliation from the World Religion Database. Darker shades represent higher Muslim shares in the population.
In Figures 1a, 1c, and 1e the trade routes are depicted as thick, black-and-white dashed lines and correspond to pre-600 CE. These routes are digitized from Brice and Kennedy (2001). The ancient ports and harbors, depicted as circled stars, are from Arthur de Graauw (2014). In figure 1b trade routes are relative to 900 AD, while in figures 1c and 1d ports in year 600 CE (1800 CE) are represented with circled stars (circled dots). Country borders are represented with a thin dashed grey line.
By the 8th century, Islam was no longer the religion of only the Arab world and had expanded geographical borders along the Silk Road. Conversions were often a result of economic considerations and the financial benefits afforded to those joining the Ummah. Even among the conquered people in Central Asia, Islam continued to gain a hearing without coercion as merchants spread the religion. Muslim traders traveled as far as the capital of the Tang dynasty, Chang’an, in the Chinese Empire.
The 9th century saw the rise of Islamic kingdoms in Central Asia, especially the Samanid Empire, the first Persian dynasty after the Arab conquests. The Islamization of the nomadic Turkic peoples of Central and Inner Asia occurred during the 10th century along the trade routes. The major ethnic groups close to trade routes with a substantial Muslim representation in this region are the Uyghurs, the Hui, the Kazakhs, the Kyrgyz, and the Tajiks. These ethnic groups also exist within China today and comprise the Muslim minority in the country.
The Uyghurs are one of the largest ethnic groups in Inner Asia, and their Islamization dates back to the Karakhanids in early 10th century, the first Turkic dynasty to convert to the new religion. The core of the Uyghurs’ homeland was Kashgar, an oasis city located in the West of China near the current-day border of Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, which historically served as a strategic trade hub between China, the Middle East, and Europe. The Hui people are another Muslim Chinese minority historically connected to Muslim merchants travelling along the Silk Road. Besides Xianjiang, they also live farther east in Central China.
A cluster of this group can be found today in Xi’an, where they form the majority of a large Muslim community (the dark spot in the center of China in Figure 1a). Xi’an was the first city in China where Islam was introduced. The longest segment of the Silk Road runs across the Central Asia and Kazakhstan. The religion practiced by the majority of Kazakhs is Islam since its introduction in the region by the Arabs during the 9th century. The Kyrgyz tribes also adopted Islam as Muslim traders and then Sufi missionaries began to move out from scattered towns to the nomadic steppes, spreading Islam among the tribal groups.
They are known to have adopted Islam between the 8th and 12th centuries. The Tajiks on the other hand, started converting to Islam in the late 11th century. Islam spread through the well-established trade routes of the east coast of Africa via merchants. The earliest records for trade in East Africa indicate Greco-Roman trade down the Red Sea and along the Somali coast to the Tanzanian coast.
This was followed by the trade of frankincense, myrrh, and spices with the Persian Gulf from the 2nd to the 5th century CE. Soon Zanzibar Island also became a trade hub and remained so until the 9th century CE, when Bantu traders settled on the Kenyan-Tanzanian coast and joined the trade network.
What is the trans-Saharan trade?
Though this trade began in prehistoric times, the peak of trade extended from the 8th century until the early 17th century CE. As a desert, the Sahara is now a hostile expanse that separates the Mediterranean economy from the economy of the Niger River Basin. As Fernand Braudel points out, crossing such a zone, especially without mechanized transport, is worthwhile only when exceptional circumstances cause the expected gain to outweigh the cost and the danger. Trade was conducted by caravans of camels.
According to Maghrebi explorer Ibn Battuta, who once traveled with a caravan, an average one would amount to 1,000 camels, but some caravans were as large as 12,000. The caravans were guided by highly-paid Berbers, who knew the desert and could ensure protection from fellow desert nomads. The caravans' survival relied on careful coordination: runners would be sent ahead to oases for water to be shipped out to the caravan when it was still several days away, as the caravans could usually not carry enough to make the full journey.
In the mid-14th century CE, Ibn Battuta crossed the desert from Sijilmasa via the salt mines at Taghaza to the oasis of Oualata. Culture and religion were also exchanged on the trans-Saharan trade routes. Ancient trade spanned the northeastern corner of the Sahara in the Naqadan era. Predynastic Egyptians in the Naqada I period traded with Nubia to the south, the oases of the Western Desert to the west, and the cultures of the eastern Mediterranean to the east. Many trading routes went from oasis to oasis to resupply on both food and water.
The overland route through the Wadi Hammamat from the Nile to the Red Sea was known as early as predynastic times; drawings depicting Egyptian reed boats have been found along the path dating to 4000 BCE. Ancient cities dating to the First Dynasty of Egypt arose along both its Nile and Red Sea junctions, testifying to the route's ancient popularity. The Darb al-Arbaʿīn trade route, passing through Kharga in the south and Asyut in the north, was used from as early as the Old Kingdom for the transport and trade of gold, ivory, spices, wheat, animals and plants.
Later, Ancient Romans would protect the route by lining it with varied forts and small outposts, some guarding large settlements complete with cultivation. Described by Herodotus as a road "traversed ... in forty days", it became by his time an important land route facilitating trade between Nubia and Egypt, and subsequently became known as the Forty Days Road. Next was the easiest of the three routes: the Garamantean Road, named after the former rulers of the land it passed through and also called the Bilma Trail.
The Garamantean Road passed south of the desert near Murzuk before turning north to pass between the Alhaggar and Tibesti Mountains before reaching the oasis at Kawar. From Kawar, caravans would pass over the great sand dunes of Bilma, where rock salt was mined in great quantities for trade, before reaching the savanna north of Lake Chad. This was the shortest of the routes, and the primary exchanges were slaves and ivory from the south for salt. To the east, three ancient routes connected the south to the Mediterranean.
The herdsmen of the Fezzan of Libya, known as the Garamantes, controlled these routes as early as 1500 BCE. From their capital of Germa in the Wadi Ajal, the Garamantean Empire raided north to the sea and south into the Sahel. By the 4th century BCE, the independent city-states of Phoenicia had expanded their control to the territory and routes once held by the Garamantes. Shillington states that existing contact with the Mediterranean received added incentive with the growth of the port city of Carthage.
Founded c. 800 BCE, Carthage became one terminus for West African gold, ivory, and slaves. West Africa received salt, cloth, beads, and metal goods. Shillington proceeds to identify this trade route as the source for West African iron smelting. Trade continued into Roman times. The Garamantes also engaged in the trans-Saharan slave trade. Ethiopian Troglodytes from chariots; this account was associated with depictions of horses drawing chariots in contemporary cave art in southern Morocco and the Fezzan, giving origin to a theory that the Garamantes or some other Saharan people had created chariot routes to provide Rome and Carthage with gold and ivory.
The earliest evidence for domesticated camels in the region dates from the 3rd century. Used by the Berbers, they enabled more regular contact across the entire width of the Sahara, but regular trade routes did not develop until the beginnings of the Islamic conversion of West Africa in the 7th and 8th centuries. Two main trade routes developed. The first ran through the western desert from modern Morocco to the Niger bend, the second from modern Tunisia to the Lake Chad area.
These stretches were relatively short and had the essential network of occasional oases that established the routing as inexorably as pins in a map. Several trade routes became established, perhaps the most important terminating in Sijilmasa (Morocco) and Ifriqiya to the north. There, and in other North African cities, Berber traders had increased contact with Islam, encouraging conversions, and by the 8th century, Muslims were traveling to Ghana.
Unlike Ghana, Mali was a Muslim kingdom since its foundation, and under it, the gold-salt trade continued. Other, less important trade goods were slaves, kola nuts from the south and slave beads and cowry shells from the north (for use as currency). It was under Mali that the great cities of the Niger bend-including Gao and Djenné-prospered, with Timbuktu in particular becoming known across Europe for its great wealth.
Important trading centers in southern West Africa developed at the transitional zone between the forest and the savanna; examples include Begho and Bono Manso (in present-day Ghana) and Bondoukou (in present-day Côte d'Ivoire). The eastern trans-Saharan route led to the development of the long-lived Kanem-Bornu Empire as well as the Ghana, Mali, and Songhai empires, centred on the Lake Chad area.
The trans-Saharan slave trade, established in Antiquity, continued during the Middle Ages. Estimating the number of enslaved people who were transported via the trans-Saharan routes is challenging, particularly prior to widespread record-keeping. Historian John Wright offers an estimated average of 5,000 people per year over the 1250 years of the trade (from the 7th to 20th century), resulting in a total estimate of "between 6 and 7 million". The majority of these people were transported after the 1500s.
The rise of the Ghana Empire in what is now Mali, Senegal, and southern Mauritania, accompanied the increase in trans-Saharan trade. The spread of Islam to sub-Saharan African was linked to trans-Saharan trade. Historians give many reasons for the spread of Islam facilitating trade. Islam established common values and rules upon which trade was conducted. It created a network of believers who trusted each other and therefore traded with each other even if they did not personally know each other.
Such trade networks existed before Islam but on a much smaller scale. Muslim merchants conducting commerce also gradually spread Islam along their trade network. Islam spread into Western Sudan by the end of the 10th century, into Chad by the 11th century, and into Hausa lands in 12th and 13th centuries. The Portuguese forays along the West African coast opened up new avenues for trade between Europe and West Africa.
By the early 16th century, European trading bases, the factories established on the coast since 1445, and trade with Europeans became of prime importance to West Africa. North Africa had declined in both political and economic importance, while the Saharan crossing remained long and treacherous. However, the major blow to trans-Saharan trade was the Battle of Tondibi of 1591-92. In a major military expedition organized by the Saadian sultan Ahmad al-Mansur, Morocco sent troops across the Sahara and attacked Timbuktu, Gao and some other important trading centres, destroying buildings and property and exiling prominent citizens.
Although much reduced, trans-Saharan trade continued. But trade routes to the West African coast became increasingly easy, particularly after the French invasion of the Sahel in the 1890s and subsequent construction of railways to the interior. A railway line from Dakar to Algiers via the Niger bend was planned but never constructed. With the independence of nations in the region in the 1960s, the north-south routes were severed by national boundaries.
Traditional caravan routes are largely void of camels, but the shorter Azalai routes from Agadez to Bilma and Timbuktu to Taoudenni are still regularly-if lightly-used. The African Union and African Development Bank support the Trans-Sahara Highway from Algiers to Lagos via Tamanrasset, to stimulate economic development, and the latter noted an increase in traffic at the border with Chad due to exports to Algeria crossing Niger.
The route is paved except for a 120 mi (200 km) section in northern Niger, but border restrictions still hamper traffic. Only a few trucks carry trans-Saharan trade, particularly fuel and salt. Three other highways across the Sahara are proposed: for further details see Trans-African Highways.
Trans-Saharan trade routes c. 1000-1500
| Trade Route | Primary Goods Traded | Key Cities/Regions | Historical Period |
|---|---|---|---|
| Darb al-Arbaʿīn | Gold, ivory, spices, wheat, animals, plants | Kharga, Asyut, Nubia, Egypt | Old Kingdom onwards |
| Garamantean Road (Bilma Trail) | Slaves, ivory, salt | Germa, Murzuk, Kawar, Lake Chad | 1500 BCE onwards |
| Western Desert Route | Various goods including gold, salt, slaves, kola nuts | Morocco, Niger Bend, Sijilmasa, Ifriqiya | 8th Century CE onwards |
| Tunisia-Lake Chad Route | Varied commodities | Tunisia, Lake Chad area | 8th Century CE onwards |
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