Published analysis
Read the full article on Maldives News: The merchant before the message
Standfirst. Before the first revelation he spent decades in the caravan trade. The institutions he left behind were commercial as well as religious.
Key facts
- Analysis pegged to the FT’s The Story of Money podcast of 19 August 2026, in which economist Benedikt Koehler (Early Islam and the Birth of Capitalism) argued early Islam’s institutions were shaped by the Prophet’s commercial life and later borrowed by medieval Europe.
- Separates settled history (the decades in the caravan trade, Khadija’s qirad/mudaraba financing, the tax-free Medina market per Ibn Majah 2233 and Ibn Shabbah, the refusal to fix prices per Abu Dawud 3451) from contested claims (that this was “the birth of capitalism” and that Europe copied it rather than converging in parallel).
- Notes Udovitch’s Partnership and Profit in Medieval Islam traces how the qirad resembles the commenda that financed Mediterranean trade, while stressing the instrument predates Islam and was ratified, not invented.
- The local hook: the Maldives supplied the Indian Ocean’s cowrie money for centuries, yet 53 per cent of Maldivian employment is now public sector, on the finance minister’s own figure to parliament this month.