134 chapter four
inherited from the two older empires. However, by 700 a new gen-
eration of Arab-speaking officials came to power and with their
descendants formed the secretarial vertebral column of the Arab-
Muslim empire until the tenth century (ibid.).
Monetary ReformThe study of historical monetary changes reveals that the changes
are, invariably, a result of the growing perception of the heads of
state of their political autonomy and their need for a means of
demonstrating the economic independence of their states. Various
factors, however, would play an important role in developing such
a perception. During the Prophet’s time the unification of Arabia
under a religio-political banner with a view to expansion into the
Byzantine and the Persian borders seemed to have occupied the
Prophet’s attention so much so that he accepted the prevailing pre-
Islamic Roman and Persian money as a means of exchange. An
additional reason could be that the early state of Islam was not yet
of the size or complexity that would necessitate a coinage of its own,
nor did the state have the international recognition of the time that
would make its coin acceptable in the Persian and Byzentine lands.
With the development of the state during caliph Umar’s time, Umar
took the first attempt towards changing the form of money by super-
scribing Arabic and Qur"ànic writing on the prevailing coinage and
it was not until the reign of the Umayyads that the Arabic coinage
started to appear (Al- ̨abarì). Abd-al-Màlik, the Umayyad caliph,
was the first to have struck the Arabic golden dinar and the silver
dirham in 695 (ibid.) as part of the wide process of Arabicisation of
state administration.
The monetary change, or reform, at the time of Abd-al-Màlik,
which was a reflection of the establishment of a consolidated state
by the Umayyad Caliph, had both political and economic conse-
quences. The following are most notable (Hitti, 1963):
a. the reinforcement of the sovereignty of the state as reflected in
its own independent coinage,
b. the collection of taxes at a unified monetary unit instead of the
Persian coin in Persia and that of the Romans in Syria and Egypt,
c. the further emphasis on the need for money-changers, who were