the abbasìd’s golden age 159Consequently, questions related to the administration of tax would
require immediate attention. Tax rates, the tax base, the efficiency
of the collection of tax, the allocation of the tax burden, the efficiency
of the distribution of tax revenue, fairness, and so on, are some
examples of complex questions that may require inquiry by special-
ists to provide their most plausible answers. And when the required
answers had to be in conformity with the Sharì"ah, it would be
inevitable that Muslim jurists were the prime authority for the task.
That was the case with the caliph al-Rashìd who asked his chief jus-
tice Abù-Yùsuf to write him a treatise on state finance. But Abù-
Yùsuf was a Œanafì jurist, following the Œanafì school of thought
although that was not the only school available. As Abù-Yùsuf wrote
his book from a Œanafìpoint of view, there would be a need for
writing another from a different point of view reflecting the opinion
of another school of thought.
The Variety of Products and Diversity of Economic Activities
Al-Jahshiyari’s list of the state revenue (the authenticity of which is
strongly emphasised by himself in his Futùh al-Bildàn, and other lists
compiled by other historians such as ibn-Khaldùn and ibn-Qudamah),
had four distinctive features: (a) it recorded in detail the state rev-
enue reported by region, (b) the size of the region was considerable,
the region was, not surprisingly, the size of a country as we know
it today, e.g. Egypt, Iraq, Cyprus, etc., showing each as a region,
(c) the number of regions was large, 36 regions/countries in the list,
(d) the tax paid was in monetary units and/or in kind (Al-Rayyis,
1977). From the list, two important conclusions can be reached: (a)
the geographical area for which the detailed revenue was to be man-
aged by the state tax administration was particularly vast, from India
to North Africa, and (b) the taxable activities in each region were
of a wide variety. In addition, although the main amount of tax rev-
enue was largely in monetary units, the payment in kind was also
quite considerable. Furthermore, because of the variety of produce
across the regions, tax in kind was well diversified throughout the
regions. This suggests that each region had its own main distin-
guishing products in addition to the agricultural produce. With a
range of about fifty distinguished products, in the list, between raisins,
spices, salt, silver, carpets, garments, elephants and slaves, that size
and variety of production activities seemed to have been huge.