Next to knowledge, commerce was the mainspring of the…

““Next to knowledge, commerce was the mainspring of the mobility of Muslim society. The power of money was fully understood by scholars. Their own relative poverty as contrasted to the wealth of the commercial and landholding segments of society remained for them an article of faith - rmly to be believed in and constantly to be proclaimed. Not very many among them might have shown appreciation for the sentiment that the principal merit of knowledge was to help a poor man to be satisfi ed with his lot. As so many other vital concerns, the bitterness of the poorly rewarded intellectual was most vividly put into words by Abû Hayyân at-Tawhidî in the tenth century. From later times, we can document what no doubt had always been the actual situation, namely, that a certain middle-class prosperity based on commercial activity was the background from which scholars most commonly came (unless, perhaps, they happened to be born into a scholarly family of established standing, but even these usually possessed commercial connections). Those who overcame grinding poverty to become prominent in scholarship were but a small minority, albeit a remarkable one. It would be diffi cult to venture any kind of general statement on the social background of Muslim mystics. Whatever it was, they quite naturally rejected wealth in favor of spiritual values, at least in theory.””

— Franz Rosenthal