Throughout the Muslim world, to “resemble the merchants of the Karimi” carried the same meaning as “rich as Rockefeller” in the early twentieth century. Many Karimi fortunes were estimated in excess of a million dinars, and one merchant—Yasir al-Balisi—was worth about ten million dinars, or nearly a half billion dollars in today’s money, an almost unimaginable amount of wealth in the preindustrial world.
