It was possible because, from the beginning, Islam had a positive view toward commerce. Mohammed himself had begun his adult life as a merchant, and no Islamic thinker ever treated the honest pursuit of profit as itself intrinsically immoral or inimical to faith. Neither in practice did the prohibitions against usury—which for the most part were scrupulously enforced, even in the case of commercial loans—in any sense mitigate against the growth of commerce, or even the development of complex credit instruments.69 To the contrary, the early centuries of the Caliphate saw an immediate
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