All this is not to say that Tusi was in any sense a radical egalitarian. Quite the contrary. “If men were equal,” he insists, “they would all perish.” We need differences between rich and poor, he insisted, just as much as we need differences between farmers and carpenters. Still, once you start from the initial premise that markets are primarily about cooperation rather than competition—and while Muslim economic thinkers did recognize and accept the need for market competition, they never saw competition as its essence87—the moral implications are very different. Nasruddin’s story about the
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