Hisba and the market inspector

The hisba is an office in which the ruler appoints a capable person to watch over the markets and streets. This officer looks into fraud in measures, weights and foodstuffs, keeps the streets from being blocked, orders buildings about to collapse to be pulled down, and punishes in proportion to the offence, without waiting for anyone to bring a complaint ¹. The TDV encyclopedia says the Prophet went into the market himself to inspect it and later appointed officers over it, and that Umar ibn al-Khattab appointed named officers over the market of Medina, among them, in one report, al-Shifa' bint Abd Allah ². The holder was first called the "master of the market" (sahib al-suq) or "officer of the market" (amil al-suq), then, under the Abbasids, the muhtasib. The office lasted more than a thousand years in Muslim cities.

In the jurists' language, the hisba is part of enjoining good and forbidding wrong when it is carried out by an appointed official. Ibn Taymiyya counts it among the Islamic offices, alongside the police, the judiciary and the financial bureaux, and says that all of them aim at enjoining good and forbidding wrong ³. Ibn Khaldun places it among the religious offices that fall under the caliphate ⁴. He says it serves the office of judge, because the muhtasib deals with general, simple matters that the judge is kept above ¹.

The difference between the muhtasib and the judge is that the judge rules only on a suit brought by a party, while the muhtasib acts on his own initiative. He rules on fraud and deception in livelihoods, measures and weights, and compels those who delay paying their debts to settle, all in matters that need no hearing of evidence ¹. The TDV encyclopedia adds that he may impose discretionary punishment (ta'zir) but may not carry out the fixed penalties or pass a death sentence; that he is paid a salary; that the jurists allowed a woman to hold the office, because the Prophet and Umar appointed women over the market; and that he must know arithmetic to understand weights, coinage and prices ².

The markets of ancient cities had officials who watched over them: the agoranomos in Greek cities, the aedile in Rome, the city prefect in Constantinople. As the TDV encyclopedia reports, this led some orientalists to argue that the Muslim master of the market imitated them ². The sources read say nothing about the market of Mecca or Yathrib before Islam, or about any official who supervised it.

The story begins in the market of Medina. Ibn Taymiyya relates the hadith of the heap of grain. The Prophet passed by a pile of food and put his hand into it, and his fingers came out wet. He asked the seller about it, then said that whoever cheats is not one of us. The hadith is in Sahih Muslim ⁵. The TDV encyclopedia says the Prophet inspected the market himself and later appointed officers over it. The sources name five of them: Sa'id ibn al-As in Mecca; and in Medina Abd Allah ibn Sa'id ibn Uhayha, Umar ibn al-Khattab, Samra' bint Nuhayk al-Asadiyya and al-Shifa' bint Abd Allah. It is also said that Umar was the one who appointed al-Shifa' ².

Nothing is recorded about the market in Abu Bakr's time. Umar, Uthman and Ali then inspected the markets themselves and appointed officers over them. Umar put al-Sa'ib ibn Yazid, Abd Allah ibn Utba ibn Mas'ud and Sulayman ibn Abi Hathma over the Medina market. Under Uthman the market officer was al-Harith ibn al-Hakam, paid two dirhams a day and later dismissed for abusing his post. Al-Tabari records in his Tahdhib al-athar that Ali had a fixed seat in the market. The whip (dirra) these officers carried later became the muhtasib's emblem ².

The editors of Ma'alim al-Qurba make the Prophet the first to do the muhtasib's work. They say the Rightly Guided Caliphs carried out the hisba themselves and then appointed muhtasibs as the conquests widened ^{6 7}. Ibn Taymiyya quotes a letter in which the Commander of the Faithful, Umar, told his governors that prayer was the most important of their affairs to him ⁸.

Under the Umayyads the office kept the name "master of the market". The TDV encyclopedia records that Asim al-Ahwal (d. 142/759) inspected the weights in the market of Kufa, and that outside the market the chief of police dealt with hisba matters. Then, in 157 (773–74), under Abu Ja'far al-Mansur, al-Tabari records that Abu Zakariyya Yahya ibn Abd Allah held the hisba in Baghdad. Some modern researchers place the first use of the title muhtasib under al-Mahdi, al-Hadi or al-Ma'mun. Whether the new name changed the office itself is not known ².

The sources do not credit the hisba to a single inventor. The museum records Umar ibn al-Khattab as the person who commissioned and established it, not as its inventor. According to the TDV encyclopedia, he was the caliph who inspected the markets himself and appointed named officers over them, and is said to have appointed a woman, al-Shifa' bint Abd Allah ². The sources place the first appointment of market officers in the Prophet's time. The museum does not record the Prophet as the "maker" of an invention, and instead tells what he did in the market in this text.

Who first called the office hisba, or its holder muhtasib, is not known. The first muhtasib of Baghdad in the sources read is Abu Zakariyya Yahya ibn Abd Allah, in 157 AH, and the source gives nothing about him beyond his name ².

The imam or his deputy appoints the muhtasib. Ibn al-Ukhuwwa requires him to be Muslim, free, adult, sane, just and capable ⁹. The muhtasib takes assistants, searches out wrongs, and punishes and disciplines in proportion to them ¹. The TDV encyclopedia describes a graded method for correcting a wrong: first explaining, then advising, then rebuking, then removing the instrument of the wrong, and only then discretionary punishment ².

Ibn al-Ukhuwwa (d. 729 AH) describes the work chapter by chapter:

• Streets and markets. He stops people sitting to sell in narrow streets, stops shops pushing their platforms out into the passage, and forbids tethering animals or throwing sweepings in the road ¹⁰.
• Weights and measures. He checks the steelyard (qabban) often, keeps the standard weights in a dry place, and appoints a trustworthy assayer for coins. Weights should be of iron and stamped with his seal; stone weights are covered in leather and sealed ¹¹.
• Bakers. He orders them to bake their bread through, sets each a daily quantity so the town never runs short of bread, has them clean their ovens, and forbids baking fish alongside the bread ¹².
• Bloodletters and physicians. He examines bloodletters on their knowledge of the veins and makes them swear not to open the veins that cause sterility ¹³. He makes physicians take the oath of Hippocrates: to give no harmful drug or poison and nothing that causes a miscarriage, to keep patients' secrets and to lower their gaze ¹⁴. He examines bone-setters on the sixth treatise of the book of Paulus and on the number of bones, two hundred and forty-eight, and surgeons on Galen's book on wounds ¹⁵.

Ibn Taymiyya adds to the muhtasib's work bidding people to pray at the set times, overseeing imams and muezzins, and watching over honesty, trusts, short measure and fraud in crafts and trade ^{16 8}. This includes forbidding talaqqi al-rukban, buying goods from caravans before they reach the market and their owners learn the price, and forbidding gross overcharging of a trusting buyer who does not know the prices ^{17 18}.

The TDV encyclopedia says the office spread from Medina to every Muslim land: Iraq, Egypt, Syria, the Maghreb, al-Andalus, Iran, Central Asia and Anatolia, and later the Ottoman state and the Indian subcontinent ². The Ma'alim al-Qurba editors date the hisba in Egypt to 253/867 ⁷. Ibn Khaldun says that under the Ubaydids, that is the Fatimids, in Egypt and the Maghreb, and under the Umayyads in al-Andalus, it was part of the judge's authority, and he appointed to it as he chose. Later it was separated out as a royal office of its own ¹.

The TDV encyclopedia reports the view of some orientalists, among them Gaudefroy-Demombynes, von Grunebaum and Foster, that the master of the market was taken from the Greek agoranomos, the Roman aedile or the Byzantine city prefect. TDV finds no evidence for this, for three reasons. The office appeared in Medina, where there was no Byzantine influence, and not first in Syria or Egypt. It was religious from the start. And the known Byzantine market ordinance dates from the tenth century, about three hundred years after the office appeared. TDV grants that the hisba manuals quote some Byzantine market rules, as in al-Shayzari and Ibn Bassam ². The museum therefore records this link as a disputed claim, not an established origin.

• The Umayyad master of the market. The office continued under the Umayyads; Asim al-Ahwal inspected the weights in the Kufa market ².
• The Abbasid muhtasib. In Baghdad in 157 AH, and afterwards a settled title ².
• The hisba manuals. Jurists wrote them for muhtasibs to work from, among them the books of al-Shayzari and Ibn Bassam, Ibn al-Ukhuwwa's Ma'alim al-Qurba and Ibn Taymiyya's al-Hisba fi al-Islam ^{2 7}.
• The Ottoman ihtisab. The TDV entry treats it in its Ottoman section, printed in vol. 18, pp. 143–145 ².
• In the Crusader and Spanish kingdoms. The office passed to the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem and the Spanish kingdoms. There the market officer was called çavaçoque or zabazoque, from sahib al-suq, and mathesseb, from muhtasib. Spanish still calls an inspector of weights and measures an almotacén ².

The muhtasib touched people's lives every day. The bread they bought came from a baker ordered to bake it through and to make a set amount each day ¹². The scale they were weighed on bore the muhtasib's seal ¹¹. The street they walked down was not blocked by platforms or animals ¹⁰. A physician, bloodletter or bone-setter they went to had been examined and put on oath ^{13 15}. Ibn Khaldun says the muhtasib also stopped porters and boatmen from overloading, and stopped schoolteachers from beating the boys too hard ¹.

The hisba gathered in one official's hands work that is spread today over many bodies. The Ma'alim al-Qurba editors note that what the muhtasib once did now corresponds to the work of ministries of supply, health, the interior and others ⁷. The office lasted more than a thousand years, from the market of Medina to the Ottoman cities, and its name passed into the languages of the Crusader and Spanish kingdoms ².

The disagreement here is about the origin of the office, not about whether it existed.

The Sunni position. The editors of Ma'alim al-Qurba make the Prophet the first to do the muhtasib's work, and the Rightly Guided Caliphs the first to carry out the hisba themselves ^{6 7}. Ibn al-Ukhuwwa says the imams of the first generation carried it out in person ⁹. Ibn Taymiyya counts it among the Islamic offices whose aim is enjoining good and forbidding wrong ³.

The academic position in the TDV encyclopedia. The office began in Medina, and the sources name the officers appointed by the Prophet, Umar and Uthman. TDV finds no evidence that it was taken from the Greeks or Byzantines, but grants that the later hisba manuals took over some of their rules ².

Another view. Some orientalists, among them Gaudefroy-Demombynes, von Grunebaum and Foster, held that the master of the market, and then the muhtasib, imitated the Greek agoranomos, the Roman aedile or the Byzantine prefect of the conquered cities ².

The museum does not decide between these views.

In most countries the hisba no longer exists as an office under that name, but its work goes on. The Ma'alim al-Qurba editors note that it has been divided among ministries of supply, health, the interior and others ⁷. Spanish still uses almotacén for an inspector of weights and measures ².

Nothing known survives of the first market of Medina. From the Umayyad period, official stamped glass weights survive. One is a green glass pound weight from Syria, dated 743, now in the Walters Art Museum, stamped with an inscription naming al-Walid ibn Abd al-Rahman, head of the treasury at Damascus. It resembles the sealed weights Ibn al-Ukhuwwa describes ¹¹, but no source says it was issued by a muhtasib. The hisba manuals themselves also survive, among them Ma'alim al-Qurba and al-Hisba fi al-Islam.

The whip carried by the first market officers became the muhtasib's emblem ². The name of the office lives on in Spanish in the word almotacén ².

Long ago in Medina, the caliph chose a man, and sometimes a woman, to look after the market and make sure no seller cheated anyone.

This officer checked the weights to see they were true, and stamped them with a seal ¹¹. The officer made sure the baker baked the bread properly and made enough for everyone each day ¹². And nobody was allowed to leave their goods or their animals in the middle of the road ¹⁰.

Later this officer was called the muhtasib ².

• TDV Encyclopedia of Islam, "HİSBE" (Cengiz Kallek and others), online edition, history section. ²
• Ibn al-Ukhuwwa, Ma'alim al-Qurba fi Ahkam al-Hisba, 1976 edition, scan pp. 5–6, 53, 137, 147, 157, 251, 258, 260. ⁹
• Ibn Taymiyya, al-Hisba fi al-Islam, Dar al-Kutub al-Ilmiyya, pp. 11, 16–18, 20–21. ³
• Ibn Khaldun, al-Muqaddima, pp. 216 and 221, section "The hisba and the mint". ¹