Islamic money
The Islamic faith has contributed a great deal to the development of Sikka industry in the Islamic world thanks to the interest of Islamic law in money, as it enters into the field of worship and determines transactions, due to its direct and close link with zakat, dowry, contracts, endowments, punishments, blood money, etc.
Islamic currencies and coins are called the Sikka, which expresses multiple meanings, all of which revolve around the money with which the Arab and Islamic peoples dealt, including gold dinars, silver dirhams, and copper money.
Meaning of the word Sikka
The term "Sikka" sometimes means the inscriptions on which these coins of various kinds are adorned. And sometimes it means the minting molds that are stamped on the circulating currency, as it is also called the function of minting the currency under the supervision of the state.
The Arab scholar Ibn Khaldun offers a comprehensive definition of railways, saying: The railway is the stamp on the dinar and dirhams that people deal with with the iron seal. In it are engraved images and words upside down, and after estimating the dirham and dinar with a specific weight called, then dealing with it is a number. If its people are not appreciated, it will be heavy handling.
The Sikka is a manifestation of the authority of the caliph, the sultan, or the ruler, in addition to being official documents that cannot be challenged or a source of history, which help in deducing historical facts, whether related to names or religious phrases inscribed on them, in addition to being a record of titles and epithets Which sheds light on many political events that prove or deny the dependency of the rulers or sultans to the caliphate or to the central governments in Islamic history.
Therefore, the coins minted in early Islam in Damascus, Baghdad and Cairo are official documents that affirm the political and economic unity of the Arab world.
The Islamic faith has contributed a great deal to the development of railway industry in the Islamic world thanks to the interest of Islamic law in money, as it enters in the field of worship and determines transactions, due to its direct and close links to Zakat, dowry, contracts, endowments, punishments, paternity, and others.
The Sikka is also closely related to Islamic arts, as its inscriptions help to identify the archaeological writings engraved on it and study its political, historical, and ideological implications in addition to being an important source for identifying the names of the countries and places in which they were struck.
The study of the railway also helps shed light on the economic state of the Islamic world through Historical eras by learning about the caliber in the railway and the amount of its weight
The places where Arab coins were minted in the cities of the Islamic world in the Middle Ages were known as Dar al-Sikka or Dar al-Darb.
Types of Islamic money and currencies
The Arabs before Islam had no money of their own, so commercial transactions were carried out with the money circulating in the Arabian Peninsula. The Noble Qur’an referred to the commercial trips that the Arabs used to make, as they had two main trade trips: a summer trip to the Levant from which they obtained the Romanian dinars, and a winter trip to Yemen from which they obtained the Himyar dirhams, as well as the silver dirhams that were returned to the Arabian Peninsula. They are hit in the eastern provinces, especially in Iran and Iraq.
Dinar
The term is derived from the Greek-Latin word denarius Auris, meaning (the gold dinar), which is the name of a unit of gold minting. The Arabs knew this Roman currency and dealt with it before and after Islam.
The Byzantine Dinar played a major role in the history of the currency in general and the Islamic one in particular, and its shape was in circulation in the Arabian Peninsula before the Arabization of the railway during the reign of the Umayyad Caliph Abdul-Malik Ibn Marwan, a round piece of gold, bearing on one side the image of the Byzantine Emperor Hercules, surrounded by his sons Heracleionas and Constantine. Each of them seized a long cross.
As for the back of the Dinar, it had a drawing of a cross standing on four steps surrounded by words of supplication and the indication of the place of striking in Greek and Latin letters.
Dirham
. One of the units of the silver rail, and its name was derived from the Greek drachma, and the Arabs knew it through their commercial dealings with the eastern regions that followed the silver rule in their monetary system, and accordingly, it took the silver dirham as its main currency.
The shapes of the Sasanian dirham circulating in the Arab countries before Arabization were a round piece of silver on one side of which an inscription represents the upper part of the image of the Persian fracture, and its face appears in a lateral position and on its head is the winged Sasanian crown, and on the second face of the dirham is an inscription of two guards armed with or without weapons between them a temple The fire, who watches over his service and guard.
Pahlavi writings inscribed on the dirham indicate the name of the king along with propaganda phrases for him and his family, and on the outside of the dirham there are three or four crescents, and inside each crescent is a sign of Venus when it meets the moon, which is a symbol of prosperity for the East.