ABSTRACT
The place of socio-economic history in the general history of the Muslim world needs no justification. The creation of a kind of parallel working model based upon the socio-economic evolution and the development of Islam as a religion might in this case help to elucidate any interconnections between the two. As for the sharecroppers, it is true that historians have been inclined to believe that Islam might in some way have heralded the beginning of a period of liberation, albeit a fleeting one. This is highly debatable. If it is true that Muslim law ignored the explicit notion of non-temporary contracts, other documents reveal that in practice, ever since pre-Islamic times, there had always been a certain attachment to the soil. Whatever might have been the “social weight” of the Muslim community to which we have just alluded, one has to admit that Muslim law had a certain allure for the indigenous populations who were often alien to it.
