Fals

The fals (plural fulus) was the copper or bronze small-change coin of the medieval Islamic world. It sat below the gold dinar and the silver dirham and was used for everyday purchases such as food and small services. The name comes from the follis, the copper coin of the Byzantine Empire, and survives today as the fils, a subunit of several Arab currencies.

Unlike the precious-metal coins, which were tightly regulated by the central government, the fals was usually issued by local governors and officials, and its weight, design and value varied considerably from place to place.

After the Arab conquests of the 7th century, copper coins in the former Byzantine provinces continued to follow Byzantine models. These issues, known today as Arab-Byzantine coinage, ranged from crude copies of imperial folles to coins showing a standing figure of the caliph. Following the coinage reform of the Umayyad caliph Abd al-Malik in the late 690s, which introduced an image-free gold dinar and a reformed silver dirham, copper coins were also given Arabic inscriptions. The reformed fals became the standard copper coin across the caliphate.

The fals was a token coin. Its metal was worth much less than its face value, so its acceptance depended on local custom and the authority of the issuer rather than on its content, an early example of money whose value was partly fiduciary, a step towards modern fiat currency. This made fulus very different from the dinar and dirham, which were valued by weight and fineness and whose relationship formed the basis of a gold and silver bimetallic system.

Because fulus were struck in many provincial towns, they are a rich source of local history. They often name governors, officials or mint towns that appear on no other coin. Although most fulus carried only inscriptions, some local issues continued to show animals, plants or other images, since the stricter rules applied to gold and silver were not always followed for copper. Weights varied widely, and in some places fulus were counted or valued by weight in bulk rather than coin by coin.

The relationship between the fals and the dirham was not fixed across the Islamic world. Exchange rates between copper and silver depended on local supply and were set by markets and officials, much as they had been between the Greek chalkous and the drachm, or the Roman as and the silver denarius.

Copper coinage was issued under the Umayyads, the Abbasids and the many dynasties that followed, but the supply was uneven. In some regions and periods, copper issues were plentiful; in others they almost disappeared for long stretches, and people relied on cut silver, foreign coins or credit for small transactions. Large-scale copper issues returned in places such as Mamluk Egypt, where heavy use of copper in the later Middle Ages is often linked with currency debasement and inflation. In the Ottoman Empire, small copper coins circulated alongside the silver akçe.

The name lives on in the fils, a subunit used by several modern currencies. One thousand fils make up the Iraqi dinar, the Kuwaiti dinar, the Bahraini dinar and the Jordanian dinar, while one hundred fils make one United Arab Emirates dirham. In everyday use these fractions are now often too small to matter, but the words dinar, dirham and fils together preserve the three-tier structure of early Islamic coins.

• The British Museum
• American Numismatic Society