TY - JOUR
AU - Moaddel,, Mansoor
AB - In Islam, Authoritarianism, and Underdevelopment, Kuru considers the state-ulama alliance as the roots of authoritarianism and underdevelopment in Muslim-majority countries and the culprit in stifling intellectual creativity and emasculating economic development since the eleventh century. Before this period, the Muslim world was stronger in commerce, more urbanized, and intellectually more creative than Western Europe. Muslim scholars were also autonomous, having little ties to the state. The stagnation began in the eleventh century. The mercantile regime gave way to the iqta system, which granted the military personnel the right to collect taxes on state lands. This system, Kuru claims, militarized the land regime, restricted private property, limited entrepreneurship, and undermined technological innovation and economic productivity. The development of madrasas under Nizam al-Mulk and thereafter integrated the ulama in the state bureaucracy. The state’s control of the economy strengthened authoritarianism, the decline of the merchants undermined the social basis for intellectual creativity, and the ulama in cahoots with the rulers stifled efforts at philosophical reflections. Western Europe, by contrast, made progress as a result of the separation of the Church and royal authorities, the establishment of universities and emergence of the intellectual class, and the rise of the merchants who served as the engine of economic progress. Kuru’s knowledge of the intellectual conditions in historical Islam is impressive. However, his sweeping generalization linking underdevelopment to the state-ulama alliance is hard to sustain. He insufficiently discusses how the historical and regional variations in the iqta system and the conditions of the merchants affected authoritarianism. His claim requires at least demonstrating that progress was higher in places where both state-religion alliance and the iqta system were weaker and commerce was stronger, while it was lower in places where these things were otherwise. It is also crucial to assess how the dynamics of the intellectual communities furthered the decline of philosophy. For example, the Mu’tazilite school of rational theology went down as a result of its emphasis on the creativity of the Qur’an over its more promising theory of ethics, intolerance of others, and reliance on state patronage. These methodological inadequacies aside, the claim that the orthodoxy stifled creativity cannot be reconciled with the ulama supporting the early twentieth-century nationalist movements. A better understanding of this process involves the adoption of a more balanced perspective on the Islamic orthodoxy. It is true, as Kuru concedes: the ulama subordinated reason to the scriptures. But facing serious anomalies for which there was no clear guidance in the Quran, they had to use reason to produce a set of objective laws that were far superior to the subjectivist perspectives of the reigning caliphs or regional rulers in the administration of justice. This development came to a halt as the gate of ijtihad was closed and the ulama were instructed to follow the methodology of one of the four schools of law. At the time, closing the gate appeared to have made sense because such schools numbered several hundreds, which had created considerable irregularities, if not chaos, in the administration of justice even in the same city. There was also the burning question of the final power of arbitrament on legal disputes. Rationalist Mu’tazilites gave this power to the subjective judgment of the caliph and the Shia to the imam, but the orthodoxy gave this power to the four schools. Moreover, the orthodoxy also realized the unworkability of the form of government under the Rashidun where the caliph was both knowledgeable on religious matters and administratively skilled. The caliphs under the Abbasids displayed limited knowledge of Islam and were increasingly administratively incompetent. The emergent secular kingships, by contrast, were more effective in defending the nation against outsiders. Therefore, such scholars as al-Mawardi (972–1058), al-Ghazali (1058–1111), Ibn Taymiyya (1263–1328), and Ibn Khaldun (1333–1406) successively departed from early doctrine of caliphate in favor of recognizing the sultan’s discretionary power. This recognition was predicated on the sultan following the sharia law and heeding the ulama’s advice. However, the notion of the gate of ijtihad and the inclusion of the sultan’s discretionary power in the sharia created a discursive space in the thought structure of the Islamic orthodoxy, giving it a remarkable flexibility. All Muslim reformers had to do was to reopen the gate of ijtihad to reconcile Islam with reason and reject the sultan’s discretionary power in favor of parliamentary democracy without abandoning the core principles of their faith. Modern secular intellectuals-cum-activists in the Muslim world, on the other hand, tended to blame the Islamic orthodoxy for their countries’ underdevelopment and tried to regulate the religion, an orientation that politicized Islam and created the fundamentalist reactions. Kuru’s analysis tended toward such a trying and tired secularist project. Nonetheless, this book has enough goodies to be recommended for students of religion and development. © The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association for the Sociology of Religion. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail:journals.permissions@oup.com. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Islam, Authoritarianism, and Underdevelopment: A Global and Historical Comparison, by AHMET T. KURU
JF - Sociology of Religion
DO - 10.1093/socrel/sraa054
DA - 2021-02-08
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/islam-authoritarianism-and-underdevelopment-a-global-and-historical-rs0fCjU3SS
SP - 123
EP - 124
VL - 82
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
ER -