Has the Arab world reached its “tipping point”, the moment when a trend flips into irreversible change because it lends the power of apparent inevitability to almost any argument? From the speed of events unfolding across the Crescent of North Africa and the Gulf, it seems we have reached the point of no return because it is impossible to damn an idea whose time has come.
The question is: Why this sudden awakening? Constraints imposed by political correctness will never tell us why the world of Islam that was for many centuries in the forefront of human achievement — in military, economic power, the arts and sciences of civilisation — slipped so far behind by the 19th century. Why had West Asia failed to modernise economically as the West (and the rest of non-Islamic world) surged ahead? It isn’t enough to say that the Arab world got saddled by strong men who beat down dissent with the help of armed forces. Or for that matter, that democracy was incompatible with the basic tenets of Islam? The time has come to ask many questions as Professor Timur Kuran of Duke University does in his book, The Long Divergence: How Islamic Law Held Back the Middle East (Princeton University Press, $29.95).
Kuran who had earlier written Islam and Mammon: The Economic Predicaments of Islamism first dispenses with the pat answer that it was “western flexibility with Muslim rigidity” that accounted for the gap between the West and Islam.
Though this charge is substantially correct, there were social and legal structures that kept West Asia behind in terms of per capita production and consumption. While the West adopted modern economic institutions, the Arab world remained wedded to commercial and financial institutions characteristic of the Middle Ages. In the economically powerful countries of the 19th century, production and commerce involved the pooling of resources with units far larger and far more complex than was possible in the Arab world. An Industrial revolution that led to mass production of goods could not have occurred in the Arab world because of its antiquated approach.
The pre-modern economic institutions of West Asia, which served identifiable economic ends, were grounded on the dominant law of the region, Islamic law. This law need not have been a static constant but it was interpreted as such by the clergy that were, and still are, the leading interpreters of Islamic law.
The Long Divergence is a comparative study between western economic development and the Arab world. Some critics would find this approach to be lopsided because the same conditions would not be found in both places owing to historical factors such as natural resources.
To uncover why certain features of classical Islamic law turned into economic handicaps, Kuran divided his study into four parts apart from the introduction. These are: Organisational stagnation with six chapters: The persistent simplicity of Islamic partnerships; drawbacks of Islamic inheritance system; the absence of the corporation in Islamic law; barriers to the emergence of a Middle eastern business corporation; and credit markets without banks. Part three deals with the makings of underdevelopment with chapters on the Islamisation of non-Muslim economic life; the ascent of the Middle East’s religious minorities and origins and fiscal impact of the capitulations. These are rounded off with the conclusions, did Islam inhibit economic development?
A common theme running through all these chapters is: Islam was left behind because it was a closed shop that didn’t allow any winds of change to run through its space because of the mistaken belief that it had all the answers to all the questions on nation-building. Inherent in this belief was the conviction that it was superior to western “civ”, a belief that was based on early Islamic advances in the sciences and mathematics. But while the West was caught up with the foundations of scientific knowledge provided by the Arabs, the Islamic world stagnated because they failed to question further.
In explaining why the Islamic world entered the 19th century as an underdeveloped region, Kuran has rightly focused on institutions that contributed to critical deficiencies. The economic infrastructure became dysfunctional “frozen waqf assets, atomistic financial markets, courts unsuited to impersonal exchange that became mutually reinforcing and blocked transformations essential for growth”. If business law didn’t help, making apostasy a religious offense, punishable by death compelled the individual to fall in line with Islamic law.
The message is clear: it will take a long time for the Arab world to get out of the hole they have dug themselves in.