Freedoms Delayed

Timur Kuran’s The Long Divergence: How Islamic Law Held Back the Middle East is one of my favorite economic history books (see my review). My students love it too. It is always among the most popular readings in my undergraduate economic history class. So when I was recently asked to comment on Timur Kuran’s recent book Freedoms Delayed: Political Legacies of Islamic Law in the Middle East for the Mercatus Center, I jumped at the opportunity.

Here is a write-up based on my remarks.

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In the Long Divergence, Kuran asked why the transition from personal trade to impersonal trade was delayed in the Middle East.  In particular, he considered two interrelated puzzles. The first puzzle was why given that the Middle East was richer than Western Europe circa 1000 CE, it had fallen behind by 1700 CE. That is, why did the Golden Age of Islam, a period of considerable prosperity fizzle out, and not lead to sustained economic growth. The second puzzle was why was the Middle East unable to catch-up to Western Europe, and its offshoots, after the diffusion of the Industrial Revolution in the 19^th century. Why didn’t the Middle East converge and why does it remain relatively underdeveloped outside of those regions rich in oil?

At the time The Long Divergence was published, Kuran was clear that it would have a twin:  a study of failure of liberal or constitutional government to emerge in the Middle East that would complement his account of the economic retardation of the Middle East.

That book, Freedoms Delayed, is a rich and dense study and will repay sustained study. A short summary hardly does it justice. But it is worth outlining its main thesis and summarizing how best to approach the book.

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The Dimensions of the Problem

The questions that Freedoms Delayed sets out to answer are more complex than those addressed in the Long Divergence. It considers a truly mammoth problem: the lack of liberalism in the Middle East. Why the Middle East is the most unfree part of the world today?

This is obviously a fascinating and challenging topic. And Freedoms Delayed will be an absolute must read for all interested in the fate of liberalism in the Middle East. It does a fantastic service in laying out the scope of the challenge and the depth of the problems facing Middle Eastern societies, while maintaining a resolutely optimistic perspective about the prospects for liberalization, if not in the short-run, then at least in the medium to long-term.

Nonetheless, the complexity and magnitude of the puzzle Kuran sets out to explain is truly daunting.   My assessment is that Freedom Delayed provides vital pieces of the answer to this puzzle.  But it would be asking too much of one book to imagine that it can provide a full solution to it.  Kuran makes important headway by both setting out the dimensions of the problem, and by proposing several possible explanations while ruling out others.

The Long Legacy of the Islamic Waqf

Kuran’s main thesis is that the repression of civil society over many centuries in the Middle East is responsible for the lack of liberalism today.  In particular, he argues that the prominence of the waqf as an organizational form crowded out other forms of investment, and other means of organizing public goods provision.

What are or rather were Islamic waqfs? Waqfs were investment vehicles that protected the investors wealth from state expropriation. But they were inflexible.  The resources invested in them were tied to the original intentions of the founder.  They could not be reinvested or repurposed.  And they were politically impotent. They could not be used to fund political causes.  Kuran contends that

“From the eighth century to the present, Middle Eastern politics is incomprehensible without an understanding of how the Islamic waqf worked and what options it foreclosed” (p 75). 

Waqfs were part of a broader nexus of Islamic institutions, most importantly the lack of legal personhood and the rigid Islamic inheritance system which limited the growth of organizations outside of the state. As a result, civil society organizations did not emerge in the Middle East historically (and when they did emerge in the 20^th century, they tended to be anemic. The Islamic waqf has long been superseded. Nonetheless, Kuran detects its long shadow in the prevailing weakness of NGOs, political parties and other non-governmental organizations in the Middle East.

Freedoms Delayed rests on an understanding of Europe’s liberalization that emphasizes first and foremost the emergence of organizations, outside of the state, that could act as checks and balances on state behavior. And second, on the gradual emergence of religious toleration and pluralism in Western states as a result of the Reformation and the Wars of Religion.

Here a critic of the argument might fairly ask: Is too much conceptual weight placed on waqfs?   This criticism is best addressed by considering what other factors Kuran considers and what conceptual weight they bear in the overall argument.

Alternative Explanations

European colonialism is dismissed as a factor.   Kuran is clearly correct to do this. Some Middle Eastern countries such as Turkey were never colonized.  Elsewhere in the Middle East, European colonization occurred too late and was too ephemeral to have much impact.  Moreover, the spread of European firms, cultural values and education probably had, if anything, a liberalizing effect. 

Another alternative is the state.  The 20^th century saw the replacement of traditional authoritarian regimes with more repressive autocracies such as Baathist Iraq and Syria and Iran under the Mullahs.  Perhaps it is these high modernist states with new technologies of repression that explain the Middle East’s liberal deficit?  Kuran does not dispute this, I believe.  Rather he argues that the autocratic nature of Middle Eastern states today is downstream of the institutional developments that are the focus of Freedoms Delayed.   According to his thesis, the modern state (as it exists in the Middle East today) isn’t so much an alternative explanation as part of the outcome variable.

Other explanations can also be thought of as complementary. Lisa Bladyes has argued that the prevalence of slave soldiers in Middle Eastern meant that rulers did not have to bargain with elites, precluding the kinds of constitutional arrangements like Magna Carta that constrained medieval rulers. The weakness of slave soldier-based political coalitions was related to the absence of long-lasting institutions that could form the basis of political opposition. Ahmet Kuru and Jean-Philippe Platteau point to the alliance between clerics and secular rulers. . Overall, Kuran finds these theses complementary to his own. The absence of long-lasting institutions outside of the state apart from the waqf meant that there was no other group beyond the clerics with whom rulers could bargain.

But there are other explanations that get less consideration.  The widespread prevalence of cousin marriage in the Middle East is briefly touched upon as a correlate of low trust (p 104-105). But the broad thesis that long-standing patterns of cousin marriage and the resulting tightly knit kinship groups are a cause of both the fragile but despotic states we observe and the weakness of civil society Joseph Henrich advances this claim in his The Weirdest People in the World (2020). Jonathan Schulz has an important paper published in the Economic Journal that links medieval Church bans on cousin marriage to measures of civil society such as the formation of communes.

Schulz finds a negative relationship between cousin marriage and a host of measures of democracy today. And he establishes a historical relationship between the Catholic Church’s prohibition of cousin marriage and the emergence of governing cities. Here are the results from his event study analysis:

The Role of Islam Itself

At all times, Kuran argues that there is nothing inherent in Islam which precludes liberalization.  Illiberal elements, such as the prohibition on exiting Islam, he suggests could be reinterpreted. Other prohibitions such as that on interest (riba) basically have been bypassed (through Islamic banking).  The book is entitled Freedoms Delayed not Freedoms Denied precisely because Kuran sees trends that give him (cautious) optimism in the medium to long-run.

Scholars such as Larry Siedentop and Tom Holland see extremely tight connections between Christianity and liberalism. Siedentop’s book is called Inventing the Individual. Many of these ideas go back to the classic work of Fustel de Coulanges (see these nice excerpts). The medieval Church’s campaign against cousin marriage mentioned above is testament to the conflict between the demands of the Christian faith and the demands of the kinship group.

Kuran would certainly caution against linking liberalism too tightly with Christianity. And he could point to the example of non-Christian societies (again perhaps Japan) as counter-examples.

Nonetheless, the historical coevolution of prominent strands of Christian thought and individualism (“Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s,” “Justification by Faith Alone"“) might help to explain both the early provenance of liberal thought in the Christian West and its weak roots in the Middle East.

An abiding puzzle for Kuran in Freedoms Delayed is the absence of liberal Islamic schisms. For Kuran, the lack of a liberal variant of Islam is partly responsible for both the repressive nature of secular states in the Middle East and for the success of Islamist parties.   He discusses many reasons for this absence. Individual reformers within Islam face the threat of violence and persecution. Sufism is pluralist but politically quietist. Some moderate Muslim organizations such as Nahdulatul Ulama in Indonesia are not especially liberal. Ultimately Kuran thinks that liberals within Islam are handicapped politically because of the repressive nature of Middle Eastern states and because they lack the capacity to organize through civil society institutions. There are latent liberals in the Middle East but the political environment provides them with little incentive to stick their heads above the parapet. So we observe preference falsification.

Much more could be written. Freedoms Delayed is a rich work of scholarship that will prompt much debate. It lays the groundwork for thinking about why the Middle East remains unfree. It sets out an institutionalist account based on the legacy of Islamic institutions, particularly legal institutions. The question is such a big and important one that scholars will be continuing to work on it for many years.