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  • Islam, Authoritarianism, and Underdevelopment: A Global and Historical Comparison by Ahmet T. Kuru
  • Eric Chaney
Ahmet T. Kuru. Islam, Authoritarianism, and Underdevelopment: A Global and Historical Comparison. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2019. 303 pp. Paper, $34.99. ISBN: 978-1108296892.

Ahmet T. Kuru's Islam, Authoritarianism, and Underdevelopment represents a balanced contribution to the debate on the links between Islam and underdevelopment. Kuru builds on a comprehensive reading of the secondary literature to argue that the Muslim-majority world's present-day underdevelopment originates from the emergence of an "ulema-state alliance" in the eleventh [End Page 484] century CE. According to Kuru, this political equilibrium undermined the previously ascendant bourgeoisie and knowledge elites and led to the economic and intellectual stagnation of Muslim societies (p. 193).

The book occupies a middle ground between those who attribute the region's ills to the immutable characteristics of Islam and those who root these difficulties in the sins of Western colonialism (p. xv). For example, Kuru convincingly notes that Western colonialism should be viewed as the endogenous product of political and socioeconomic crises in the Muslim world. Similarly, he provides evidence that many of Islam's supposedly immutable tenets were imported from other cultures centuries after the death of the prophet Muhammad (e.g., p. 202). While these observations do not excuse the damage wrought by colonialism or by "quasi-Islamic" interpretations of Islam (p. 234), they root both phenomena in the emergence of the ulema-state alliance during the medieval period.

Kuru provides considerable evidence that many of the Muslim-majority world's present-day difficulties can be traced to the institutional nexus that crystalized under the Seljuks (p. 4). Yet in his narrative these institutions arrive in a deus ex machina fashion, rapidly spreading across non-Seljuk regions and neatly explaining the transition from growth to centuries of stagnation. The actors underpinning these institutions (p. 64) are often unclear as are the causes behind the rapid diffusion and remarkable persistence of this institutional framework.

Understanding why the Seljuks' reforms emerged and spread so quickly complicates Kuru's thesis, hinting that his ulema-state alliance was the ultimate reflection of societal changes that began long before the Seljuks arrived on the scene. For instance, an influential literature traces the militarization of governmental structures (p. 4) to the introduction of slave soldiers by the Caliph al-Mutasim (r. 833–42 CE). This practice spread rapidly across the Islamic world and is believed to have gradually undermined state structures through the predatory behavior of the military (p. 98). The weakening of state structures, in turn, led to the expansion of tribal forms of societal organization and empowered conservative religious leaders who came to perform many of the functions previously provided by the state. These developments created a weakly institutionalized environment in which the ulema wielded significant political power, thus preparing the ground for the institutional changes introduced by the Seljuks.

Whatever the fundamental causes of the Seljuks' reforms, much of the post-Seljuk Islamic world seems to have been characterized by skeleton-like bureaucracies and tribal forms of societal organization (e.g., p. 170), not by the stifling state structures that Kuru often describes. These post-Seljuk arrangements differed from early Islamic bureaucracies and raise the possibility that [End Page 485] the collapse of these early bureaucratic structures is a more fundamental cause of the Muslim world's unique development challenges.

The very different development trajectories followed by societies subject to the same ulema-state alliance are arguably related to these developments and further complicate Kuru's thesis. For example, while modern-day Turkey and much of south-eastern Europe were subject to the ulema-state alliance (p. 168), their development challenges today seem very different than other regions such as Libya, Somalia, or Afghanistan. The fact that the former group of countries was incorporated into the Islamic world centuries after the latter seem to explain their differences to a greater extent than Kuru's ulema-state alliance can. In particular, regions incorporated early into the Islamic world were affected by the medieval decline of bureaucratic state structures and the tribalization of society to a greater extent than those incorporated...

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