Why is the Islamic world socioeconomically underdeveloped? When we compare Muslim-majority countries not only with Western countries but also with the rest of the world in terms of Gross National Income per capita, they rank below average, despite their substantial oil revenues. The same is true when it comes to life expectancy, years of schooling, and literacy rate. What is more, of fifty Muslim-majority countries, none is a liberal democracy, and only a few of them are categorized as electoral democracies, compared to roughly half of all other countries worldwide.
But to raise the question of why this is the case in educated circles in the West is almost taboo, as I discovered this when I was working on a book on the topic. At the time, a colleague in my department suggested I get it published in Turkish and Arabic, but not English; he was concerned that the book would fuel Islamophobia. The book, Islam, Authoritarianism, and Underdevelopment, appeared in 2019 in English and has since been translated into fifteen languages; it has been received differently in the West and in Muslim-majority countries. While Western scholars have accused me of Orientalism and Eurocentrism, editions published in Turkey, Bosnia, Lebanon, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Indonesia have been well received as an overdue analysis of the problems in these societies.
Do I blame Islam for underdevelopment? No. Religious ideas matter, but they exist within a broader political, social, and material context. As is well-known, Islam was compatible with remarkable scientific and economic progress in its early history. For the majority of Western scholars, Western colonialism is what brought this earlier progress to an end and keeps these societies behind. I disagree. Although colonialism and imperialism have been detrimental, they are not unique to the Muslim world. From Latin America to East Asia, many countries faced similar conditions, but they have found ways to develop and democratize anyway. Furthermore, the Muslim world started to lag behind Western Europe before widespread colonization began.
“Islam was compatible with remarkable scientific and economic progress in its early history.”
For many Western scholars, to place too much emphasis on Muslim societies’ historical stagnation is to judge them by European standards through an Orientalist lens. It is time to question this approach. Although Edward Said’s Orientalism was a paradigm-shifting book a half-century ago, its central concept is now used lazily to dismiss scholarship with inconvenient conclusions. In any case, there is an obvious way to avoid the Orientalist charge: to judge the contemporary Muslim world by its own historical achievements. In an earlier era, Muslim societies gave the world philosophers, scientists, and mathematicians whose influence persists to this day, while also playing a pivotal role in intercontinental trade, all at a time when Europe was intellectually and economically marginal. During that period, Muslims taught Europeans the Hindu-Arabic numeral system, optics, and Aristotelian philosophy, among other novelties.
In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, however, the Muslim world and Western Europe began to reverse roles. The relations between religious, political, intellectual, and economic classes played a central position in this process. In early Islamic history, Islamic scholars (the ulema) generally regarded close entanglements with political authorities as corrupting; they preferred to be funded by commerce and maintained close relations with merchants. At that time, most Islamic scholars and their families worked in commerce; a small minority received public money. The resulting independence from political power was a boon to intellectual and economic development.
However, the Muslim world underwent a transformation in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Sectarianism was at the center of it. The Abbasid caliphs in Baghdad, severely weakened by the rising Shii powers throughout the Middle East and North Africa, called for the unification of Sunnis to meet this threat. The caliphs declared a “Sunni creed,” and those whose views were deemed to contradict this creed, including certain Shiis, rationalist theologians, and philosophers, were declared to be apostates and faced the threat of execution.
This transformation led to a partnership between religious and political authorities. This alliance gradually marginalized the philosophers and merchants, leading to long-lasting scientific and economic stagnation in the Muslim world. There were later attempts to reform religio-political institutions in the Muslim world, but the ulema and their monarchical partners used apostasy laws, state power, and the monopoly on education through madrasas to preserve the status quo. Between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, Muslims established three empires: the Sunni Ottoman, the Shii Safavid, and the Sunni-run (but non-sectarian) Mughal empires, which ruled a vast geography from the Balkans to Bengal. These empires were militarily powerful, but they failed to revive early Muslims’ intellectual and economic dynamism because their ulema-state alliances virtually eliminated philosophers and marginalized merchants.
While the Muslim world was losing its intellectual and economic momentum, Western Europe experienced the opposite trajectory after the eleventh and twelfth centuries, with the distinction between church and state, opening of universities, and the rise of a powerful merchant class.
In their early history, Muslim societies were so dynamic that when they saw an innovation, such as Chinese papermaking, they immediately employed it. Western European societies opened the first paper factory centuries after Muslims did. But as class relations changed, so did attitudes toward innovation. Muslims waited for centuries to adopt new technologies and tools developed in Western Europe, such as the printing press, telescope, and medical research on cadavers.
By the nineteenth century, there was almost a consensus among the Muslim elite, especially in Istanbul and Cairo, that Muslim societies needed to reform to catch up with the West. These political elites were not “Orientalists”; they simply knew the conditions of their own countries in comparison to the West. As the Ottoman bureaucrat and intellectual Ziya Pasha, who lived between 1829 and 1880, wrote in a famous poem: “I traveled through the lands of infidels and saw cities and mansions,/ I wandered through the realm of Islam and saw total ruins.”
Yet the reform attempts in the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries were only partially successful. The legacy of centuries of intellectual and economic stagnation proved difficult for Muslim societies to overcome. Although reformist bureaucrats often sidelined the ulema, they never truly tried to revive intellectual and bourgeois classes. Most of the reformers had military backgrounds, and they were too statist to appreciate free speech and the free market. Over the past half-century, the ulema-state alliance has reasserted its power across much of the Muslim world in different forms: through the Wahhabi-Saudi alliance in the Arabian Peninsula, the Islamic Revolution in Iran, the sharia courts-military nexus in Pakistan, the Azhar-military alliance in Egypt, and the Diyanet-elected politicians alliance in Turkey.
What is to be done? The first task is to be honest about the situation and refuse to cover up problems with charges of Orientalism or laments over the colonial legacy. Although Western colonialism and imperialism damaged many Muslim countries and exploited their resources, a narrow focus on this history has distracted Muslims from addressing their internal problems and reforming their institutions. An honest retelling of the region’s history does not contribute to Islamophobia. For example, it has been frequently claimed that Islam, unlike Christianity, rejects the separation of church and state, and is therefore incompatible with liberal democracy. But an analysis of Islamic history reveals that there was a certain level of religion-state separation in early Islamic history, which contributed to Islam’s scientific and economic golden age. The ulema–state alliance is neither a theological necessity of Islam nor a continuous historical fact.
This historical interpretation suggests that contemporary Muslims can redesign the relationship between their religion and their states in a way that would promote intellectual and economic creativity, as well as allowing for liberalization and democratization. Muslims do not need to be Westernized for such a reform to take place; their early history provides an authentic inspiration.