In one of the most important studies on the topic in recent years, Ahmet Kuru examines the causes of contemporary underdevelopment and authoritarianism in the Muslim world. Relying on the key insights of the institutional approach to economic development, Kuru analyzes both how the religio-political institutions that failed the Muslim world were established and legitimized in the first place and the role of ideas in this process.

Kuru argues that the gradual shift in the relationships between the political, economic, and religious classes starting in the eleventh and twelfth centuries reversed the intellectual and economic dynamism in the Muslim world and set in motion the process for its economic and political downfall in the modern period. In early Islamic history, the independence of the ulema class—the Muslim equivalent of the clergy—and the growth of the merchant class underlay notable progress between the ninth and twelfth centuries. The intellectual life in this period, including that of the ulema, was supported by the merchant class and did not rely on the benevolence and support of the political elite, leading to a vibrant and thriving scientific and intellectual environment undergirded by freedom of thought, critical thinking, and openness to creativity. Kuru states that “in early Islamic history, merchants were an influential class, and that status was one of the reasons for Muslims’ economic progress” (p. 202). After the eleventh century, however, the ulema class was co-opted by the political elite and became increasingly subservient to the growing influence of the military elite. The ulema thus morphed into legitimizers of the state and the political elite. Importantly, Kuru traces the genealogy of the state–religion alliance that was entrenched in this period to the Sasanian influence on early Muslim political thought (p. 115).

This analysis of the state–religion alliance constitutes, arguably, the most important contribution of the book: it illustrates the historical construction of this alliance more than four centuries after the rise of Islam. Looking at the state–ulema alliance par excellence in the Ottoman Empire, Kuru writes, “The Ottoman model of the ulema–state alliance, therefore, represents neither a textual essence of Islam nor the entire Islamic history. Instead, it is a phenomenon constructed during a particular period of Islamic history” (p. 202). The intellectual stagnation of the Muslim world correlates with the marginalization of the merchant class and the concurrent rise of this state–religion alliance (p. 154). The rise of orthodoxy and orthopraxy during this period first marginalized nonreligious scholarship and subsequently substantially limited the space available to sciences such as mathematics, astronomy, and medicine (p. 106). Over time, this process resulted in the “declining role of philosophy and increasing status of religious preaching in Muslim intellectual life” (p. 173).

Islam, Authoritarianism, and Underdevelopment does not follow a strict chronological order. The author first provides an overview of the current state of violence, underdevelopment, and authoritarianism in Muslim-majority countries in chapters 1–3, using a range of empirical evidence. These major problems in the Muslim world are not treated as independent developments but rather as interrelated outcomes. Yet this section goes beyond a purely empirical discussion; instead, the author reviews main arguments in the literature for why violence, underdevelopment, and authoritarianism are more pervasive in the Muslim world compared to the rest of the world. After this synopsis, Kuru presents an incredibly rich, well-researched historical analysis of the evolution of Muslim religio-political life between the seventh and twentieth centuries (chapters 4–7). Critically, this analysis traces the up-and-down trajectory of Muslim intellectual life to show how Kuru’s theory concerning the key effect of the state–ulema alliance better accounts for the gradual failure of the Muslim world, particularly in comparison to some of the prevailing accounts of this failure such as colonialism.

Islam, Authoritarianism, and Underdevelopment is a meticulous analysis of political, economic, and religious dynamics in the Muslim world; it skillfully weaves together distinct literatures for a broad view of Islam. The book makes two original contributions to the literature. First, Kuru’s analysis does not merely focus on the contemporary period when the Muslim world is stuck in a cycle of underdevelopment and authoritarianism but rather takes the longer view and examines variation over time to pin down the causal mechanism at work. He argues that “contemporary Muslim countries’ political and socioeconomic problems have long-term historical origins and cannot simply be explained as the result of either Islam or Western colonialism” (p. 3). In this regard, Kuru’s comparative analysis of the scientific, intellectual, and economic progress in early Islamic history with the stagnant state of intellectual, economic, and political life in the Muslim world in the modern period is extremely valuable. Second, Kuru ascribes underdevelopment and authoritarianism in the Muslim world in part to religion. However, he forcefully rejects essentialist arguments on both sides (i.e. “Islam is bad” and “Islam is good” [p. 84]). Diverging from theological arguments, Kuru makes a key contribution to the supply side of the religion–politics relationship by focusing on the “human side” of religion (Rodney Stark and Roger Finke, Acts of Faith: Explaining the Human Side of Religion, 2000): his analysis shows the historical variation in how the relationship between religion and politics is constructed. Kuru’s treatment of Ghazali is instructive in this regard. Ghazali was a vaunted member of the ulema in the eleventh century (1058–1111), with an outsized influence on Muslim intellectual and religious life that lasts to this day. At critical junctions in his life, Ghazali was shaped by his proximity to powerful political networks, according to Kuru. Although he cautioned the ulema against close association with the ruling elite, Ghazali nonetheless harped on the idea of a religion–state brotherhood, reinforcing the early construction of the state–ulema alliance for the next millennium. Likewise, Kuru examines Sufism, one of the celebrated and most tolerant faces of Islam, its integration into the state–ulema deal, and how it helped entrench the budding close relationship between the state and religion in Islam (p. 144). As such, this focus on Sufism provides Kuru’s causal argument on the construction of the state–ulema alliance with a dissemination mechanism among the broader population (p. 149).

It is a challenge to find a weakness in Kuru’s Islam, Authoritarianism, and Underdevelopment, because the book takes head-on the major theories of Islam’s role in contemporary political outcomes with convincing evidence. Like other macrolevel analyses, however, one could be rightly tempted to suggest that the sheer scope of the study in terms of its temporal and geographic coverage makes it difficult to evaluate the applicability of the causal argument in particular cases. Although the book connects transitions well between different time periods and illustrates how the relationships hold and evolve in distinct polities over time, the argument does not travel to the same extent in explaining different outcomes. One can establish a more direct causal relationship between underdevelopment and the institutional structure that the state–ulema alliance established, whereas the effect is more indirect and contingent on contextual and contemporary factors in the cases of authoritarianism and violence. Nonetheless, Islam, Authoritarianism, and Underdevelopment is a tour de force that lays out the broader context for the failures of the contemporary Muslim world in perspective and the ways in which religion can shape political outcomes.