This is an important and provocative book, whose generalizations have already reached well beyond academia. One of the regular Op Ed columnists for the New York Times (Nicholas Kristof) cited it in seeking explanations for the failure of the Islamic world to keep pace with the West. For some, including me, the title itself, indebted to Kenneth Pomeranz's award-winning work in global history, The Great Divergence: Europe, China, and the Making of the World Economy (2000), has an Orientalist ring to it. It posits an underlying question that has haunted Orientalist scholarship for years and that has become more pronounced recently with the rise of radicalized Islam: why is the Islamic world not more like the Western capitalist world? For the moment, let us set aside this reservation and treat the book on its own merits, which, in fact, are many.

Kuran provides a convincing, although admittedly partial, economic explanation to the most widely accepted narrative of Muslim history. This narrative argues that Islam went from a series of political, cultural, and economic triumphs that characterized Islamic civilization, perhaps to the middle of the thirteen century (although in the author's view to 1000 CE) to an increasing intellectual rigidity and economic stagnation that has persisted until the present. Assuming that this view of Islamic history is valid, scholars have sought to account for Islam's economic stagnation following a series of brilliant centuries during which the Islamic world attained global commercial leadership, dominating long-distance trade across the Afro-Eurasian land mass. Certainly not all of the merchants residing in Muslim lands were Muslims. Many were Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians, animists, Buddhists, and persons of no fixed belief. But these men and women relied on Sharia law and Muslim judges to adjudicate disputes and to promote sound economic relations. Then, lo and behold, Islam lost its preeminence, mainly, as we know, to European merchants, whose financial and economic institutions, in Kuran's view, proved superior to those that had served the Islamic world so well.

Kuran's main contention is that it was the very institutions of Islam itself and mainly the Islamic legal system, which had facilitated the earlier commerce and economic progress that ultimately created barriers to robust economic functioning. Specifically, inheritance laws worked against the amassing of large fortunes; corporate forms of governance, including, eventually, joint stock limited corporations, failed to emerge; and restrictions on the taking of interest placed merchants in Islamic countries at a disadvantage compared to their European counterparts. Kuran devotes most attention to Muslim inheritance law. By dividing estates among many heirs, the Sharia put a limitation on the accumulation of wealth. In contrast, the European preference for primogeniture enabled wealth to be passed undivided from one generation to the next. These claims are altogether plausible, even convincing, and well documented through careful historical, cultural, and legal research. The author has read widely in secondary literature on the topic and employs crucial legal texts to good effect.

Especially persuasive is Kuran's treatment of the important role that minorities played within Middle Eastern economies as European capitalist elements penetrated the region. In his view, Jews, Greeks, Armenians, and others became the vital intermediaries for European business firms eager to invest in the Muslim world. They did so not because of European racial, religious, or ethnic biases, but because these local collaborators were not bound by Islamic law and were able to work more efficiently with Europe's businesspersons than their Muslim counterparts.

Kuran's claims attach extraordinary primacy to religion and law, portraying the religious laws of Islam as inherently immutable. As the author acknowledges, Europeans faced many of the same economic and financial limitations based on religious underlying tenets. European merchants, too, had to cope with powerful religious injunctions against taking interest and were expected to place community above the individual when amassing wealth. What was it, then, that enabled European communities to replace these restrictions with a more individualistic and profit-oriented view of economic behavior? If one were to look at Western Europe rather than the Muslim world in seeking answers to this crucial question, the answers would not necessarily lie in the greater flexibility of European legal and religious practices. Many ingredients went into the European capitalist miracle, to employ the usage of E. L. Jones in his book, The Economic Miracle: Environments, Economies, and Geopolitics in the History of Europe and Asia. Clearly religious tenets and legal prescriptions buttressed by religious law were important, but there is no denying the significance of the good fortune and enterprise of the Europeans in venturing across the Atlantic Ocean, discovering, then colonizing, and exploiting the vast territorial and raw material resources of the Americas. The bonanza that the Europeans found in the New World loosened religious and cultural attitudes toward economic activity, and aided European merchants in fostering robust and radically new economic institutions.

If this review dwells on reservations to Kuran's arguments, it is so only because the book's claims are so well argued and documented, have such far-reaching implications for understanding the long sweep of Islamic history and the relationship of Islamic countries to the West, and are extraordinarily tempting to accept.