21. Strategic Interactions Between Religion and Politics: The Case of Islam

To what extent and in what sense is Islam responsible for the problems encountered by the countries in which it dominates? Foremost among such problems are high political instability and the postponement or reversal of social reforms conducive to long-term development: reform of the family code and measures to improve women’s status, or modernization of school curricula and measures to minimize rote learning of religious and other texts, for example, clearly involve high costs in terms of growth opportunities foregone. How to explain the simultaneous presence of these two problems is the question addressed in this chapter. Our central argument rests on two propositions. First, we disagree with the essentialist view according to which Islam is a major obstacle to modern development because it has always been associated with a merging of religion and the state, or a fusion between the spiritual and political spheres of life. Second, we reckon that Islam possesses a special feature in the form of a highly decentralized structure. It makes politics comparatively unstable yet, by buying off religious clerics, autocratic rulers can mitigate instability at the cost of fewer institutional reforms. Radicalization of the clerics nevertheless makes this co-option strategy more costly.