Why the Arab Spring turned Islamic: the political economy of Islam

See the detailed analysis of Ekelund et al. (1996).

For an interesting modelling approach to the conflict and cooperation of church and king that allows comparison between Christian and Islamic theocracies see Salmon (2009).

“Theocracy” is how the Byzantines themselves called their own system. The label is inaccurate and confusing because in a theocracy, as usually understood, the emperor would ultimately be answerable to the head of the church whereas in Byzantium the opposite was the case. See Ferrero (2009) for discussion.

For an economic analysis of the theological controversies and sectarian conflict inside and outside the Christian church in the Roman period see Ferrero (2008). For an outline of subsequent developments, down to the Reformation and beyond, see Ferrero (2017).

For completeness, we must mention in passing several fringe groups that loosely belong here. The Alawis of Syria are self-described Twelvers and accepted as such by the latter’s authorities. They engage in secretive cult practices, perhaps in syncretism with Christian practices, which are not well understood and, if perhaps not theoretically closed to conversion, they are certainly ethnic. Similarly, the Alevis of Turkey are Twelver Shiites of Anatolia who were there before the Ottomans’ Sunnification of the country. They too follow deviant, secretive worship practices that include Sufi elements and, allegedly, pre-Islamic traces, and it is not clear that they accept conversions. Finally, the Druze of Lebanon and Syria were originally Ismailis but can now be bracketed out of Islam not only because of their deviant beliefs but especially because they have for several centuries been a completely closed group, formally disallowing conversion into and out of the group (even for marriage).

There have been a few unsuccessful attempts to found new Muslim sects in modern times. The best known is perhaps the Ahmadi sect, founded in British India near the end of the nineteenth century and still in existence in South Asia and elsewhere, which is rejected by all established Muslim sects as an apostate group because its founder is alleged to have re-opened prophethood after Muhammad—a rejection which is testimony to the current persistence and power of the commitment to Islam’s oneness. In his comprehensive presentation of Islam to Western readers, Nasr (2004, ch. 2)—who classifies all branches of Shiites as mainstream—lists as sects only the Ibadis, the marginal groups discussed in note 5 above, the Ahmadis, and the Baha’i who, though originally a nineteenth-century offshoot of Iranian Shi’ism, clearly put themselves out of Islam. Despite his commitment to document the “rich tapestry” of the world of Islam, Nasr has very little to show for it.

Nasr (2004, 86–87) similarly argues that the position of Twelver Shi’ism vis-à-vis Sunnism within the Islamic tradition is exactly the same as that of Eastern Orthodoxy vis-à-vis Catholicism in the Christian tradition—both had been there from the beginning. He sees both Muslim groups as lying together in the middle of the spectrum of Islamic orthodoxy, with the other sects mentioned above lying at various distance on either side.

The following two paragraphs draw on Ferrero (2017), which provides an extended discussion of the sectarian history of Christianity and Judaism and explains it with a model in which religions set optimal thresholds of compliance for members and the members’ reaction to the thresholds generates sects.

The non-Sunni sects have their own separate jurisprudence; in particular, most of the Shiites follow the Ja’fari school of law, which among other things still relies on ijtihad and rejects taqlid.

Social historians have drawn attention to the fact that, in the early centuries of Islam, the madhahib were not just scholarly circles but attracted wide affiliation of lay followers, often vying with each other for members and getting involved in factional politics. In particular, in tenth-century Baghdad, the Hanbalis became a mass movement that policed the propriety of behavior of fellow citizens and officials, attracting the unfriendly attention of the caliph and his police—they were engaging in the practice of “forbidding wrong” (see below). See Hurvitz (2000, 2003) and the literature cited therein. However, such militancy had to do with either personality politics or public enforcement of religious rules, not with the substance of the rules themselves that are the focus of this sub-section. In any case, this mobilizational aspect of the schools seems to have died out in the Middle Ages.

The list that follows was pieced together by scanning through my reference works as best I could; it should be understood as suggestive of the most important points at issue, not as a complete or exhaustive list. To the best of my knowledge, no scholar has ever thought of drawing up a systematic, comparative table of such inter-school differences—which is itself an indication that no one has thought of the schools as competing for followers.

Also, the list focuses on substantive laws and disregards procedural or methodological differences among the schools, which are regarded as important by all scholars of Islamic law.

Hallaq (2005, 151) decries the “notion, dominant in modern scholarship, that the differences between and among the schools are minor” as a “falsehood”, but provides no evidence to substantiate his claim other than one example concerning the definition of usurpation. His more recent book (Hallaq 2009) is devoted to a detailed exposition of the substance of Shari’a’s positive laws; the few differences between schools I was able to cull from it, in addition to those underlined in the standard literature, are listed above [points (i), (j), (k)].

Shiite law diverges from Sunni law as a whole in some more substantial ways, including the legality of temporary marriage and the priority of any descendant of the deceased, male or female, over any male collateral in inheritance law (Coulson 1969, 31–33)—the latter being the rationale for the deathbed conversions to Shi’ism discussed in the previous subsection. Also, Shiite law further restricts the Hanafi rule regarding the consumption of seafood (point (h) above) to permitting only fish with fins and scales (like the Jewish rule from Leviticus 11: 9–12) (Chehabi 2007).

This choice of law could in certain places cross the boundaries to the non-Sunni sects, wholly unorthodox as this was. In Zanzibar, which traditionally had a mixed Sunni and Ibadi population, and where the Sunnis belonged to the Shafi school, Shafi wives could obtain dissolution of their marriage on grounds of the husband’s cruelty by submitting their petition to an Ibadi judge since Ibadi law, unlike Shafi law (see point (d) above), allows it (Coulson 1964, 183–184). This belongs in the same class as the deathbed conversions to Shi’ism in Iraq for inheritance reasons (discussed in the previous subsection).

In an important contribution which is at variance with the consensus view in the economics of religion, Eswaran (2011) offers a model of the religious market that emphasizes the distinction between pluralism and competition and shows that the two may change in opposite directions following entry (or deregulation), thus suggesting that decentralization may not entail competition—although for different reasons than with the Sunni law schools.

The ulemas seem to have preserved their scholarly independence as a professional class even in the Ottoman Empire, where from the sixteenth century they were appointed by the state and organized into a centralized hierarchy with the Great Mufti at its head. The latter apparently refrained from exercising his authority on legal rulings and judicial decision by individual scholars, who—imperial patronage of the Hanafi school notwithstanding—remained fragmented among all the orthodox schools as before (Gerber 1999, ch. 3).

A reviewer has suggested that a centralized organization like the Catholic Church, in sharp contrast to the Sunni system, may after all facilitate adaptation to the changing needs of society. The problem, however, is that the church is bogged down by the cumulative weight of the dogmas enacted in two millennia, which span a huge range of issues defined as theological, and none of which can ever be touched because of the dogma of infallibility of the church (and now, of the Pope alone) on such matters. If so, adaptation and flexibility must be sought in ways other than changing the doctrine, such as competitive saint-making (Ferrero 2002) and religious orders (Ferrero 2017). In turn, the dogmatic build-up itself, culminating in the infallibility of the pope, can be given a rational-choice explanation (Ferrero 2011, 2014).

Akin to jihad is the duty known as “commanding right and forbidding wrong”, which enjoins ordinary Muslims to confront, rebuke, and if needed, put down anyone found to engage in any wrongdoing in a public space; according to the majority of the scholars, this duty includes recourse to violence and confrontation with unjust rulers—two features that are alien to the comparable doctrines of Judaism and Catholicism. This duty is founded on a principle that each and every Muslim possesses an executive power of the law of God, and it takes no account of differences of social standing. Unsurprisingly, then, “forbidding wrong” was often invoked by Muslim political rebels in history and can still be invoked by Islamic radicals today. See the discussion in Cook (2000, chs. 17, 19).

The essay is here quoted and referenced as it originally appeared in print, by “G.S.H. Marshall”. The latter is an otherwise unknown writer, and reading the essay makes one immediately suspect that the real name of the author is the distinguished Marshall G.S. Hodgson. American scholars closer to his time knew it. For example Brown (Brown 1983–1984, 167, 171 n. 20) cites the essay as authored by “M.G.S. Hodgson”.

There is some historical evidence for this. It seems that in Ottoman Cairo the details of the law, and the technical distinctions between the law schools, were common knowledge, and people were able deliberately to exploit the differences between schools to best advance their interests in any particular legal case (Hallaq 2009, 176 n. 62).

See Ferrero (2005) for a general model of Islamic extremism as a rational response to failure. More specifically, Ferrero (2013) offers a model of theocracy (defined as a religion’s taking over the state) in which theocracy is found to be the optimal choice of government form for a religion faced with a threat to its survival, when this threat is perceived as deadly but not too likely; the model is then applied to contemporary cross-country data on Muslim-majority countries. In a different approach, Coşgel and Miceli (2013) model theocracy as the merger of religious and political authorities in government (regardless of who takes over whom) and find that theocracy is most likely when the religion is monotheistic, when it achieves monopoly in the religion market, and when it confers legitimacy on the state—which, unsurprisingly, perfectly fits the Sunni Muslim group in their total sample of contemporary societies.

Of course, if the Islamists have their way, sooner or later the drawbacks of a government program that is 1000 years old will become apparent and its costs may begin to offset the benefits in the supporters’ balance sheet, but such a day of reckoning may be a long way off, giving the Islamists more steam to carry on and time to find a way out of their problem. At the time of this writing, such developments are difficult to predict.