Stifled By Clerics

Pervez Hoodbhoy has an interesting Dawn piece on Pakistan compared to the world’s Muslim-majority countries.


Is Pakistan unusual?

IS Pakistan unlike the world’s Muslim-majority countries? In some respects, certainly, but not in others. While religious violence there is on the higher side, it shares some striking similarities with other Muslim countries.

Turkish author Ahmet Kuru helps situate Pakistan within a broader context of authoritarianism, underdevelopment, and ongoing conflicts in Muslim countries. Kuru is a professor of political science at San Diego State University and director of the Centre for Islamic and Arabic Studies. Much of what is below derives from his award winning book, Islam, Authoritarianism, and Underdevelopment – A Global and Historical Comparison. The rest comes from my public conversation with him this week over Zoom before an audience in Islamabad.


The whole piece is well worth reading, particularly Ahmet Kuru's explanation for the decline of the Islamic Golden Age - the stifling rise of fanatical clerics. A comparison with the hordes of functionaries who surround our seats of power is both interesting and not entirely misplaced.


The Islamic Golden Age owed its vitality largely to independent scholars and Arab merchants who scoured the world for trade and brought back new ideas. Broad-minded caliphs of that era welcomed such individuals to their courts. Muslim, Christian, and Jewish scholars filled the royal courts.

But around the 11th century, rulers and usurpers discovered the usefulness of clerics in endowing legitimacy to their rule. An ulema-state alliance emerged, hugely empowering the ulema. The number of clerics surrounding the caliph shot up but that of merchants and independent scholars dwindled. By the 12th century, clerics were firmly in the saddle.

The impact on Muslim society was catastrophic. As just one example, in Turkey, influential ulema decried the printing press, invented by Gutenberg in 1436, as the devil’s machine. It was finally deemed Sharia-compliant in 1727 — a whopping 293 years later! Consequently, while the literacy rate in Europe of the 1800s stood at around 31 per cent that in the Ottoman empire was a pitiful 1pc. Clerical resistance also delayed banking by about three centuries. The very first bank in a Muslim country was the Imperial Ottoman Bank (1856) followed by the Egyptian Arab Land Bank (1880).