In Rulers, Religion, & Riches, Jared Rubin considers the roles of religion and political legitimacy in the relative decline of the Islamic world vis-à-vis the Christian west. He hypothesizes that circumstances during the formational period of the two religions made Islam “more conducive to legitimizing rule than Christianity” and therefore “the benefits of religious propagation were greater in the Middle East than in Western Europe” (p. 13). In other words, rulers in the Middle East relied more on religious authorities for their political legitimacy, and therefore religious leaders had more political influence than did religious leaders in Western Europe.
These initial differences rendered the emergence of secular institutions less likely in the Islamic world with important long-term consequences. For example, Rubin traces the development of Western banking to these differences in legitimacy (p. 92). Similarly, they are invoked to explain delays in the adoption of the printing press in the Islamic world (p. 114).
This narrative resonates with a body of scholarship highlighting the negative effects of the intertwining of religion and politics throughout much of Islamic history. Rubin draws on more than a decade of his own research to provide a significant addition to this literature. The book builds a strong case that “secularism matters” in explaining the divergent fortunes of the Islamic world and the West, showing how politically influential religious leaders can adversely affect economic development. He goes to great lengths to minimize the role Islamic doctrine played in this divergence, arguing “nothing about Islam per se…led to the economic stagnation of the Middle East except its conduciveness to legitimizing political rule” (p. 218).
At some level, however, his argument rests on Islamic doctrine to explain the Middle East's long-run economic stagnation. Thus, he claims that unlike Christianity, “[f]rom its inception, Islamic doctrine provided a mechanism to legitimize rulers” by commanding Muslims to follow only those rulers who implemented Islamic dictates (p. 52). Yet during Islam's formative period alternative interpretations rejected the idea of the union of religious and political leadership in the Islamic community altogether (e.g., the Najdiyya). Others argued that this union had become inoperable from a very early date (e.g., some Mutazilites), explicitly championing the use of reason (aql) over tradition and religious authority (naql) in political, religious, and other human endeavors. Some of these alternative interpretations were very influential during the Islamic world's medieval “Golden Age” and are often highlighted by liberal reformers as reflective of the true spirit of Islam.
Why then, did religious leaders wield significant political power through much of Islamic history? It seems plausible that this was due to historical accident, just as was the case in the emergence of more secular arrangements in parts of Western Europe (p. 153).
Whatever the prophet Muhammad intended political arrangements to look like following his death, in practice the union of religious and political authority did not survive in the Islamic world for very long. The caliphs did not inherit Muhammad's mantle of prophecy, and as they became increasingly autocratic, Muslims began to look to autonomous religious scholars both to check caliphal authority and for religious guidance. This process seems to be reflected in the prophetic saying that the religious scholars (ulama) not the caliphs (at least those after the first four) were Muhammad's true heirs.
Unsurprisingly, the caliphs resented these increasing checks on their power. Rather than bargain with these increasingly powerful religious leaders the caliphs eventually attempted to force them to submit. At roughly the same time this attempt failed (the ninth century ce), the Abbasid caliphs introduced the slave soldier system which characterized much of the Islamic world for a millennium. The eventual collapse of caliphal temporal authority, the militarization of political rule and dominance of religious leaders over both civil society and public good provision were arguably the ultimate product of these early political developments. Yet just as there is nothing in the Qur'an that mandates the use of slave soldiers, there is nothing mandating the existence of a politically influential class of religious elites (indeed during the first Islamic centuries, religious scholars were generally not paid and appear to have mostly preferred to avoid politics).
While it is possible that these political developments were made more likely by the circumstances in which Islam was born (p. 12), the institutional evolution of the Islamic world seems to confirm Rubin's view that historical development is “far from pre-determined” (p. 212). This insight also appears to extend to how Islam is interpreted (including the extent to which it is used to legitimate rule) in any given place and time. Thus, interpretations of Islam have arguably been as varied as those of Christianity across history. For example, the distance between the Islam practiced by Mutazilites in tenth century Iraq and that advocated by Ibn Taymiyyah in the thirteenth (p. 147) seems at least as large as that separating Catholicism and Protestantism in the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries.
Rubin successfully highlights how powerful religious authorities can stymie economic growth, but further research is needed to understand how certain interpretations of Islam won out over others that historically vied for dominance and why Muslim religious leaders gained so much political power over time. Nonetheless, with Rulers, Religion, and Riches, Rubin makes an important contribution to our understanding of the role of religion in politics. In particular, the book demonstrates that those seeking solutions for the Islamic world's ills in an ever-closer union of religion (din) and state (dawla) are barking up the wrong tree.
