Abstract:
The House of Islam – the term in the Islamic tradition by which those parts of the world are described in which Islam is the dominant religion – currently finds itself in a troubling state of disrepair; compared to its own past, compared to the West, but increasingly also compared to other parts of the non-Western world. As late as the early 1970s, there were no significant gaps between Islamic countries and the rest of the non-Western world in terms of democracy, human rights, political violence or economic development. Since then, however, while many non-Islamic countries in Asia, Latin America, Eastern and Southern Europe, as well as some in sub-Saharan Africa have made important progress, most Islamic countries have stagnated or even moved in a reverse direction. That this divergence has taken shape in the last fifty years indicates that its causes are not intrinsic to the nature of Islam. The crucial development has been the rise of Islamic religious fundamentalism, which achieved a breakthrough in the year 1979, with the simultaneous occurrence of the revolution in Iran, the occupation by jihadists of the Great Mosque in Mecca, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
I identify and provide empirical evidence for three central mechanisms through which fundamentalist interpretations of Islam produce adverse outcomes concerning democracy, human rights, political violence, and economic development.
First, the rejection of a separation between religion and state, which has resulted in a combination of a politicization of Islam and an Islamization of the state, with negative consequences for democracy, violent conflict, and the rights of minorities.
Second, the Islamic world has failed to partake in what is perhaps the most important social and economic innovation of the second half of the 20th century, the emancipation of women. Muslim countries dominate the bottom ranks in global comparisons of the legal position of women as well as female labour-market participation and literacy rates, with negative consequences for economic development.
Third, Islamic fundamentalism promotes the primacy of religious over secular knowledge. Muslim-majority countries have fallen behind in the educational and cognitive revolution of the post-World-War-II period, as indicated for instance by low levels of book production and patents, and illiteracy levels that continue to be twice as high as in the non-Muslim world.
About the Speaker:
Ruud Koopmans is Research Director at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center and Professor of Sociology and Migration Research at Humboldt University Berlin. His current research focuses on migration and integration, religious fundamentalism and extremism, and majority and minority rights. His most recent books deal with the new political cleavage around globalization (The Struggle over Borders. Cosmopolitanism and Communitarianism, with Pieter de Wilde et al.; Cambridge University Press, 2019); the crisis of the Islamic world (Das verfallene Haus des Islam. Die religiösen Ursachen von Unfreiheit, Stagnation und Gewalt; CH Beck Publishers, 2020; also translated into Dutch and Danish), and the tension between majority and minority rights (Majorities, Minorities, and the Future of Nationhood, with Liav Orgad, forthcoming with Cambridge University Press, 2022).
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