Timur Kuran weighs the legacy of Islam’s economic divergence from the West

How is it that Islamic civilization, which flourished in the 10th century while Europe was still mired in the Dark Ages, found itself far behind the West economically and politically at the beginning of the 20th?
That question has long been subject to broad-brush speculation by scholars, but Duke University economist Timur Kuran has forgone any hand waving to argue that a special mix of trade and legal traditions can explain why İstanbul languished while London and Antwerp bloomed. In his critically acclaimed book “The Long Divergence: How Islamic Law Held Back the Middle East,” Kuran summons a meticulous knowledge of economics, history and Islamic law to find the many roots of that slow-emerging disparity: Islamic inheritance law dispersed wealth among the family rather than heaping it on first sons, trade laws nullified commercial partnerships after a single signatory’s death and Middle Eastern trusts were inextricably bound to their founding mandate unlike European corporations, which were dynamic and self-governing. These reasons and more, argues Kuran, meant that capital remained diffuse in the Middle East while the West rose to commercial might unchallenged.

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