Türk Milliyetçiliğinin Doğuşu 1876-1908 by David Kushner

He is the author of award-winning Secularism and State Policies toward Religion: The United States, France, and Turkey (Cambridge 2009) and co-editor (with Alfred Stepan) of Democracy, Islam, and Secularism in Turkey (2012). Kuru is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Center for Islamic and Arabic Studies at San Diego State University. This important study links its historical explanation to contemporary politics by showing that, to this day, the ulema–state alliance still prevents creativity and competition in Muslim countries. This alliance gradually hindered intellectual and economic creativity by marginalizing intellectual and bourgeois classes in the Muslim world. However, in the eleventh century, an alliance between orthodox Islamic scholars (the ulema) and military states began to emerge. Kuru argues that Muslims had inﬂuential thinkers and merchants in their early history, when religious orthodoxy and military rule were prevalent in Europe. Nor was Western colonialism the cause: Muslims had already suffered political and socioeconomic problems when colonization began.

Kuru criticizes explanations which point to Islam as the cause of this disparity, because Muslims were philosophically and socioeconomically more developed than Western Europeans between the ninth and twelfth centuries. Islam, Authoritarianism, and Underdevelopment Why do Muslim-majority countries exhibit high levels of authoritarianism and low levels of socioeconomic development in comparison to world averages? Ahmet T.

Türk Milliyetçiliğinin Doğuşu 1876-1908 by David Kushner