Islam without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty (44 page)

26.
Joseph Loconte, “Economic Prosperity: A Step of Faith,”
The American
, November 10, 2009.

27.
Mahmood Ibrahim,
Merchant Capital and Islam
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), pp. 192, 193.

28.
Ibid., p. 192.

29.
Ibid., p. 193.

30.
Ibid., p. 194.

31.
Mahmood Ibrahim, “Religious Inquisition as Social Policy: The Persecution of the ‘Zanadiqa’ in the Early Abbasid Caliphate,”
Arab Studies Quarterl
y 16, no. 2 (1994): 53–54.

32.
Maya Shatzmiller,
Labour in the Medieval Islamic World
(Leiden: Brill, 1994), pp. 255–318; quoted in Kuran, “The Islamic Commercial Crisis,” p. 425.

33.
Binder,
Islamic Liberalism
, p. 222.

34.
Braudel,
History of Civilizations
, p. 87.

35.
Ibid., p. 69 ff. Also see Abdelwahab Meddeb, “Islam and Its Discontents: An Interview with Frank Berberich,”
October
99 (Winter 2002): 4.

36.
Hourani,
History of the Arab Peoples
, p. 98.

37.
Schacht,
Introduction to Islamic Law
, p. 17.

38.
Muhammad Ibn al-Hajj,
Madkhal Al-shar’ Al-sharif
[Introduction to the Noble Law], vol. 1 (Cairo, 1929), p. 79. Quoted in Jonathan P. Berkey, “Tradition, Innovation and the Social Construction of Knowledge in the Medieval Islamic Near East,”
Past and Present
146 (February 1995): 42.

39.
George F. Hourani, “Islamic and Non-Islamic Origins of Mu‘tazilite Ethical Rationalism,”
International Journal of Middle East Studies
7, no. 1 (January 1976): 87.

40.
Ibn Khaldun,
The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History
, trans. Franz Rosenthal, vol. 2 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967), p. 353.

41.
Jean-Baptiste Chardin, “author of one of the greatest travel books of all time,” seems to be “a highly credible link between Ibn Khaldun and Montesquieu.” Warren E. Gates, “The Spread of Ibn Khaldûn’s Ideas on Climate and Culture,”
Journal of the History of Ideas
28, no. 3 (July–September 1967): 422.

42.
Adam Smith “underscored the role of geography in shaping the growth of commercial arrangements in parts of ancient Greece. Not only, he claimed, did the relatively easy access to the sea allow these city-states to trade with each other, but they also enjoyed a landscape that lent itself more easily to self-defense against more bellicose, agrarian peoples.” Samuel Gregg,
The Commercial Society
(Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007), pp. 149–50.

43.
William Harmon Norton, “The Influence of the Desert on Early Islam,”
The Journal of Religion
4, no. 4 (July 1924): 395–96. Norton’s approach was quite Orientalist, in the Edward Saidian sense, and not admiring of the Qur’an either, but his distinction between the Qur’anic text and the environment-influenced mindset is notable.

44.
Sabri Ülgener,
Zihniyet ve Din: Islam, Tasavvuf ve Çözülme Devri Iktisat Ahlakı
[Mentality and Religion: Islam, Sufism and the Ethics of Economy in the Era of Decline] (Istanbul: Derin Publications, 2006), p. 10.

45.
Rodinson,
Islam and Capitalism
, p. 153.

46.
Muhammed Abid el-Cabiri,
Arap-Islam Aklının Olusumu
[The Formation of the Arab-Islamic Mind] (Istanbul: Kitabevi Publishing, 1997).

47.
Mehmet Yasar Soyalan, “Egemen Islam Kültüründeki Estetik Yoksunlugu Üzerine” [On the Lack of Aesthetics in the Dominant Islamic Culture],
Bilge Adam
, September 2006.

48.
Erhard Rostlund, “Twentieth-Century Magic,” in
Readings in Cultural Geography
, ed. Philip L. Wagner and Marvin W. Mikesell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), p. 49.

49.
See Dwayne Woods, “Latitude or Rectitude: Geographical or Institutional Determinants of Development,”
Third World Quarterly
25, no. 8 (2004): 1401–14. Also see Eric Jones,
The European Miracle: Environments, Economies and Geopolitics in the History of Europe and Asia
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

50.
Jared M. Diamond,
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), p. 352. The other book is David S. Landes,
The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1998).

51.
J. Russell Smith, “The Desert’s Edge,”
Bulletin of the American Geographical Society
47, no. 11 (1915): 831. Smith also argued that aridity was a hindrance to courtesy: “‘After you, sir,’ means, in the long run, that there is enough for both.”

52.
For a famous example of this argument, see Karl Wittfogel,
Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power
(orig. published 1957) (New York: Vintage Books, 1981).

53.
Fareed Zakaria,
The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), p. 36.

54.
Ibid.

55.
Encyclopedia of Islam
, vol. 3, p. 1088.

56.
Hassan Shaygannik, “Mode of Production in Medieval Iran,”
Iranian Studies
18, no. 1 (Winter 1985): 81.

57.
Ira M. Lapidus, eminent historian of Islamic history, agrees that patrimonial authoritarianism is a late development in Islam, rooted in the rise of Islamic empires. Under these empires, he explains, the classical Islamic theory of sovereignty retreated to provide a space for a theory of patrimonialism where “power is not an expression of the total society but the prerogative of certain individuals or groups.” This historical legacy of authoritarianism, Lapidus argues interestingly, continued into the modern period, as, for example, “many features of the Turkish republic and the Ataturk program may be derived from the patrimonial premises of the Ottoman Empire.” Ira Lapidus, “The Golden Age: The Political Concepts of Islam,”
Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
, November 1992, pp. 17, 23.

58.
Bryan S. Turner,
Weber and Islam
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974), pp. 142–43; cited in Binder,
Islamic Liberalism
, pp. 222–23.

59.
Quotes are from Binder,
Islamic Liberalism
, p. 221.

CHAPTER SIX: THE OTTOMAN REVIVAL

1.
Sadık Albayrak,
Türkiye’de Din Kavgası
[The Fight over Religion in Turkey], Istanbul, 1973, p. 100; translated and quoted in Necmettin Dogan,
The Origins of Liberalism and Islamism in the Ottoman Empire (1908–1914)
. Dissertation zur Erlangung des Doktorgrades der Philosophie am Institut für Soziologie, Fachbereich Politik- und Sozialwissenschaften der Freien Universität Berlin, December 2006, p. 121.

2.
One exceptional bright spot was the seventeenth-century Mulla Sadra, a Shiite thinker from Iran who synthesized Aristotelian logic, Sufi metaphysics, and classical Islamic theology, with a strong emphasis on the Qur’an. He was also notable for defining “change,” and not stability, as the essence of the created world. For more, see Ibrahim Kalin,
Knowledge in Later Islamic Philosophy: Mulla Sadra on Existence, Intellect, and Intuition
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).

3.
Cevdet Pasa,
Tezakir
, vol. 1, 2nd ed. (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Yayınları, 1986), pp. 111, 113.

4.
Ibid., p. 118.

5.
12. FO 78/3131, Zohrab to Salisbury no. 1, political and secret, Jidda, March 17, 1880; quoted in Tufan Buzpınar, “Vying for Power and Influence in the Hijaz: Ottoman Rule, the Last Emirate of Abdulmuttalib and the British (1880–1882),”
The Muslim World
95 (January 2005), p. 2.

6.
Cevdet Pasa,
Tezakir
, vol. 1, pp. 137–38.

7.
Ibid., pp. 111, 113.

8.
Ibid., p. 130.

9.
Lewis,
The Middle East
, p. 88.

10.
The Seyh-ül Islam was Zembilli Ali Efendi. Halide Edip Adıvar,
Türkiye’de Sark-Garp ve Amerikan Tesirleri
[East-West and American Influences in Turkey] (Istanbul: Can Books, 2009 (reprint of 1955 edition), p. 58.

11.
Catherwood,
Brief History of the Middle East
, p. 124; Karabell,
People of the Book,
p. 177.

12.
Karabell, p. 184.

13.
Bulgarian historian Maria Todorova, with reference to author Holm Sundhaussen, speaks of negative Balkan perceptions about the Ottoman Empire, such as “the ‘golden’ pre-Ottoman period” and the “Turkish yoke,” as “myths.” (Maria Nikolaeva Todorova,
Balkan Identities: Nation and Memory
[London: C. Hurst and Co., 2004, p. 7].) American historian Zachary Karabell concurs: “The reputation of the Ottomans [besides European prejudice] suffered from the nationalist movements that swept the Balkans and the Near East in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. First the Greeks in the 1820s and then the Hungarians, Serbs, Bulgarians, Romanians, and, finally, the Arabs of the Near East defined themselves as nations that had been conquered, brutalized, and silenced by Ottoman autocrats. For the Greeks and other Balkan peoples, there was an added religious element: the Muslim Ottomans, they claimed, had oppressed Christian peoples. Even the Arabs, who caught the infectious bug of nationalism just before World War I, distanced themselves from the Ottomans, though their main bone of contention was more ethnic than religious.” Karabell,
People of the Book
, p. 167.