The Authoritarian State in the Muslim World: Comparative Insights From Ibn Khaldun and Stein Rokkan ¹

Introduction

For decades, Political Science, at least in the United States, has been dominated by those who advocate quantitative methods at the expense of qualitative ones. ² Scholars who do not use statistics or formal theory are generally regarded as “area specialists” but not true political scientists (Hopf et al., 2006). ³ The main problem of this domination is that quantitative research has certain characteristics, such as being probabilistic and variable-oriented, which hinder it from asking “big questions.”

In the last half a century, most books asking big questions have been written by scholars who conduct qualitative, particularly comparative historical, methods (Anderson, 1983; Moore, 1966; Munck & Snyder, 2007; Skocpol, 1979). One of these scholars was Stein Rokkan (1975, 1999), who analyzed Western European political systems, with a focus on party politics, societal cleavages, and nation/state-building, and by conducting comparative historical methods (Lipset & Stein Rokkan, 1967). He particularly contributed to qualitative research by systematically using such tools as conceptual maps, typologies, grids, and clustered comparisons (Mjøset, 2000, 2015).

One big question that has to be asked is why there exists a disproportionately high level of authoritarianism in the Muslim world. A quarter of all countries in the world (50/195) are Muslim-majority. Although the majority countries in the world fulfill the basic requirements of being a democracy, only six Muslim-majority countries do so (Freedom House, 2022).

In the Muslim world and elsewhere, authoritarianism is a complex, multi-causal phenomenon (Kuru, 2019, Chapter 2; Kuru, 2021). This chapter will focus on the state as the main political organization and its impact on the problem of authoritarianism in Muslim-majority countries. It will analyze the historical transformation and contemporary types of states in the Muslim world. While doing so, the chapter refutes the perception of Muslim-majority states as “exceptional.” Instead, it will show certain similarities between these states and their Western European counterparts. To emphasize this universalistic approach, it will reveal how theoretical and conceptual frameworks of Ibn Khaldun (a 14th-century Arab social scientist) and Stein Rokkan (a 20th-century Norwegian political scientist) are both helpful in analyzing the Muslim world.

Ibn Khaldun and the State in the Muslim World

Political, Religious, Economic, and Intellectual Classes

My 2019 book, Islam, Authoritarianism, and Underdevelopment: A Global and Historical Comparison, analyzes contemporary problems of violence, authoritarianism, and socio-economic underdevelopment in 50 Muslim-majority countries. It argues that neither Islam nor Western colonialism is the culprit. Instead, it points to the alliance between the state and Islamic scholars (the ulema) as the main source of the problems.

In the book, I refer to Ibn Khaldun and his writings over 100 times on numerous subjects, such as the concept of asabiyya, Sufism, hadith methodology, Muslim philosophers, and Muslims' intellectual decline. Yet, I do not use his theory based on the dialectical relations between nomads and sedentary people. Because, rather than the relations between nomadic and sedentary people, I regard the relations between political, religious, economic, and intellectual classes (in other words; rulers, the ulema, merchants, and independent scholars) as the main cause of the rise and fall of the Muslim civilization.

Between the eighth and mid-11th centuries, the economic class, especially merchants, was an engine of the Muslim civilization. Prophet Muhammad and many of his close companions were merchants, so was the founder of the Umayyad dynasty, Muawiya (Jahiz, 1969 [c. 862], p. 272). Later, merchants also played important roles in the Abbasid Empire as funders of philosophy and Islamic scholarship. At that time, there was no organized class of the ulema (Mottahedeh, 1980, pp. 135–137). Islamic scholars constituted a loosely defined group and they worked in various sectors, particularly commerce.

Another characteristic of the ulema was their financial and intellectual distance from political rulers. They regarded close entanglements with political authorities as corrupting. Hayyim Cohen (1970, pp. 16–17, 36–61) analyzes 3,900 ulema biographies between the eighth and mid-11th centuries, from Egypt eastward. Cohen finds out that at that time the ulema were very different from the Christian clergy; the ulema, except the judges and few other scholars, “functioned in an entirely private capacity, unappointed either by the authorities or by any religious institution … received no emoluments and had to support themselves, which they did in a variety of ways.” His analysis reveals that 72.5% of the ulema or their families worked in commerce and/or industry. Only a small portion of them (8.5%) worked as officials.

The ulema's distance from political authorities had a historical background. In the mid-seventh century, Ali, the fourth caliph and the son-in-law of the Prophet, and Muawiya, the governor of Damascus, clashed over the leadership of the Muslim community. During this and following civil wars, thousands, including Ali and his son Hussein, were murdered. Muawiya established the Umayyad Empire based on these tragedies (Hodgson, 1974a, pp. 212–223). Hence, all Shiis and many other Muslims were disenchanted about the coexistence of political authority and public morality.

Unlike Prophet Muhammad's and four succeeding caliphs' charismatic, personal, and “religious” authorities, Muawiya's authority was institutionalized and largely “secular.” Muawiya was the first in Islamic history to use a throne and bodyguards (Ibn Khaldun, 2005 [1377], p. 216; Morony, 1984, p. 93). Several scholars define Muawiya as the first real state-builder in Islamic history, and most Umayyad rulers as those who secularized political authority (Abdel Rezak, 2012 [1925]; Al-Banna, 2003, pp. 4–9; Djaït, 1989, p. 411).

The 11th century was a critical juncture when the Muslim world began to experience a multidimensional transformation, which left a path-dependent class-based, ideological, and institutional legacies for the subsequent centuries. At that time, a new economic regime emerged with the increasing usage of iqtas – tax farming and land revenue assignments to the military and other officials. In later centuries, various Muslim states developed and used versions of the iqta system (Cahen, 1953; Lambton, 1965). The main political transformation in the 11th century was the militarization of the state structure. Starting with the Ghaznavids and then the Seljuks, Muslim sultanates focused on military conquests (Barthold, 1977 [1900], pp. 272–292; Starr, 2013, pp. 332–335).

This multidimensional transformation was also encouraged by sectarianism. In the first half of the 11th century, Abbasid caliphs in Baghdad tried to regain their political power against the Shii rulers who dominated North Africa, Egypt, Syria, and even Iraq. Two subsequent Abbasid caliphs, Qadir and Qaim, called for the unification of Sunni sultans, ulema, and masses. They declared a creed, which defined a “Sunni orthodoxy.” Those whose views were deemed to contradict this creed, including certain Shiis, philosophers, and rationalist theologians (Mutazilis), were declared to be apostates and faced the threat of execution (Akyol, 2021, Chapters 7–9; Hanne, 2007, p. 71; Mez, 1937, pp. 206–209).

In the second half of the 11th century, the Seljuk rulers allied with the Abbasid caliphs and the ulema to consolidate the Sunni orthodoxy and to eliminate (Ismaili) Shiis. Muslim philosophers were also targeted due to their heterodox thoughts. The institutional basis of the ulema-state alliance was a network of schools – the so-called Nizamiyya madrasas. These madrasas promoted Sunni orthodoxy and trained a particular type of ulema who would accept the service to the state (Arjomand, 1999; Ephrat, 2000). The ulema-state alliance during the Seljuks eliminated philosophers and marginalized merchants.

In short, the Seljuk way of combining the iqta system, the military state, and the ulema-state alliance emerged in Central Asia, Iran, and Iraq. In the mid-12th century, the Ayyubids and then Mamluks expanded this model to Syria and Egypt (Berkey, 1992, pp. 130–146; Lapidus, 1984). Later, this model dominated a vast geography from the Balkans to India under the Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals (Kuran, 2011, pp. 128–131; Lapidus, 1996; Yıldırım, 2019). These three empires were militarily powerful, but they failed to revive early Muslims' intellectual and economic dynamism, because these empires lacked vibrant economic and intellectual classes (İnalcık, 1994).

From the early 20th century onward, several Muslim political rulers pursued top-down modernization projects, imitating Western ideologies and institutions. These rulers, including Turkey's Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, Iran's Reza Shah, and Egypt's Gamel Abdel Nasser, ended the old forms of ulema-state alliance and weakened the ulema's roles in politics, the legal system, and public education (Kuru, 2009, Chapters 5–6). However, these secularist leaders could not sufficiently revitalize their countries' economic and scientific lives. The main reason was these rulers' state-centric ideologies and policies. They wanted to keep the economy and even the intellectual life under the state control. Hence, they marginalized the bourgeoisie and the intellectuals. In other words, the new secularist leaders were not categorically different from the old ulema-state alliances in terms of being anti-bourgeois and anti-intellectual. Moreover, during the last four decades, in most Muslim-majority countries, including Turkey, Iran, and Egypt, secularist leadership was replaced by new forms of the ulema-state alliance.

In addition to authoritarianism and socio-economic underdevelopment, a major question my book grapple with is intellectual stagnation. The book asks why Muslims achieved scientific/philosophical productivity between the ninth and 11th centuries, and why they faced gradual scientific/philosophical stagnation afterward. Ibn Khaldun (2005 [1377], 375, 430–431; 1967 [1377], III: 315) acknowledges this stagnation in the late 14th century. He briefly attempts to explain it with the declining “sedentary culture” in the Muslim world. He emphasizes that while “Iraq, Khurasan, and Transoxiana retained their sedentary culture,” these regions had a flourishing of sciences. Yet, “when those cities fell into ruins, sedentary culture, which God has devised for the attainment of sciences and crafts, disappeared from them.” As a result, sciences “disappeared from among the Persians, who were now engulfed by the desert attitude.” Similarly, in Andalus and Northwest Africa, “sciences decreased with the decrease of civilization.” He notes that sedentary culture and sciences survived in some parts of the Muslim world, such as Cairo and few cities in Transoxiana.

My explanation differs from that of Ibn Khaldun. The Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal empires had many cities with flourishing sedentary culture from the fifteenth to the 18th centuries, but their scientific and philosophical lives were stagnant in comparison to scientific/philosophical dynamism Muslims had between the ninth and 11th centuries. I explain the decline of Muslim scientific production by the increasing influence of conservative ulema and their political allies after the mid-11th century, which led to the marginalization of scientists/philosophers.

My analysis based on the relations between political, religious, economic, and intellectual classes is not peculiar to the Muslim world. In Islam, Authoritarianism, and Underdevelopment (2019, Chapters 4–6), I examine Western Europe with the same theoretical framework. Throughout the Early Middle Ages (500–1,000), Western Europe was dominated by the military aristocracy and the Catholic clergy. Western Europe had neither a dynamic merchant class nor a vibrant intellectual class. After the mid-11th century, however, class relations changed – with expanding economies and cities, Western Europe gained an increasingly influential bourgeois class and with opening of universities, it experienced the rise of a creative intellectual class (Bloch, 2014 [1940], pp. 75–78; Daly, 2021; Elias, 2000 [1939], p. 221).

Rokkan was an important political scientist who analyzed cultural, religio-political, geographical, and economic aspects of Western Europe. The next section explores how Rokkan's approach may inspire the analysis of the Muslim world.

Rokkan and Variation Within the Muslim World

In their seminal essay, Martin Lipset and Stein Rokkan (1967, p. 14) analyze four main sociopolitical cleavages in Western European countries. Two of them are products of “National Revolution” (1789 and after): (1) Ethno-linguistic Minorities vs National Culture and (2) Church(es) vs the State. Two of them are products of “Industrial Revolution” (the 19th century); (3) Landed elite vs Bourgeoisie and (4) Workers vs Capitalists. Lipset and Stein Rokkan (1967, pp. 14–15) note, “Much of the history of Europe since the beginning of the 19th century can be described in terms of the interaction between these two processes of revolutionary change: the one triggered in France and the other originating in Britain.”

In this and other writings, Rokkan (1975, 1999) explains cultural, geographical, religiopolitical, and economic variations within Western Europe by using grids and conceptual maps (Mjøset, 2000). As Robert Dahl and Val Lorwin (1980, p. 110) emphasize, on the one hand, Rokkan's “research and writing were animated by a search for patterns, for similarities,” on the other hand, “his detailed historical understanding made him acutely sensitive to the unique aspects of each nation's development.”

Unlike Rokkan's analysis that elaborates variation within Western Europe, my analysis in Islam, Authoritarianism, and Underdevelopment does not focus on variation within the Muslim world for two reasons. First, my book primarily conducts a longitudinal analysis while comparing Muslim world before and after the mid-11th century. Hence, taking the entire Muslim world as a case helps this comparative purpose. Second, the book secondarily compares the Muslim world with Western Europe from the Middle Ages to the present. Analyzing the Muslim world as a case is necessary for this comparison, too.

Nonetheless, my book still explains certain cultural, geographical, economic, and religiopolitical variations in both history and present of Muslim-majority countries. As Table 7.1 summarizes, the Umayyads were not only Arab, but also favoring Arabs. This led to the political resistance of ethnolinguistic minorities, particularly the Persians. With a bloody revolution, the Abbasids replaced the Umayyads, everywhere except Andalus. Under the Abbasids, the capital moved from Damascus to Bagdad (founded near the former Sasanian capital) and the Persian influence strengthened in administration and literature (Ibrahim, 1994, pp. 63–66; Wiet, 1953, pp. 64–70).

In the mid-11th century, the Turkish Seljuks established an empire with a capital city (Merv) in Central Asia and took control of Baghdad. They were subsequently followed by three major Turkic states – Mamluks, Ottomans, and Safavids. Out of these three, only Mamluks had an Arab-populated capital city – Cairo. Though Arabic remained as the language of religious sciences, Persian generally flourished under these Turkic rules as the language of bureaucracy and literature. This cultural and geopolitical shift from Arabs to Turks was not crucial enough to explain the stagnation of Muslim intellectual life during and after the Seljuk rule. Although the Seljuk rulers were Turkish, many other actors who established the Sunni orthodoxy in the 11th century were non-Turks. They included caliphs Qadir and Qaim, who were Arab, and the grand vizier of the Seljuk Empire, Nizam al-Mulk, and the most important scholar of the Seljuk Empire, Ghazali, who were Persian. ⁷ So, the post-11th century stagnation was a result of changing class relations and ideologies, rather than replacement of Arab rulers by Turkish rulers.

Regarding the economy, the Umayyads and the early Abbasids had commerce-based monetary system. In response to financial problems, late Abbasid rulers began to distribute iqtas – land revenue assignments and agricultural tax farming – to officials. Seljuk, Mamluk, Ottoman, and Safavid states further institutionalized the iqta system with different names and adaptations. ⁸ The iqtas were primarily distributed to military officials (Cahen, 1953; Goitein, 1966, p. 218; Lambton, 1965). Hence, it was associated with the militarization of the state structure under the Seljuks, Mamluks, Ottomans, and Safavids and their conquest-based strategy.

The transformation from monetary economy to the iqta system shrank private financial sources for the ulema and made many of them accept, if not seek, public funding in the service of the state. Thus, the iqta system provided an economic basis for the ulema-state alliance. Instead of their previous position of being funded by commerce, some ulema became state servants, while others and their madrasas became funded by politically-controlled, seemingly-independent waqfs (pious foundations) (Hodgson, 1974b, pp. 46–52; Safi, 2006, p. 90).

In short, the cultural and geopolitical variations in the historical Muslim world were not the key factors to explain the post-11th century transformation. They key factor was the changing relations between the ulema and the state – the establishment of the ulema-state alliance. The economic change – the rise of the iqta system – was important because of its role in promoting this alliance.

Similarly, my book refers to certain variations within the contemporary Muslim world, as summarized in Table 7.2. The colonial legacy shows a very limited variation because only three out of 50 cases were never directly colonized. Even these three cases (Turkey, Iran, and Saudi Arabia) reflected semi-colonized status on various issues in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, particularly due to the British colonial influence. Even the identity of colonizer (whether it is Britain, France, or Russia) does not seem to be significant because most of former British, France, and Russia colonies in the Muslim world similarly ended up with authoritarian regimes.

Having a sharia-based or secular constitution does not establish a clear pattern either. All countries that have constitutions referring to sharia (Islamic law) as a (or the) source law, or a compatibility requirement, are authoritarian. In these countries, the ulema have legislative and judicial authorities, both of which are problematic from democratic point of view. In the last four decades, such influential cases as Egypt, Iran, and Pakistan experienced the expansion of the ulema's legal and political influence and the deepening of authoritarianism. Nonetheless, the overwhelming majority of countries with secular constitutions in the Muslim world are authoritarian, too. There are two reasons for that. First, the secularist leaders and ideologies of these countries have pursued top-down modernization policies by violating rights of their citizens. Second, even in the countries with secular constitutions, such as Turkey, the state rulers have established various forms of the ulema-state alliance, which reproduced authoritarian ideas and practices.

The third factor is dominant culture. Alfred Stepan and Graeme Robertson (2003, 2004) argue a connection between wealth and democratization; for them, if a country's Gross National Income per capita (GNIpc) is high (that is more than $5,500), than its regime can be predicted to become democratic. With data from 2003 to 2004, Stepan and Robertson document that notwithstanding their high GNIpc, eight Arab countries are still authoritarian, while there is not a single non-Arab Muslim country with high GNIpc and authoritarian regime. Consequently, they argue that there is an “Arab gap of democracy,” rather than a “Muslim gap of democracy.” Using 2010–2013 data, I retested their thesis. The updated data show that there are eight, instead of zero, non-Arab Muslim countries with high GNIpc and authoritarian regimes. The difference between their analysis and mine can be explained by the changes between 2004 and 2013. During these years, eight non-Arab Muslim countries had a major increase in their GNIpc without having democratization. Out of these countries, six (Brunei, Malaysia, Iran, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, and Turkmenistan) are oil-rich, rentier states. These rentier states' GNIpc became inflated because of the sharp increase in oil prices after the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. Arab underachievers have the same characteristics: seven of 10 Arab underachievers are oil-rich, rentier states. In short, the cultural variation between Arab and non-Arab countries in the Muslim world is not an indicator of authoritarianism, whereas the economic variation between rentier and non-rentier states is.

Basically, rent can be defined as a gift of nature which does not need labor-intensive production. The revenues from rents, especially those from oil, make an economy rentier. A state is also defined as “rentier” if the rents constitute over 40% of that state's total revenues. Rulers of rentier states do not financially depend on taxation; therefore, the people cannot use taxation as leverage to hold rulers accountable. Moreover, the rentier states distribute rents to the people in the form of money, jobs, and social services, in exchange of their political loyalty. This means a patron–client relationship between the rulers and the people. It also causes various problems, including a lack of independent political, economic, and civil society in a country dominated by oil rents. The absence of independent political parties, a bourgeois class, and civic associations makes democratization unlikely and authoritarianism robust (Beblawi & Luciani, 1987; Ross, 2001, 2012).

Rentier economies are crucial for the persistence of the ulema-state alliance as seen in such examples as Saudi Arabia and Iran. Neither the ulema nor political rulers are a productive class; thus, they always need a financial source. That source was the land revenues in the iqta system in history, and it is mostly oil revenues in the rentier system today.

Nevertheless, Table 7.2 shows that many non-rentier states are also authoritarian, particularly in Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and Central Asia. Oil rents have created a “regional diffusion” in these two regions by going beyond state boundaries. Regional diffusion implies that political systems in neighboring countries affect each other through multiple mechanisms by creating a regional mood – of either democracy or dictatorship, depending on the dominant political and economic forces of that region. These mechanisms can be very direct (such as military interventions), relatively indirect (such as diplomacy and international loans), or indirect (such as the cultural influences). In MENA and Central Asia, dominant states such as Iran, Saudi Arabia, and (neighboring) Russia are rentier. This creates an authoritarian regional diffusion. Even nonrentier states in these regions are likely to become authoritarian because they have been under the political and economic influence of their rentier and authoritarian neighbors (Kuru, 2014). Moreover, authoritarianism has deep historical roots in both regions: in MENA, the ulema-state alliances have had a long history, while in Central Asia Russian colonization followed by the Soviet rule constituted the main historical basis of authoritarianism.

In sum, authoritarianism is the main characteristic of regimes in the Muslim world, due to ulema-state alliances, rentier economies, and regional diffusion. There are few Muslim-majority democracies, such as Albania, Bosnia, Kosovo, Indonesia, Senegal, and Sierra Leone, which similarly lack both a strong ulema-state alliance and a rentier economy. Furthermore, none of them is in MENA or Central Asia. Yet, these democracies are too few and too fragile to establish a clear pattern or a long-standing model in the Muslim world.

Conclusion

The dominance of quantitative methods in Political Science, at least in the United States, has restricted the discipline's ability to ask “big questions” given the variable-oriented nature of these methods. In order to solve this problem, the discipline should value qualitative methods, particularly comparative historical analysis, which was used by pioneering scholars. One of these scholars was Rokkan, who asked big questions and developed such tools as conceptual maps, grids, and clustered comparisons.

While Rokkan was from Western Europe and studied that region, Ibn Khaldun was from the Muslim world and analyzed that. Nonetheless, both scholars asked such big questions and provided such broad theoretical frameworks that they have universal implications. Ibn Khaldun's explanations about the dialectical relationship between nomads and sedentary people are helpful to understand not only historical sociology in the Muslim world but also that in China, India, and Western Europe.

This chapter has particularly focused on Ibn Khaldun's twin concepts of asabiyya and sedentary culture while analyzing his understanding of the state, or royal authority. The chapter has shown the limits of these twin concepts in explaining Muslims' socioeconomic and intellectual progress before the mid-11th century and their socioeconomic and intellectual stagnation afterward. Instead, the chapter highlights my alternative explanation based on the changing relations between political, religious, economic, and intellectual classes in explaining the rise and fall of the Muslim civilization. The chapter has also stressed that my explanations based on these four classes is not peculiar to the Muslim world, but relevant to Western Europe – its stagnation before the mid-11th century and its gradual process of development afterward.

My historical and contemporary analysis generally takes the Muslim world as a single case, unlike Rokkan's analysis of cultural, geographical, economic, and religiopolitical variations within Western Europe. It is because of the fact that I compare two periods of the Muslim world – before and after the mid-11th century, as well as comparing the Muslim world with Western Europe. Nonetheless, this chapter has summarized the data in my book about the variation within the Muslim world from history to the present, using Rokkan's cultural, geographical, economic, and religiopolitical categories. In the contemporary Muslim world, democracies are so few and fragile that comparing them with Muslim-majority autocracies does not provide reliable results. In the future, if these democracies constitute a larger number and become consolidated, analyzing variations within the Muslim world will be more consequential and necessary.