Better Than Ever

Life may be bleak in the Middle East, but it's never been better

"To this day, vast numbers of Muslims cannot understand how once they had it all but now languish in humiliating poverty in a backward part of the world run by petty tyrants," writes Alexander Rose of Canada's National Post. In many ways, the Islamic world was the handmaiden to the West, translating its most precious texts, developing its science, and fostering its trade. Yet today, it's Western Europe and the United States that stand prosperous. Modernism and all of its progenies, Marxism, capitalism, and socialism, have failed the Islamic world, it's often noted. Its decline can only be reversed, many conclude, by a return to the religious rule that prevailed in Islam's golden age.

This story's not quite right, at least if we think of "having it all" and "languishing in poverty" in absolute terms. Life is certainly harsh in many parts of the Middle East, but in general it's never been so good. "In absolute terms, the living standard in the Middle East was much higher in the 19th century than in the 13th and is still much higher now," notes University of Southern California economist Timur Kuran, who studies the economics of Islam. The decline has been a relative one. In other words, to return to Islam's golden age, would be to increase poverty, not escape from it.

That's hardly surprising. Golden ages, be they the neo-Confederates' pre-Lincoln America, Bill Bennett and Pat Buchanan's 1950s, the social activists' 1960s, or Islam's world supremacy, were never actually that golden. "By the standard of modern growth economies," writes L.E. Birdzell Jr., co-author of How the West Grew Rich: The Economic Transformation of the Industrial World, in the August/September reason, "the Golden Ages were marked by short life expectancy, high infant-death rates, deficient nutrition, dwarfed human beings, coerced religious conformism, negligible medical care, widespread illiteracy, little or no vertical economic mobility, and despotic government. That is what made a fall from a Golden Age truly a disaster."

In fact, Islam experienced at least four Golden Ages. Islamists consider 622 to 661, the time of the prophet Muhammad and his immediate followers, the best of times. Social scientists and historians point to life in Baghdad and Damascus in the 10th and 11th centuries, Spain in the 13th and 14th centuries, and the Ottoman Empire in the 15th and 16th centuries as Golden Ages. Pluralistic tolerance, intellectual inquiry, and trade characterized each of these latter periods.

It wasn't until late 1600s and early 1700s that the West surpassed the Middle East economically. Some give credit for this to colonial exploitation and the fact that capitalism is better suited to the West. Khalid Sayeed, for instance, writes in the Toronto Star that "Capitalism works in the West thanks to endowments of natural and technological resources." Others point to the abundance of a natural resource, oil, as the source of the region's problems. A more convincing reason, offered by Kuran and explained lucidly by Reason editor-at-large Virginia Postrel, is that the Middle East was slow to develop legal institutions that protect private property and wealth accumulation.

Western-style secular capitalism hasn't failed Islam or the Middle East. It's never really been tried. Just look at Turkey, a secular westernized country, 98 percent Muslim, with a per capita income considerably higher than some oil-exporting states.

No one knows for sure why Islamic countries failed to develop wealth-creating institutions. But a compelling theory holds it was because they were already extremely wealthy, due to freedom and innovation. Kuran estimates that sometime between the 9th and 11th centuries, social leaders declared that the Islamic world had attained perfection, independent judgement was no longer acceptable, and all that was required of people was to obey.

"It was several centuries into the religion," says Kuran. "It was a very innovative culture until then, and many people felt that everything that needed to be known was known. At that point they were certainly very prosperous relative to other parts of the world and people who traded between the Middle East and East Asia and Europe could see this," Kuran continues. "Just as there are people who think the United States has the most perfect system people could imagine, there were people who thought that then, and many centuries later it caused problems."

We'd be wise to let that serve as a cautionary tale.