Timur Kuran
This course offers an introduction to the political history of the Middle East from the advent of Islam fourteen centuries ago to the modern era. It has four main objectives. First of all, it will familiarize students with the institutions that have determined the pace and characteristics of political development in the region. Second, it will examine certain institutional transformations and selected cases of institutional stagnation to derive lessons about the mechanisms that govern political development in general, including democratization. As such, it will provide insights applicable to other regions of the world, in both the past and present. Third, the course will investigate how religion shaped the region’s political trajectory; in particular, it will identify mechanisms through which Islam contributed to specific historical patterns. These patterns include militarily strong empires, campaigns to suppress or control religion, and, in the present, low government legitimacy, low political participation, and weak civil society. Fourth, the course will identify the social forces driving the contemporary rediscovery and reinterpretation of Islam for political ends, by both Islamists and secular political actors.
