Foreign Affairs - 03.2020 - 04.2020

Recent Books

March/April 2020 183

Middle East

John Waterbury

Islam, Authoritarianism, and

Underdevelopment: A Global and

Historical Comparison

BY AHMET T. KURU. Cambridge

University Press, 2019, 316 pp.

K

uru, a political scientist, under-

takes an ambitious and, on

balance, successful analysis o„ the

ills o„ the authoritarianism, economic

backwardness, and religious violence

that plague 49 Muslim-majority states.

He rejects the essentialist notion that

the fault for the struggles o„ these states

lies in Islamic doctrine, but he also

dismisses apologias that point to the

lingering eŠects o‹ European colonial

domination. Kuru traces a longer arc o„

decline. He describes a period o‹ Islamic

scientiŒc and cultural eŽorescence from

roughly the eighth to the eleventh

century, in which a dynamic mercantile

bourgeoisie allied with a vibrant intel-

ligentsia. That golden age came to an

end thanks to the rise o„ a conservative

and anti-intellectual alliance o„ religious

scholars and state o‘cials. Despite

covering a vast amount o„ secondary

literature, he does not adequately

explain why the clergy failed to see the

bourgeoisie as potential partners. He

more convincingly makes the case that

Muslim societies inherited the model o„

the powerful military-theocratic state—

composed o„ warrior-rulers, religious

authorities, and their subjects—from

Persian tradition, not the Koran.

into a movie. Gorky Park’s protagonist,

the criminal investigator Arkady

Renko, has since proceeded to solve

crimes in an ongoing series o„ novels

that now take place in modern Russia.

The Siberian Dilemma, the latest in this

series, unfolds in 2019 and refers to

real events, such as Russian President

Vladimir Putin’s reelection the previ-

ous year. Renko, however, has not aged

one bit and remains as astute and

battle seasoned as ever. He faces a

deadly dilemma as he Œnds himsel„

personally implicated in the events he

happens to be investigating, and he

narrowly escapes death in the Siberian

taiga. Those drawn to Smith’s mysteri-

ous Russian settings will be fully

rewarded by the depictions o„ vast and

cold Siberian expanses, monstrous bears,

and precious sables (Smith appears to

have a special feeling for the last: a

sable-smuggling operation was central

to the plot o„ Gorky Park), as well as

small-time mobsters, big-time oil ty-

coons, dirty politics, banyas, and vodka.

Russian readers, however, might smile

at the book’s small cultural inaccuracies.

21_Recent Books_Blues.indd 183 1/20/20 5:12 PM