The Fukuyama Thesis

One restricted, almost purely empirical, version of the general Whiggish/progressive thesis is offered courtesy of Francis Fukuyama’s 1992_32ya The End of History and the Last Man; to steal a Fukuyama quote, the general understanding of his thesis is:

What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.

This isn’t the same thing as the ‘expanding circle thesis’, but rather an almost trivial observation that Western liberal democracy has steadily expanded the ranks of believers and as time passes, ever more countries slip into liberal democracies (of varying qualities) and few slip back into some alternative form like a divine-right absolute monarchy. Curiously, one sometimes sees descriptions of Fukuyama as debunked by 9/11, such as this gem in a National Interest review:

He rejected, for example, Francis Fukuyama’s heralded “End of History” thesis—that Western liberal democracy represents the final form of human governance—when it appeared in this magazine in 1989_35ya. History, it turned out, lingered long enough to prove Gray right and Fukuyama wrong.

I disagree in the strongest possible terms: this is a grossly uncharitable reading of Fukuyama and a shocking misunderstanding of the last 20 years of geopolitical changes & key historic events. History has not proved Fukuyama wrong, it has proven him right. And he foresaw both this and that people would be unable to understand this; the very first paragraph of his 1989_35ya article “The End Of History?” ends in a line that should shock the average reader of 2015 to their core:

Most of these analyses lack any larger conceptual framework for distinguishing between what is essential and what is contingent or accidental in world history, and are predictably superficial. If Mr. Gorbachev were ousted from the Kremlin or a new Ayatollah proclaimed the millennium from a desolate Middle Eastern capital, these same commentators would scramble to announce the rebirth of a new era of conflict.

I ask simply this: what credible alternatives are there to Western liberal democracy with regulated capitalism? For concreteness’s sake, let us specify Norway as our paradigmatic Western liberal democracy. If you can provide a form of governance which has the allegiance of hundreds of millions of people as improving on Norway as a goal or ideal, then you have succeeded. So many people claim Fukuyama is not just wrong, but laughably incredibly wrong, that this should be easy.

Communism was fully discredited and remains discredited, no one disputes that; Cuba & North Korea inspire no one and are a lingering refutation of the idea combined with a demonstration of common communist failure modes.

Socialism is not clearly distinguishable from the above summary, and in key countries like the USA, Britain, or France, has been in constant retreat since the days of unions and regulated airlines and government rations of cheese and coal.

Anarchistic self-governing communes? Hardly.

City-states? There have been no new ones, one of the existing 2 (Hong Kong) has fallen under Chinese sway, and attempts to create new ones in the form of Paul Romer’s charter city have died at the hands of nationalist democracies; they have neither come into existence nor won a global intellectual or mass following. Seasteading is even more obscure and unsuccessful. And it’s worth noting that even though it was famously characterized as a “Disneyland with the death penalty” and commonly put forth as a new kind of governance, the technocratic parliamentary democracy of Singapore has nothing new to it—the American goo-goos, and their Silicon Valley contemporaries, would have approved.

Monarchism? It continues its shabbily genteel decline into tourist fodder. I can think of perhaps one counter-example where a monarch may have increased their power (Thailand), but its reliance on thuggish tactics like lèse majesté laws, suggest, if anything, its leaders perceive serious underlying weakness (especially after the 2006_18ya coup), continued internal political division, and the monarch Bhumibol Adulyadej’s substantial age plus multiple military coups suggest Thailand has only postponed its reckoning (après nous, le Déluge?). This is further proof of the Fukuyama thesis, not evidence against.

What about 9/11? Surely if this disproved Fukuyama as so many commentators claimed, it must have demonstrated the rise of a new form of government that would revolutionize key countries, be fervently espoused by millions, and seize the imaginations & minds of intellectuals the world over—surely we can point to many successful revolutions spear-headed by al-Qaeda, to new Caliphates, and to the Caliph consolidating the Dar al-Islam under his benevolent & divinely ordained rule and expanding the realm of peacefulness? People, look at the Arab Spring. It happened before our eyes in exhaustive detail, you have no excuse for ignorance of what the protesters sought or what the results have been. Did it yield any caliphates? Empires? Monarchies? Self-governing city-states? Hanseatic Leagues? Or heck, anarchistic autonomous communes? Of course not. It yielded more representative governments—eg. Tunisia, Egypt. (They are still far from being Western utopias, but who can argue that they are worse than 50 years ago?) On the contrary, radical Islam has been increasingly unpopular as the brutality and ineffectiveness of terrorism became evident, the success of peaceful liberal-style protests became apparent. And in the one country where Islamists (the Muslim Brotherhood) have successfully been elected (note the verb), Egyptians have been learning that being fervent believers is not a job qualification for effective corruption-free government and the President has become increasingly unpopular with both his party and the populace.

Well, OK, but what about… um… Hugo Chavez’s “Chavismo”? No. Chavez never succeeded in gaining hegemony over Latin America or exporting his ‘revolution’ (a warmed-over socialism), and did succeed in destroying Venezuela’s economy, looting & crippling its oil industry, and died having failed to turn Chavismo into anything but a personality cult combined with standard welfare give-away tactics for gaining votes. It is barely alive in Venezuela and non-existent overseas. This is no refutation.

Iran’s “Islamic Revolution”? Iran never had any sway in the Sunni Muslim world, and what it did, it has likely forfeited due to its support for Bashar Assad trying to roll back his personal Arab Spring; the urban protests belie any claim that the regime can earn legitimacy in the face of Western liberal democratic memes, and the uniquely Iranian aspects of their democracy like the Council of Guardians banning presidential candidates inspire no admiration either in or outside the country. The Iranian economic model has fostered massive corruption due to the Revolutionary Guards and the bonyads, failed to provide jobs for a youth bulge, is not robust against sanctions, and is running perilously high inflation. No one admires the Iranian economic model. The Islamic Revolution is not a counter-argument to Fukuyama, and no one suggested this in 1992_32ya either though the revolution happened decades before.

Various Sunni militant extremists, with AK-47s in one hand and Shari’a law in the other? Ask Kenyans or Malians or Afghanis or Somalians how attractive they found such a system of governance in practice.

Similar comments hold for Russia: crony capitalism & ethnic prejudice might be inspirational for dictators like Kim Jong-Eun thinking about how to ride the economic growth tiger without being deposed, but no intellectuals or masses believe it is superior to Western liberal democracy. Growth is based principally on resource extraction, wealthy Russians maintain overseas ties to hide their wealthy from the regime and ensure themselves an escape route, Putin has allied himself with the Orthodox Church for support and manpower, and there are occasional protests despite surveillance, routine executions of journalists, etc. Where are the Communist apologists of yesteryear?

We could say something very similar about China, as well. In particular with China, we have explosive growth papering over huge problems in the underlying levels of corruption, economic equity, separatism, liberalizing population, and parking children and wealth overseas. People praising the Communist Party there seem to ignore the striking parallels to Japanese growth in the 1980s, where its own overweening government agencies & practices of questionable integrity & sclerotic consensus-building were praised as an unique new form of national & corporate governance—right up until the crash revealed the truth and largely discredited them. As Fukuyama comments in his 2014 retrospective evaluation of how well the thesis is doing:

The only system out there that would appear to be at all competitive with liberal democracy is the so-called “China model,” which mixes authoritarian government with a partially market-based economy and a high level of technocratic and technological competence. Yet if asked to bet whether, 50 years from now, the U.S. and Europe would look more like China politically or vice versa, I would pick the latter without hesitation.

Scott Sumner remarks bluntly:

This story [a Nigerian suicide bomber for Boko Haram] is emblematic of something I’ve noticed seems increasingly common in the 21^st century—political movements that appear exceedingly stupid…To an educated westerner the statements made by the anti-western leaders (as well as terrorist groups like ISIS and Boko Haram) don’t just seem offensive, they seem extremely stupid. I’ve talked to Venezuelans who told me that Chavez would give long speeches on TV that were almost mind-bogglingly stupid. Anyone who has read the various laughable claims made for the Kim family in North Korea has to wonder what the North Korean people make of the absurd propaganda…Both the US and Soviets, as well as their allies, at least tried to make their political models look appealing to the nonaligned countries, and to intellectuals. And to some extent they succeeded—lots of western intellectuals were on each side of the debate. There is almost no western intellectual support for the militarism and gay bashing of Putin, or the racism of Mugabe, or the stoning to death of adulterers and homosexuals. Nor for the kidnapping of school girls that get sold into slavery. The North Korean dynasty is treated like a bad joke. Only Chavez had a bit of support among western intellectuals, and that’s mostly gone now, as Venezuela keeps deteriorating under his replacement.

None of these models come even close to satisfying the requirement of convincing even a small fraction of the world that they are more desirable end-states or equilibriums than mature Western liberal democracies. (“Caliphism, comrades, has never truly been tried!”) There is no credible alternatives for current humans—although I cannot frame any hypotheses about what the ideal post-human society or governance will be.

Fukuyama was right. There are no credible alternatives to the capitalist liberal democracy paradigm. Human history has ended. And we await the resumption of history with fear and trembling.

Islamic Waqfs

“The Provision of Public Goods under Islamic Law: Origins, Impact, and Limitations of the Waqf System”, by Timur Kuran; Law & Society Review, Vol. 35, No. 4 (2001_23ya), pp. 841–898. The basic idea:

A waqf is an unincorporated trust established under Islamic law by a living man or woman for the provision of a designated social service in perpetuity. Its activities are financed by revenue-bearing assets that have been rendered forever inalienable. Originally the assets had to be immovable, although in some places this requirement was eventually relaxed to legitimize what came to be known as a “cash waqf.”

Waqfs were not an Islamic innovation, exactly; may have had Persian antecedents, but certainly we can find earlier analogies:

One inspiration for the waqf was perhaps the Roman legal concept of a sacred object, which provided the basis for the inalienability of religious temples. Another inspiration might have been the philanthropic foundations of Byzantium, and still another the Jewish institution of consecrated property (hekdesh). But there are important differences between the waqf and each of these forerunners. A Roman sacred object was authorized, if not initiated, by the state, which acted as the property’s administrator (K6prluii 1942_82ya:7–9; Barnes 1987_37ya:5–8). By contrast, a waqf was typically established and managed by individuals without the sovereign’s involvement. Under Islamic law, the state’s role was limited to enforcement of the rules governing its creation and operation. A Byzantine philanthropic foundation was usually linked to a church or monastery, and it was subject to ecclesiastical control (Jones 1980_44ya:25). A waqf could be attached to a mosque, but often it was established and administered by people outside the religious establishment. Finally, whereas under Jewish law it was considered a sacrilege to consecrate property for one’s own benefit (Elon 1971_53ya:280–88), there was nothing to keep the founder of a waqf from appointing himself as its first administrator and drawing a hefty salary for his services.

These perpetuities were huge; modern Iran’s bonyads are estimated at 20% of its GDP and the waqfs may have been bigger and correspondingly active:

Available aggregate statistics on the assets controlled by waqfs come from recent centuries. At the founding of the Republic of Turkey in 1923_101ya, three-quarters of the country’s arable land belonged to waqfs. Around the same time, one-eighth of all cultivated soil in Egypt and one-seventh of that in Iran stood immobilized as waqf property. In the middle of the 19^th century, one-half of the agricultural land in Algeria, and in 1883_141ya one-third of that in Tunisia, was owned by waqfs (Heffening 1936_88ya:1100_924ya; Gibb & Kramers 1961_63ya:627; Barkan 1939_85ya:237; Baer 1968_56yab:79–80). In 1829_195ya, soon after Greece broke away from the Ottoman Empire, its new government expropriated waqf land that composed about a third of the country’s total area (Fratcher 1973_51ya:114). Figures that stretch back the farthest pertain to the total annual income of the waqf system. At the end of the 18th century, it has been estimated, the combined income of the roughly 20,000 Ottoman waqfs in operation equaled one-third of Ottoman state’s total revenue, including the yield from tax farms in the Balkans, Turkey, and the Arab world (Yediyildlz 1984_40ya:26). Under the assumption that individuals cultivating waqf land were taxed equally with those working land belonging to state-owned tax farms, this last figure suggests that roughly one-third of all economically productive land in the Ottoman Empire was controlled by waqfs.

…here is abundant evidence that even a single waqf could carry great economic importance. Jerusalem’s Haseki Sultan charitable complex, founded in 1552_472ya by Haseki Hurrem, wife of Suleyman the Magnificent and better known in the West as Roxelana, possessed 26 entire villages, several shops, a covered bazaar, 2 soap plants, 11 flour mills, and 2 bathhouses, all in Palestine and Lebanon. For centuries the revenues produced by these assets were used to operate a huge soup kitchen, along with a mosque and two hostels for pilgrims and wayfarers (Peri 1992_32ya:170–71). In the 18th century, a waqf established in Aleppo by Hajj Musa Amiri, a member of the local elite, included 10 houses, 67 shops, 4 inns, 2 storerooms, several dyeing plants and baths, 3 bakeries, 8 orchards, and 3 gardens, among various other assets, including agricultural land (Meriwether 1999_25ya: 182–83)…many of the architectural masterpieces that symbolize the region’s great cities, were financed through the waqf system. So were practically all the soup kitchens in operation throughout the region. By the end of the 18th century, in Istanbul, whose estimated population of 700,000 made it the largest city in Europe, up to 30,000 people a day were being fed by charitable complexes (imarets) established under the waqf system (Huart 1927_97ya:475).

Such wealth would make them targets just like the Catholic Church was targeted by King Henry—but perhaps with different results (surprising since waqfs seem predicated on ordinary property rights being insecure, especially compared with England):

The consequent weakness of private property rights made the sacred institution of the waqf a convenient vehicle for defending wealth against official predation. Expropriations of waqf properties did occur, especially following conquests or the replacement of one dynasty by another. However, when they occurred, they usually generated serious resistance. During the two and a half centuries preceding Egypt’s fall to the Turks in 1517_507ya, no fewer than six revenue-seeking Mameluke rulers attempted to confiscate major waqfs; primarily because of judicial resistance, their efforts were largely unsuccessful (Yediyildlz 1982_42yaa:161). In the 1470s the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II expropriated scores of waqfs to raise resources for his army and his unusually broad public works program. His conversion of hundreds of waqf-owned villages into state property generated a strong reaction, and it influenced the succession struggle that followed his death. Moreover, his son Bayezid II, upon acceding to the throne, restored the confiscated lands to their former status (Repp 1988_36ya:128–29; Inalclk 1955_69ya:533). Such episodes underscored the relative security of waqf property. …Precisely because of the commonness of this motive, when a state attempted to take over a waqf it usually justified the act on the ground that it was illegitimate (Akgunduz 1996_28ya:523–61). Accordingly, its officials tried to convince the populace that the expropriated properties belonged to the state to begin with or simply that the waqf founder had never been their legitimate owner.23

The waqf structure did succeed, as economics might predict, in increasing the amount dedicated to charity, as we can see comparing religious groups’ participation:

Accordingly, up to the 19^th century Jews and Christians were ordinarily permitted to establish only functionally similar institutions (Akgindfiz 1996_28ya:238–41). Unlike waqfs, these would not be overseen by the Islamic courts or enjoy the protection of Islamic law. We know that actual practices varied. In certain periods and regions influential non-Muslims were permitted to establish waqfs.¹⁴ Yet, the requirement pertaining to the founder’s religion was generally effective. Non-Muslims were less inclined than equally wealthy Muslims to establish and fund charitable foundations of any kind, even ones to serve mostly, if not exclusively, their own religious communities (Masters 1988_36ya:173–74; Jennings 1990_34ya:308–9; Marcus 1989_35ya:305).¹⁵ This pattern changed radically only in the 19^th century, when the right to establish waqfs was extended to the members of other faiths (Cadlrcl 1991_33ya:257–58). At this point it became common for wealthy Jews and Christians to establish waqfs under a permissive new variant of Islamic law (Shaham 1991_33ya:460–72; Afifi 1994_30ya:119–22).¹⁶

The chief flaw in waqfs was the ‘dead hand’—perpetual meant perpetual:

To start with the former type of rigidity, the designated mission of a waqf was irrevocable. Ordinarily not even the founder of a waqf could alter its goals. Wherever possible, the objectives specified in the waqf deed had to be pursued exactly. This requirement, if obeyed to the letter, could cause a waqf to become dysfunctional. Imagine a richly endowed waqf established to build and support a particular caravanserai. Two centuries later, let us also suppose, a shift in trade routes idles the structure. If the long-dead founder had neglected to permit future mutawallis to use their own judgment in the interest of supporting commerce through the most efficient means, his waqf’s assets could not be transferred from the now dysfunctional caravanserai to, say, the administration of a commercial port. They could not be shifted even to another caravanserai. At least for a while, therefore, the resources of the waqf would be used inefficiently. Probably because this danger of serious efficiency loss gained recognition early on, the architects of the waqf system made the residuary mission of every waqf the benefit of the poor.³⁶ This rule meant that the assets supporting a dysfunctional caravanserai would eventually be transferred to a public shelter or a soup kitchen, thus limiting the misallocation of resources. But in tempering one form of inefficiency this measure created another. The resources devoted to poor relief would grow over time, possibly dampening incentives to work. The earlier-reported evidence of Istanbul’s soup kitchens feeding 30,000 people a day points, then, to more than the waqf system’s success in providing social services in a decentralized manner. Perhaps it shows also that the system could generate a socially costly oversupply of certain services. This is the basis on which some scholars have claimed that the waqf system contributed to the Islamic world’s long economic descent by fostering a large class of indolent beneficiaries (Akdag 1979_45ya:128–30; Cem 1970_54ya:98–99).³⁷

Not only were these recognized but steps were taken to mitigate them. The typical Ottoman waqf deed contained a standard formulary featuring a list of operational changes the mutawalli was authorized to make. However, unless explicitly stated otherwise, he could make only one set of changes; once the waqf’s original rules had undergone one modification, there could not be another reform (Akgindiiz 1996_28ya:257–70; Little 1984_40ya:317–18). This point qualifies, but also supports the observation that the waqf system suffered from operational rigidities. Sooner or later every waqf equipped with the standard flexibilities would exhaust its adaptive capacity…It is on this basis that in 1789_235ya, some 237 years after the establishment of the Haseki Sultan complex, its mutawalli decided against hiring a money changer, even though some employees wanted the appointment to cope with rising financial turnover (Peri 1992_32ya:184–85).

Finally, if the founder had not explicitly allowed the waqf to pool its resources with those of other organizations, technically achievable economies of scale could remain unexploited. In particular, services that a single large waqf could deliver most efficiently—road maintenance, piped water—might be provided at high cost by multiple small waqfs. Founders were free, of course, to stipulate that part, even all, of the income of their waqfs be transferred to a large waqf. And scattered examples of such pooling of waqf resources have been found (Cizakga 2000_24ya:48).⁴⁰ The point remains, however, that if a waqf had not been designed to participate in resource pooling it could not be converted into a “feeder waqf” of another, ordinarily larger waqf. Even if new technologies came to generate economies of scale unimaginable at the waqf’s inception, the waqf would have to continue operating independently. Rifaah al-Tahtawi, a major Egyptian thinker of the 19^th century, put his finger on this problem when he wrote, “Associations for joint philanthropy are few in our country, in contrast to individual charitable donations and family endowments, which are usually endowed by a single individual” (Cole 2000_24ya).

On this basis one may suggest that the “static perpetuity” principle of the waqf system was more suitable to a slowly changing economy than to one in which technologies, tastes, and lifestyles undergo revolutionary changes within the span of a generation. Even if adherence to the principle was only partial-as discussed later, violations were hardly uncommon-in a changing economy the efficiency of the waqf system would have fallen as a result of delays in socially desirable adjustments.⁴² This interpretation is consistent with the fact that in various parts of the modern Islamic world the legal infrastructure of the waqf system has been, or is being, modified to endow mutawallis with broader operational powers. Like many forms of the Western trust, a modern waqf is a corporation-an internally autonomous organization that the courts treat as a legal person.⁴³ As such, its mutawalli, which may now be a committee of individuals or even another corporation, enjoys broad rights to change its services, its mode and rules of operation, and even its goals, without outside interference. This is not to say that a mutawalli is now unconstrained by the founder’s directives. Instead, there is no longer a presumption that the founder’s directives were complete, and the mutawalli, or board of mutawallis, is expected and authorized to be much more than a superintendent following orders. A modern mutawalli is charged with maximizing the overall return on all assets, subject to intertemporal tradeoffs and the acceptability of risk. The permanence of any particular asset is no longer an objective in itself. It is taken for granted that the waqf’s substantive goals may best be served by trimming the payroll to finance repairs or by replacing a farm received directly from the founder with equity in a manufacturing company. …The ongoing reforms of the waqf system amount, then, to an acknowledgment that the rigidities of the traditional waqf system were indeed sources of inefficiency.

Such inefficiency is consistent with one estimate of the beneficial economic effects of the English Dissolution of the Catholic Church’s holdings (Heldring et al 2015). The natural approach was to add in new flexibility by two routes; first, explicit flexibility in the incorporation:

It was not uncommon for founders to authorize their mutawallis to sell or exchange waqf assets (istibddl). Miriam Hoexter (1998_26ya:ch. 5) has shown that between the 17^th and 19^th centuries the mutawallis of an Algerian waqf established for the benefit of Mecca and Medina managed, acting on the authority they enjoyed, to enlarge this waqf’s endowment through shrewd purchases, sales, and exchanges of assets. In the same vein, Ronald Jennings (1990_34ya:279–80, 286) has observed that in 16^th-century Trabzon some founders explicitly empowered their mutawallis to exercise their own judgment on business matters. He has also found that the courts with jurisdiction over Trabzon’s waqfs tolerated a wide range of adaptations.⁴⁵ The waqfs in question were able to undertake repairs, adjust payments to suit market conditions, and rent out unproductive properties at rates low enough and for sufficiently long periods to entice renters into making improvements (Jennings 1990_34ya:335). Other scholars, in addition to providing examples of founder-endorsed plasticity, have shown that there were limits to the founder’s control over the waqf’s management, especially beyond his or her own lifetime. Said Arjomand (1998_26ya:117, 126) and Stephane Yerasimos (1994_30ya:43–45) independently note that the waqf deed could suffer damage or even disappear with the passage of time. It could also be tampered with, sowing doubts about the authenticity of all its directives. In such circumstances, the courts might use their supervisory authority to modify the waqf’s organization, its mode of operation, and even its mission. Moreover, even when no disagreements existed over the deed itself judges had the right to order unstipulated changes in the interest of either the waqf’s intended beneficiaries or the broader community. We have seen that such heavy handedness sometimes sparked resistance. Harmed constituencies might claim that the principle of static perpetuity had been violated. However, judges were able to prevail if they commanded popular support and the opponents of change were poorly organized. Yerasimos furnishes examples of 16^th-century Ottoman construction projects that involved the successful seizure of ostensibly immobilized waqf properties, sometimes without full compensation. …There are ample indications that modification costs were generally substantial. As Murat (Sizakca 2000_24ya:16–21) observes, only some of the Islamic schools of law allowed sales and exchanges of waqf properties, and even these schools imposed various restrictions.

The second approach was to avoid inalienable assets—not real estate, but perhaps money or other financial instruments:

“Cash waqfs” thus emerged as early as the eighth century, earning income generally through interest-bearing loans (Qizakga 2000_24ya:ch. 3). Uncommon for many centuries, these waqfs provoked intense controversy as their numbers multiplied, because they violated both waqf law and the prohibition of interest (Mandaville 1979_45ya; Kurt 1996_28ya:10–21). According to their critics, not only was the cash waqf doubly un-Islamic but it consumed resources better devoted to charity and religion. Interestingly, the defenders invoked neither scripture nor the law. Conceding that the cash waqf violates classical Islamic principles, they pointed to its popularity and inferred that it had to be serving a valuable social function. In effect, they held that the cash waqf should be tolerated because it passes the utilitarian test of the market-the irreligious test now commonly used to justify popular, but perhaps ethically troubling, economic practices. The defenders of the cash waqf, who included prominent clerics, also lamented that their opponents, though perhaps knowledgeable of Islam, were ignorant of both history and the prevailing practical needs of their communities (Mandaville 1979_45ya:297–300, 306–8).

Because they met important needs and encountered little opposition outside of legal and religious circles, cash waqfs became increasingly popular. By the 16th century, in fact, they accounted for more than half of all the new Ottoman waqfs. Most of them were on the small side, as measured by assets (Cagatay 1971_53ya; Yediylldlz 1990_34ya:118–22; Masters 1988_36ya:161–63). One factor that accounts for their enormous popularity is the ubiquitous quest for wealth protection. Another was that there existed no banks able to meet the demand for consumption loans, only moneylenders whose rates reflected the risks they took by operating outside the strict interpretation of the law. Where and when the cash waqf enjoyed legal approval, it allowed moneylenders to operate more or less within the prevailing interpretation of Islamic law. If nothing else, the sacredness that flowed from its inclusion in the waqf system insulated its interest-based operations from the charge of sinfulness.

Both brought their own problems:

Yet, cash waqfs were by no means free of operational constraints. Like the founder of an ordinary waqf, that of a cash waqf could restrict its beneficiaries and limit its charges. Yediylldlz points to the deed of an 18th-century waqf whose founder required it to lend at exactly 10% and only to merchants based in the town of Amasya (Yediylldlz 1990_34ya:122). The restrictions imposed on a cash waqf typically reflected, in addition to the founder’s personal tastes and biases, the prevailing interest rates at the time of its establishment. Over time, these could become increasingly serious barriers to the waqf’s exploitation of profit opportunities. Precisely because the cash waqfs were required to keep their rates fixed, observes Cizakqa (2000_24ya:52–53), only a fifth of them survived beyond a century…Revealingly, the borrowers of the 18th-century cash waqfs of Bursa included their own mutawallis. These mutawallis lent on their own account to the moneylenders of Ankara and Istanbul, where interest rates were higher (Cizakqa 1995_29ya). Had the endowment deeds of these cash waqfs permitted greater flexibility, the gains reaped by mutawallis could have accrued to the waqfs themselves.

Insofar as these methods enhanced the acceptability of corruption, they would also have facilitated the embezzlement of resources ostensibly immobilized for the provision of social services, including public goods and charitable causes. Embezzlement often occurred through sales and exchanges of waqf properties. While such transactions could serve a waqf’s financial interests, and thus its capacity for meeting the founder’s goals, they were subject to abuse. Mutawallis found ways to line their own pockets through transactions detrimental to the waqf, for instance, the exchange of an economically valuable farm for the inferior farm of an uncle. A bribe-hungry judge might approve such a transaction under the pretext of duress, knowing full well that it was motivated more by personal gain than by civic duty. In certain times and places this form of embezzlement became so common that high officials took to treating waqf properties as alienable. In the early 16th century, right before the Ottomans occupied Egypt, a Mameluke judge ruled that the land on which the famous al-Azhar complex stands could be sold to someone looking for a site to build a mansion (Behrens-Abouseif 1994_30ya:146–47)…Her waqf was to support, she stated, “the poor and the humble, the weak and the needy… the true believers and the righteous who live near the holy places . . . [and] hold onto the sharia and strictly observe the commandments of the sunna” (Peri 1992_32ya:172). Since practically any Muslim resident of greater Jerusalem could qualify as either weak or devout, within a few generations huge numbers of families, including some of the richest, were drawing income from the waqf. Even an Ottoman governor managed to get himself on the waqf’s payroll, and he took to using the waqf as an instrument of patronage (Peri 1992_32ya:173–74). As Hfirrem’s waqf turned into a politicized source of supplementary income for people whom she would hardly have characterized as needy, the government in Istanbul tried repeatedly to trim the list of beneficiaries. Evidently it sensed that continued corruption would cause the waqf, and therefore Ottoman rule itself, to lose legitimacy. Yet the government itself benefited from showering provincial notables with privileges, which limited the reach of its reforms. After every crackdown the waqf’s managers returned to creating entitlements for the upper classes (Peri 1992_32ya:182–84). Ann Lambton (1997_27ya:305) gives examples of even more serious abuses from 14th-century Iran. Based on contemporary observations, she notes that practically all assets of the 500 waqfs in Shiraz had fallen into the hands of corrupt mutawallis bent on diverting revenues to themselves…One must not infer that managerial harm to the efficiency of waqfs stemmed only, or even primarily, from corruption. As Richard Posner (1992_32ya:511) observes in regard to charitable trusts in common law jurisdictions, the managers and supervisors of trusts established for the benefit of broad social causes generally lack adequate incentives to manage properties efficiently.

Contrast with European institutions:

Just as the premodern Middle East had inflexible waqfs, one might observe, the preindustrial and industrial West featured restrictions that inhibited the efficient administration of trusts (Fratcher 1973_51ya:22, 55, 66–71). …Do such facts invalidate the claim of this section, namely, that inflexibilities of the waqf system held the Middle East back as Europe took the lead in shaping the modern global economy? Two additional facts from European economic history may be advanced in defense of the presented argument. First, over the centuries the West developed an increasingly broad variety of trusts, including many that give a trustee-the counterpart of the mutawalli-greater operational flexibility. These came to include trusts to operate businesses, trusts to manage financial portfolios, and trusts to hold the majority of the voting shares in a corporation. Also, while it is doubtless true that certain Western trusts suffered from the sorts of rigidities that plagued the waqf system, other trusts mitigated these problems by equipping their trustees, or boards of trustees, with powers akin to those of a corporate board.

Another important difference concerns the powers of founders. As early as the 14th century, judges in England were discouraging waqf-like “perpetuities” through which donors could micromanage properties indefinitely, well after their deaths. Trusts providing benefits for unborn persons were declared invalid, or valid only if subject to destruction by prior beneficiaries. And in France, a law was instituted in 1560_464ya to keep the founders of fideicommissa, trust-like devices grounded in Roman law, from tying the hands of more than two generations of beneficiaries (Fratcher 1973_51ya:11–12, 86). These cases of resistance to static perpetuity show that the immobilization of property also presented dangers in Europe. But they also demonstrate that successful attempts to contain the dangers came much earlier in Europe than in the Middle East, where legal reforms designed to give mutawallis greater discretion had to await the 20^th century.

Waqfs are discussed further in “Legal Roots of Authoritarian Rule in the Middle East: Civic Legacies of the Islamic Waqf”, Kuran2016 & “Islam and Economic Performance: Historical and Contemporary Links”, Kuran2018:

This essay critically evaluates the analytic literature concerned with causal connections between Islam and economic performance. It focuses on works since 1997_27ya, when this literature was last surveyed…Weak property rights reinforced the private sector’s stagnation by driving capital out of commerce and into rigid waqfs. Waqfs limited economic development through their inflexibility and democratization by restraining the development of civil society.

The later Bazzi et al 2019 exploits a natural shock in Indonesian politics which drove a burst of donations to waqf endowments, showing generally negative effects in affected regions (particularly to economic growth).

The Discovery of France

pg89:

Written descriptions of daily life inevitably convey the same bright sense of purpose and progress. They pass through years of lived experience like carefree travellers, telescoping the changes that only a long memory could have perceived. Occasionally, however, a simple fact has the same effect as the photograph in the museum. At the end of the eighteenth century, doctors from urban Alsace to rural Brittany found that high death rates were not caused primarily by famine and disease. The problem was that, as soon as they became ill, people took to their beds and hoped to die. In 1750_274ya, the Marquis d’Argenson noticed that the peasants who farmed his land in the Touraine were ‘trying not to multiply’: ‘They wish only for death’. Even in times of plenty, old people who could no longer wield a spade or hold a needle were keen to die as soon as possible. ‘Lasting too long’ was one of the great fears of life. Invalids were habitually hated by their carers. It took a special government grant, instituted in 1850_174ya in the Seine and Loiret départements, to persuade poor families to keep their ailing relatives at home instead of sending them to that bare waiting room of the graveyard, the municipal hospice.

When there was just enough food for the living, the mouth of a dying person was an obscenity. In the relatively harmonious household of the 1840s described by the peasant novelist Émile Guillaumin, the family members speculate openly in front of Émile’s bed-ridden grandmother (who has not lost her hearing): ‘“I wish we knew how long it’s going to last.” And another would reply, “Not long, I hope.”’ As soon as the burden expired, any water kept in pans or basins was thrown out (since the soul might have washed itself—or, if bound for Hell, tried to extinguish itself—as it left the house), and then life went on as before.

‘Happy as a corpse’ was a saying in the Alps. Visitors to villages in the Savoy Alps, the central Pyrenees, Alsace and Lorraine, and parts of the Massif Central were often horrified to find silent populations of cretins with hideous thyroid deformities. (The link between goitre and lack of iodine in the water was not widely recognized until the early nineteenth century.) The Alpine explorer Saussure, who asked in vain for directions in a village in the Aosta Valley when most of the villagers were out in the fields, imagined that ‘an evil spirit had turned the inhabitants of the unhappy village into dumb animals, leaving them with just enough human face to show that they had once been men’.

The infirmity that seemed a curse to Saussure was a blessing to the natives. The birth of a cretinous baby was believed to bring good luck to the family. The idiot child would never have to work and would never have to leave home to earn money to pay the tax-collector. These hideous, creatures were already half-cured of life. Even the death of a normal child could be a consolation. If the baby had lived long enough to be baptized, or if a clever witch revived the corpse for an instant to sprinkle it with holy water, its soul would pray for the family in heaven.

…A slightly callous view of past suffering has emphasized the suspiciously repetitive nature of these Cahiers. Set phrases were suggested by central committees and copied down by local committees. One village found an adequate expression of its suffering and others repeated the impressive details: children eating grass, tears moistening bread, farmers feeling envious of their animals, and so on. But those grass-eating children were clearly not a figure of speech: the harvest of 1788_236ya had been worse than usual, and the Cahiers were drawn up in the dangerously hollow months when last year’s supplies were running low and next year’s corn had yet to ripen. The relatively prosperous town of Espère obviously had nothing to gain when it applied the phrase to its neighbours:

We have not yet seen our children munching grass like those of our neighbours, and our old people, happier than many of those in the surrounding region, almost all survived the rigours of last January. Only once did we have the affliction of seeing one of our own people die of hunger.

Even for prosperous peasants, disaster always loomed. Few lives were free from sudden setbacks. Every year, several villages and urban districts went up in smoke. An English traveller, crossing the Jura from Salins to Pontarlier in 1738_286ya, was told that ‘there is scarce a Village in all this Tract that does not perish by Flames once at least in 10 Years’. Salins itself was almost totally destroyed in 1825_199ya by a fire that burned for three days. The city of Rennes disappeared in 1720_304ya and much of Limoges in 1864_160ya. Thatch was cheap (gleaned from harvested fields in October), but it harboured huge populations of insects and caught fire easily unless it was completely covered by a layer of clay, quicklime, horse manure and sand. (In some parts, thatch was outlawed in new buildings in the mid-nineteenth century and replaced by the red corrugated iron that was thought to add a pleasant touch of color to the landscape.)

Déguignet was fortunate in having parents who wanted to keep him. Thousands of children—like Tom Thumb in the French fairy tale—were abandoned every year. At Provins, between 1854_170ya and 1859_165ya, 1,258 children were deposited in the rotating barrel built into the wall of the general hospital. (It can now be seen in the local museum.) These tours d’abandon, which contained a straw bed and some blankets, made it possible for mothers to abandon their babies anonymously and safely. They were outlawed as a public disgrace in 1861_163ya, which simply meant that more babies than before were left to die on doorsteps. In 1869_155ya, over 7 per cent of births in France were illegitimate, and one-third of those children were abandoned. Each year, fifty thousand human beings started life in France without a parent. Many were sent to the enterprising women known as ‘angel-makers’ who performed what can most kindly be described as postnatal abortions. A report on the hospice at Rennes defined them as ‘women who have no milk and who—doubtless for a fee—feloniously take care of several children at the same time. The children perish almost immediately.’

Before 1779_245ya, the nuns who ran the foundling hospital in Paris were obliged by law to take the infant overflow from the provinces. This emergency regulation produced one of the strangest sights on the main roads of France. Long-distance donkeys carrying panniers stuffed with babies came to the capital from as far away as Brittany, Lorraine and the Auvergne. The carters set out on their two-hundred-and-fifty-mile journeys with four or five babies to a basket, but in towns and villages along the route they struck deals with midwives and parents. For a small fee, they would push in a few extra babies. To make the load more tractable and easier on the ears, the babies were given wine instead of milk. Those that died were dumped at the roadside like rotten apples. In Paris, the carters were paid by the head and evidently delivered enough to make it worth their while. But for every ten living babies that reached the capital, only one survived more than three days.

See also Village Life in Late Tsarist Russia, Olga Semyonova Tian-Shanskaia, The Moral Basis of a Backward Society.

The Dark Side of the Enlightenment

The same phenomena viewed from opposite ends of a period of dramatic intellectual change may look very different…Paradise Lost [1667_357ya] is an epic poem based in the history of Adam and Eve as recounted in the first two chapters of the Book of Genesis…The subject of Paradise Lost is “the Fall of Man”, the “original sin” of ancient Christian theological orthodoxy. The results of the primal transgression were catastrophic, for sin “brought death into the World, and all our woe, with loss of Eden.” Our human ancestors, now rendered mortal by their own disobedience, were banished into the harsh world of labor and necessity—our world. This myth was universally understood among Christian thinkers both as a historical account of the primal fall and an allegory of every act of sin in which sensuality masters reason an willfulness conquers a required obedience. John Milton, an actual revolutionary both in politics and in art, very clearly grounded his poem in a strictly static hierarchy of the Great Chain of Being. There was a metaphysical pyramid with God at its apex. Just below that were the hierarchically ordered angels. A “little lower than the angels” were human beings, with man the superior to woman. Below that were all the animals and birds, all of vegetative life from the mighty oak to the lichen scabrous upon the stone, then the stones and minerals themselves, down to the meanest clods of the earth…Sin at its core was the overthrow of divinely established hierarchies, turning things upside down.

…In 1793_231ya…William Blake created a work called The Marriage of Heaven and Hell…The Marriage takes Paradise Lost as its point of departure, and it makes the following criticism of it: “Note: The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devils party without knowing it.” The idea that Milton was subconsciously “of the Devils party”—or putting it in more forceful terms that Satan is the true hero of Paradise Lost and God Almighty its true villain—has become one of the orthodoxies of modern literary history. It seems to accord with our sense of what is good and true, and it seems confirmed by the nature of the verse. Milton’s God is arbitrary and autocratic, and His words, when compared with Satan’s fiery speeches, are boring. According to one famous interpretation, by the literary critic William Empson, Milton’s God is actively evil. Satan, on the other hand, is dynamic. Pandemonium—the parliament of all the devils—is less like a royal court than a democratic senate. There is verbal thrust and verbal parry, the most fundamental challenging of authority. Non serviam, cries Satan. I shall not serve. His most memorable line may be “Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven!”

Despite tortured attempts to attribute this “reading” to Milton’s conscious intention, it seems impossible that a seventeen-century English Puritan would write a biblical epic in which God is the villain and Satan the hero, or that it would be received by nearly the entire Protestant eighteenth century as the greatest Christian poem ever written. Slightly more plausible, but only slightly, is the notion that such an interpretation reveals a subconscious irresolution within John Milton. It is much more likely that what seemed manifestly clear to the twentieth-century literary critic Empson never occurred to anybody for a century or more after the poem’s publication [1793–1667 = 126]. When, however, the Old World view of the Great Chain of Being and the rightness of fixed hierarchies gives way to a very different view—of the generative power of dynamically interacting polarities—the phenomena may look very different. Yet unless we are willing to turn all of cultural history into a vast Rorschach test that can tell us only what is already in our own minds, we need to make a strenuous effort to grasp something very different from what may already be there. “A perfect judge will read each work of wit”, says Alexander Pope, “With the same spirit that its author writ.”

The Better Angels of Our Nature, Pinker

…A survey of cultures by the anthropologist Laila Williamson reveals that infanticide has been practiced on every continent and by every kind of society, from non-state bands and villages (77% of which have an accepted custom of infanticide) to advanced civilizations.¹⁰² Until recently, between 10 and 15% of all babies were killed shortly after they were born, and in some societies the rate has been as high as 50%.¹⁰³ In the words of the historian Lloyd deMause, “All families once practiced infanticide. All states trace their origin to child sacrifice. All religions began with the mutilation and murder of children.”¹⁰⁴

…Martin Daly and Margo Wilson tested the triage theory by examining a sample of sixty unrelated societies from a database of ethnographies.¹¹¹ Infanticide was documented in a majority of them, and in 112 cases the anthropologists recorded a reason. 87% of the reasons fit the triage theory: the infant was not sired by the woman’s husband, the infant was deformed or ill, or the infant had strikes against its chances of surviving to maturity, such as being a twin, having an older sibling close in age, having no father around, or being born into a family that had fallen on hard economic times.

…The technological efficiency of daughter-proofing a pregnancy may make it seem as if the girl shortage is a problem of modernity, but female infanticide has been documented in China and India for more than two thousand years.¹¹⁹ In China, midwives kept a bucket of water at the bedside to drown the baby if it was a girl. In India there were many methods: “giving a pill of tobacco and bhang to swallow, drowning in milk, smearing the mother’s breast with opium or the juice of the poisonous Datura, or covering the child’s mouth with a plaster of cow-dung before it drew breath.” Then and now, even when daughters are suffered to live, they may not last long. Parents allocate most of the available food to their sons, and as a Chinese doctor explains, “if a boy gets sick, the parents may send him to the hospital at once, but if a girl gets sick, the parents may say to themselves, ‘Well, we’ll see how she is tomorrow.’”¹²⁰

Female infanticide, also called gendercide and gynecide, is not unique to Asia.¹²¹ The Yanomamö are one of many foraging peoples that kill more newborn daughters than sons. In ancient Greece and Rome, babies were “discarded in rivers, dunghills, or cesspools, placed in jars to starve, or exposed to the elements and beasts in the wild.”¹²² Infanticide was also common in medieval and Renaissance Europe.¹²³ In all these places, more girls perished than boys. Often families would kill every daughter born to them until they had a son; subsequent daughters were allowed to live.

…The evolutionary anthropologists Sarah Hrdy and Kristen Hawkes have each shown that the Trivers-Willard theory gets only half of the story right. In India, it’s true that the higher castes tend to kill their daughters. Unfortunately, it’s not true that the lower castes tend to kill their sons. In fact, it’s hard to find a society anywhere that kills its sons.¹²⁸ The infanticidal cultures of the world are either equal-opportunity baby-killers or they prefer to kill the girls—and with them, the Trivers-Willard explanation for female infanticide in humans.

Whether they are new mothers in desperate straits, putative fathers doubting their paternity, or parents preferring a son over a daughter, people in the West can no longer kill their newborns with impunity.¹³⁵ In 2007_17ya in the United States, 221 infants were murdered out of 4.3 million births. That works out to a rate of 0.00005, or a reduction from the historical average by a factor of two to three thousand. About a quarter of them were killed on their first day of life by their mothers, like the “trash-can moms” who made headlines in the late 1990s by concealing their pregnancies, giving birth in secret (in one case during a high school prom), smothering their newborns, and discarding their bodies in the trash.¹³⁶ These women find themselves in similar conditions to those who set the stage for infanticide in human prehistory: they are young, single, give birth alone, and feel they cannot count on the support of their kin. Other infants were killed by fatal abuse, often by a stepfather. Still others perished at the hands of a depressed mother who committed suicide and took her children with her because she could not imagine them living without her. Rarely, a mother with postpartum depression will cross the line into postpartum psychosis and kill her children under the spell of a delusion, like the infamous Andrea Yates, who in 2001_23ya drowned her five children in a bathtub.

What drove down the Western rate of infanticide by more than three orders of magnitude? The first step was to criminalize it. Biblical Judaism prohibited filicide, though it didn’t go the whole hog: killing an infant younger than a month did not count as murder, and loopholes were claimed by Abraham, King Solomon, and Yahweh himself for Plague #10.¹³⁷ The prohibition became clearer in Talmudic Judaism and in Christianity, from which it was absorbed into the late Roman Empire. The prohibition came from an ideology that held that lives are owned by God, to be given and taken at his pleasure, so the lives of children no longer belonged to their parents. The upshot was a taboo in Western moral codes and legal systems on taking an identifiable human life: one could not deliberate on the value of the life of an individual in one’s midst. (Exceptions were exuberantly made, of course, for heretics, infidels, uncivilized tribes, enemy peoples, and transgressors of any of several hundred laws. And we continue to deliberate on the value of statistical lives, as opposed to identifiable lives, every time we send soldiers or police into harm’s way, or scrimp on expensive health and safety measures.)

For almost a millennium and a half the Judeo-Christian prohibition against infanticide coexisted with massive infanticide in practice. According to one historian, exposure of infants during the Middle Ages “was practiced on a gigantic scale with absolute impunity, noticed by writers with most frigid indifference.”¹⁴⁵ Milner cites birth records showing an average of 5.1 births among wealthy families, 2.9 among the middle class, and 1.8 among the poor, adding, “There was no evidence that the number of pregnancies followed similar lines.”¹⁴⁶ In 1527_497ya a French priest wrote that “the latrines resound with the cries of children who have been plunged into them.”¹⁴⁷

At various points in the late Middle Ages and the early modern period, systems of criminal justice tried to do something about infanticide….Various fig leaves were procured. The phenomenon of “overlying,” in which a mother would accidentally smother an infant by rolling over it in her sleep, at times became an epidemic. Women were invited to drop off their unwanted babies at foundling homes, some of them equipped with turntables and trapdoors to ensure anonymity. The mortality rates for the inhabitants of these homes ranged from 50% to more than 99%.¹⁴⁹ Women handed over their infants to wet nurses or “baby farmers” who were known to have similar rates of success. Elixirs of opium, alcohol, and treacle were readily obtainable by mothers and wet nurses to becalm a cranky infant, and at the right dosage it could becalm them very effectively indeed. Many a child who survived infancy was sent to a workhouse, “without the inconvenience of too much food or too much clothing”, as Dickens described them in Oliver Twist, and where “it did perversely happen in eight and a half cases out of ten, either that it sickened from want and cold, or fell into the fire from neglect, or got half-smothered by accident; in any one of which cases, the miserable little being was usually summoned into another world, and there gathered to the fathers it had never known in this.” Even with these contrivances, tiny corpses were a frequent sight in parks, under bridges, and in ditches. According to a British coroner in 1862_162ya, “The police seemed to think no more of finding a dead child than they did of finding a dead cat or a dead dog.”¹⁵⁰

It is true that in much of the world today, a similar proportion of pregnancies end in abortion as the fraction that in centuries past ended in infanticide.¹⁵¹ Women in the developed West abort between 12% and 25% of their pregnancies; in some of the former communist countries the proportion is greater than half. In 2003_21ya a million fetuses were aborted in the United States, and about 5 million were aborted throughout Europe and the West, with at least another 11 million aborted elsewhere in the world. If abortion counts as a form of violence, the West has made no progress in its treatment of children. Indeed, because effective abortion has become widely available only since the 1970s (especially, in the United States, with the 1973_51ya Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision), the moral state of the West hasn’t improved; it has collapsed.

“The Book of Revelation: prophecy and politics Edge master class 2011”:

…Steven Pinker: This speaks to the original question of why a lot of these beliefs persist. And I’m always puzzled how, if you take all of this literally as some profess to do, that it really does lead to some—and speaking anachronistically as a post-enlightenment secular humanist—it leads to all kinds of pernicious consequences. Like if the only thing that keeps you from an eternity of torment is accepting Jesus as your savior, well, if you torture someone until they embrace Jesus, you’re doing them the biggest favor of their lives. It’s better a few hours now than all eternity. And if someone is leading people away from this kind of salvation, well, they’re the most evil Typhoid Mary that you can imagine, and exterminating them would be a public health measure because they are luring people into an eternity of torment, and there could be nothing more evil. Again, it’s totally anachronistic. The idea of damnation and hell is, by modern standards, a morally pernicious concept. If you take it literally, though, then of course torturing Jews and atheists and heretics and so on, is actually a very responsible public health measure. Nowadays, people both profess to believe in The Book of Revelation, and they also don’t think it’s a good idea to torture Jews and heretics and atheists.

…Even the televangelists who are thundering from their pulpits, probably don’t think it’s a good idea to torture Jews. And in fact, in public opinion polls, there’s a remarkable change through the 20^th century, in statements like, all religions are equally valid, and ought to be respected. which today, the majority of Americans agree with. And in the 1930s, needless to say, the majority disagreed with. What I find fascinating is, what kind of compartmentalization allows, on the one hand, people to believe in a literal truth of judgment day, eternal torment, but they no longer, as they once did, follow through the implication, well, we’d better execute heretics and torture nonbelievers. On one hand they’ve got admirably, a kind of post-enlightenment ecumenical tolerant humanism, torturing people is bad. On the other hand, they claim to hold beliefs that logically imply that torturing heretics would be an excellent thing. It’s interesting that the human mind can embrace these contradictions and that fortunately for all of us, the humanistic sentiments trump the, at least, claimed belief in the literal truth of all of this.