[MUSIC]. Welcome to the last week of our course. And if you followed the course so far which you probably have, otherwise you wouldn't be here, you will have gained an appreciation for the incredible variety of in ideological outlook, in ethnic composition, in linguistic diversity, in cultural and social practices that exist across this vast geographical space that we have covered in this course. Not least also, you have come to realize that there are very large variations in the institutional depths, and in the economic well- being of the populations we have looked at. It was likewise not hard for you to discern my skepticism with respect to, generally, politically motivated claims about the unitary nature of either the religion or the people, or the political tradition that comprises the phenomenon of Islam in the contempory world. And indeed stressing this variety will be one of the main themes of this final week, where we try to pull together the different strands of this course. But before we come to these empirically observable variations in the dogma and in the practice of Islam, it's perhaps proper to acknowledge that there is indeed something that unites people of the Muslim faith across all these differences. Something that most, if not, all Muslims do have in common, and that links across these divergences, and we will arrive probably at different estimates with what these commonalities are, and how strong they are. But we will also probably be of different minds in our assessment as to the relative strength of these common features if compared to other religions' ability to bind their members together across these type of differences. But setting perhaps a frustrating pattern this week, and probably you have now acknowledged it across the course, we will not be able to provide you with ultimate answers on this question, as probably on some others. But it's suffice to state at this point, that perhaps no other religion has at the very least at the international level has led its adherence to create specific international phenomenon. Such as the the Organization of the Islamic Corporation that we discussed earlier on and whose flag you see on the left, or the Arab League that despite its ethnic basis makes no attempt to hide its very strong adherence to a common religion as a uniting feature. We have phenomena like the various Islamic republics. These are phenomena that we see among Muslims, and we do not see among other religions. And they hint towards this commonality of something that binds Muslims together. So take this commonality as the point of departure for our exploration of the variety that we spend so much time in this course in stressing, in ethnic, in linguistic, in cultural terms. And I have repeatedly warned you against the dangers of essentialism, and these dangers are at least two fold: One is a normative element - that you are reducing complex characters, both individual, and in groups to one relatively arbitrarily chosen variable among many, and that does not do justice to the complexity of people and their cultures. But perhaps more importantly, you do disservice to your own cognitive understanding of the world, because this reductionist way of approaching the world will prevent you from gaining a fuller understanding, and without that fuller understanding you will not be able to act properly on the world around you. But equally important, it will prevent you from fully understanding and therefore enjoying the complexity around you. Here I'd like to share a quote from one of my heroes that you so far have not encountered in this course. The British mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell, who's essay called useless knowledge I read as a first year law student, and that helped me dispel my doubts about my at time unstructured approach to learning. And it made me appreciate the beauty of discovery and the joy of serendipity, and he's encouraging us to be curious and not always think about the utilitarian benefits of what we might encounter. Here I'm quoting: "...Curious learning not only makes unpleasant things less unpleasant, but also makes pleasant things more pleasant. I have enjoyed peaches and apricots more since I have known that that they were first cultivated in China in the early days of the Han dynasty; that Chinese hostages held by the great King Kaniska introduced them to India. Whence they spread to Persia, reaching the Roman Empire in the first century of our era, that the word 'apricot' is derived from the same Latin source as the word 'precocious', because the apricot ripens early; And that the A at the beginning was was added by mistake, owing to a false etymology. All this makes the fruit taste much sweeter...", end of quote. So, my main point is that withdrawing to an essentialist, reductionist, caricature of the world, not only does disservice to the people and the objects you're looking at. But more importantly it reduces your cognitive development, and the joy you will have in being part of this world. And it's an idea perhaps not totally alien to Farhad Darya, one of the, perhaps the biggest contemporary Afghan musician, whom I'd like to show you here in a recording of one of his better known songs, in which one of the better known German rock musicians, Peter Maffay, is serving as his background gutair. [MUSIC] I leave it to you whether you want to become orange, but you have now come I hope to understand the problems I have with essentialism, something I warned you at the beginning of the course. You might have also now remember one of the other things that I cautioned you at the beginning and throughout this course - the notion of path dependencies. The importance of you becoming aware how historical developments in one space, constrain the range of possibilities in the future. And how with respect to our part of the world now how it preexisting customs, and the incorporation into, in this case the, newly arriving Islamic law, creates diverging cultural practices that very much limit what is going to develop in particular regions. And that accounts for the variations that we see in culture and also legal practices across the Islamic world. And the persistence of these differences perhaps became mostly clear aware of when we talked about Malaysia and Indonesia. And the different ways Islamic law and Islamic custom has developed in the different parts of these very large archipelagic states. And be also aware of how the different colonizing powers, introduced different approaches to dealing with at the administration of these territories. Do you remember Malaysia recognized formally Islamic law and custom as within the prerogative of the local states still under the rulership of the Malay kings. Indonesia, by contrast you know, that there the Dutch had the theory of the reception theory that explicitly denied recognition to formal Islamic law and only looked at it when it was received into custom. You might remember the experience of Nigeria, that is much more akin to the Malaysian experience than the Indonesian experience. So, depending on the choices colonizers took, and the responses local populations took to these decisions, we see very different legal systems and legal cultures developing, and that you need to be aware, because that dramatically limits to what is now possible in a federal state like Nigeria, as opposed to a unitary state like, say, Indonesia. So already from this very brief glance of the different development of court institutions and other judicial institution, you will be reminded of the impossibility of destilling one common approach to Islamic law and Islamic legal institutions. And then if you compare this to the wide variety of ethnic and cultural practices that we just discussed as we see here in this picture, [...] these are all Muslims from very different parts of the world. They're Chinese, Bosnians, African and Afghan, and while they do share commonalities in the observance of the faith, obviously their living conditions are very different. And if you now add to this the very different legal institutions and political institutions that have developed in the place. And if you add again the very different economic conditions that exist as in this picture you have a contrast between Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates and Somalia. You see that the variations in colonial history, in political development matter if we look at the societies and therefore we have to look at each of the societies separately. And don't forget, also, that not all Muslim societies have been colonized. We talked about Turkey, we talked about the very strange experience with colonial domination that Iran had. And also, don't forget that some Muslim countries had been colonizing forces themselves throughout Muslim history. Something we would come in a minute when we look at the map. So the shortcut of looking at colonialism as the one-stop explanation for everything, something that I criticized with respect to Ngugi in last week's lectures is something you need to be aware of. Remember also that oil is arguably the most important single factor that determines political, social and psychological conditions in many of these societies and it's something that has absolutely nothing to do with religion. And here this element of the resource curse that we discussed when we talked about the Gulf States in economic terms is mirrored in the nefarious impact this free income has on state structures that thereby become isolated from their populations. So we have a political resource curse as well, which then fuels into authoritarian tendencies, and again these are things that have nothing to do with religion, but they have an economic base. And they will produce similar results in whatever society is affected by them. Note also that reliance on foreign aid can function very similar to this resource abundance creating rentier-type economies that again insulate the state from it's population, something we discussed with respect to Afghanistan, something that we returned to last week when we talked about the African state. So abundance, availability of free income from outside, something we saw dramatically during the cold war, again fuels into autocratic tendencies. And you need to separate these factors from cultural and religious factors that might exist simultaneously. So, you also need to be aware of the vast differentiation in time, as we will return to this point later on this week. But if you look at this image, for example, this shows Afghanistan, maybe these images are 30-40 years apart. And that they show that the same society might undergo quite dramatic changes. So it's ascribing particular characteristics to a society, does not do justice to this temporal variation that we see. Also pay attention to the vast diversity in economic performance. Here we see a chart for Turkey, and we just, we saw last week charts for African countries, that do not do as well as Turkey or Malaysia or Indonesia have done. And we have tried to identify some of the factors that account for that diversity. And they have to do with the quality of their respective institutions primarily. And again these are questions that only peripherally are affected by religion. And if you just look at the different incomes of some of the members of the Organization of the Islamic Corporation, that we mentioned in the outset of this lecture, we see this enormous spread. You have the very richest nation Qatar with a GDP per capita per year of more than a $100,000, being part of that organization, sharing that commonality and at the same time, you have some of the world's poorest nations, such as Afghanistan being ranking at 185 with a GDP per capita of about $1,000 per year. Or even Somalia ranking at 93 with a GDP per capita of about $600 per year. So obviously, if you have a spread of more than a thousand fold in income, you will have very different living conditions, and that's something you need to be aware of and that should you caution against ascribing simplistic descriptions of these very different populations. The origin of these differences is often due to very accidental factors like the fact that you have oil in your ground. The fact that you were colonized by the British and not by the French, or the fact that a particular ruler came to power rather than his uncle. These path dependencies by now I think you have come to appreciate. You will also come to appreciate the variations in the way the Islamic religion arrived in these areas. Which left the different tendency, and that allows me now to come to the third element that I cautioned you at the beginning of this course, and I mean the whole idea of contingency, the idea that things can happen, but don't have to happen. And remember Marco Olsen's economic theory that we discussed last week. The fact that small groups have an inherent organizational advantage over the dispersed interests of large groups. And these small, well-organized groups take decisions. And these decisions are not structurally predetermined. These are decisions that are actively taken, and that then have an outcome. And I'd like to, well I have tried in this course, to highlight some of the disastrous effects of these deliberate decisions, that were taken by particular groups within these societies. So my aim was to create an appreciation and an awareness, for the need to take responsibility for these decisions. And for their outcomes, and not try to shift blame outside. And just to recapitulate some of these decisions. You remember the fueling of the Sundanese civil war, through the decisions to impose very aggressive Islamization policies after 1983 by Numayri. Ultimately leading to the disintegration of the state and the separation of the south. We see the same deliberate and disenfranchisement and ultimately genocidal murder, unleashed by West Pakistan against its [East] Pakistani citizens, eventually leading to the 1971 war and the disintegration of the state. We see, the decision by Iraq to first invade Iran and then Kuwait, leading to decades of disastrous war by this nation. Of course, this happens in a context, in an enabling environment of the other international actors, but ultimately these are decisions being taken. They could have just as well been taken differently, and that's the notion of contingency that I'd like you to internalize, to ponder about. Because that will prevent you from ascribing simplistic national characteristic, or ethnic or religious characteristics to groups of people. If you become aware of how histories could have been done differently if at crucial junctures, decisions have been taken differently. And that is something that the simplistic essentialist ascribing of immutable characteristics to individuals and groups does not permit us to do. Now you will probably ask, how come the area that we look at is so overwhelmingly bad in taking good decisions. And that is something really that we need to ponder. And that is one of the common themes that hopefully has run through this course, and for which you might have gotten an appreciation here. And what I believe is that it's not due to the common religion that unites the people we've looked at. And here you see a similar map just showing the relative distribution of, of Muslims in different populations and we see that this map coincides with bad governance. Now a simplistic reading would be it's a religion that causes bad governance. I would say that bad governance is caused by other things, and here I'd like to refer you to a brilliant essay written by one of my former professors, Stephen van Evera at MIT, who [...] tries to get to the ground, why states and societies believe in as he call it, foolish ideas. And he's referring, to, Professor Kenneth Waltz's book that we referred to repeatedly through this course particularly, in the first week and then thereafter about the socializing impact of a competitive international system. I'm quoting: "...Kenneth Waltz argues that states are socialized to the international system because they will be injured or even destroyed if they fail to adapt to it. I believe this claim is correct but should be qualified. Most states are indeed socialized to the international system´, but the socialization is often slow and sometimes minimal because states widely fail to evaluate their own ideas and policies. This failure to self-evaluate impedes national learning and allows misperceptions to flourish. Myths, false propaganda, and anachronistic beliefs persist in the absence of strong evaluative institutions to test ideas against logic and evidence, weeding out those that fail. As a result, national learning is slow and forgetting is quick. The external environment is perceived only dimly, through a fog of mist and misperceptions. States that misperceive their environment in this way are bound to fail to adapt to it, even when the penalties of such failure are high. Blind to the incentives they face they will respond inappropriately even if they accept in principle the need to adapt...", end of quote. And we just, I gave you the example of Iraq which I think is, you don't need more examples to see how this problem that professor Evera outlines is played out in practice. It's the failure to self-evaluate and he refers to institutions, and I would here now add to this, also individuals, the role that individuals play in challenging foolish ideas. And that's hopefully something that you now might be better equipped in doing. So, in sum, our exploration of the vast canvas of Muslim life, should have now allowed you to develop an appreciation for the dramatically different living conditions we see both across space and through time. Here these are three images from Iran in the Middle Ages, from the Shah period, from the present period of, the one at the bottom I took. It's art students in Isfahan taking a painting lesson. So, as a result of this realization, hopefully you have developed now profound skepticism about anybody using a definite article when speaking about as broad of region as this, about as wide and multifaceted religon as this, as diverse different peoples as the ones we have encountered. So, be aware of anybody who uses a definite article. And on this cheerful note, I point over to the next video, in which we will now try to elaborate a little bit more on the claims of unity of religious dogma, and particularly public law and the reality of friction that we see in this society. Not least with respect to these dogmas. [MUSIC]
