Institutional Roots of Authoritarian Rule in the Middle East: Political Legacies of the Islamic Waqf by Timur Kuran* 11 December 2013 Abstract. In the pre-modern Middle East the closest thing to an autonomous private organization was the Islamic waqf. Paradoxically, this non-state institution inhibited political participation, collective action, transparency in governance, and rule of law, among other indicators of democratization. For a millennium it delayed and limited democratization through several mutually supportive mechanisms. Its activities were essentially set by its founder, which limited its capacity to meet political challenges. Being designed to provide a service on its own, it could not participate in lasting political coalitions. The waqf’s beneficiaries had no say in evaluating or selecting its officers. Circumventing waqf rules required a court’s permission, which incited corruption. Finally, the process of appointing officials promoted and legitimized nepotism. Thus, for all the resources it controlled, the Islamic waqf contributed minimally to advancing the rule of law or building civil society. As a core element of Islam’s classical institutional complex, it perpetuated authoritarian rule by keeping the state largely unrestrained. Therein lies a major reason why in the Middle East democratization is proving to be a drawn out process. Keywords: Middle East, Ottoman Empire, Turkey, Arab world, Egypt, Islamic law, sharia, waqf, democracy, autocracy, civil society, political participation, collective action, coalition, corporation, foundation, corruption, nepotism, trust, institutional change. * Department of Economics, Box 90097, Duke University, Durham, NC 27708, USA ([email protected]) Acknowledgment. In the course of writing this article, I benefited from discussions with Bruce Ackerman, Bas van Bavel, Jenna Bednar, Fahad Bishara, Richard Brooks, Jessica Dijkman, Robert Ellickson, Mohammad Fadel, Henry Hansmann, Daniel Markovits, Tine De Moor, David Patel, Claire Priest, Auke Rijpma, Adam Sabra, Jan Luiten van Zanden, and Jaco Zuijderduijn. I am grateful to Noa Cnaan-On and Mai Ha Linh Nguyen for research assistance, and to the Economic Policy Research Foundation of Turkey (TEPAV) for financial support. T. Kuran, “Institutional Roots of Authoritarian Rule in Middle East: Political Legacies of the Waqf” (11 December 2013) 1 1. Introduction Even after the Arab uprisings of 2011, the Middle East1 remains the world’s least democratized region. Its only predominantly Muslim country that qualifies as a full electoral democracy is Turkey, where as late as 1997 the military forced an elected government to resign and where, under the increasingly Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP) government, fundamental freedoms are eroding.2 Several other region-wide patterns point to weak political performance. Trust in strangers, or generalized trust, is strikingly low by the standards of established democracies.3 Likewise, trust in institutions is very limited.4 Corruption is common as perceived by both local residents and foreigners; so is nepotism, the tendency to favor relatives.5 Insofar as they exist, institutional checks and balances are unreliable, which is why secularists and Islamists, and also Shiis and Sunnis, object to being governed by parties under the other’s control. For all their insights, the literatures on these patterns raise puzzles.6 Certain important findings relate to only part of the region. For example, the observation that oil revenues allow rentier states to buy off their critics leaves unexplained the persistence of autocratic rule in oil- importing states.7 Other popular arguments are inconsistent with evidence from outside the Middle East. Consider the treatment of the Middle East’s low political performance as a legacy of colonialism.8 It begs the question of why many former colonies outside the region, including India and Brazil, have better political records A common trait of inquiries into the Arab world’s chronic political failures is a focus on proximate factors.9 Since the end of foreign rule, it is commonly observed, monarchs and presidents have emasculated the news media, suppressed intellectual inquiry, restricted artistic expression, banned political parties, and co-opted regional, ethnic and religious organizations. Authoritarian governments have thus suppressed collective empowerment on the part of politically oriented non-governmental organizations. Sustained collective action tends to be limited, as one contributor puts it, to “extraordinary social and political circumstances.”10 To make matters worse, the private organizations that manage to engage in advocacy tend to be unaccountable to the constituencies that they ostensibly represent. All this is true, with variations among countries. But why have the oppressive policies of Arab rulers worked so well and for years on end? And why have the region’s non-governmental organizations (NGOs) lacked accountability? Might the identified patterns, including the persistence of authoritarianism and the political passivity of the masses, be rooted in historical processes that predate European colonialism? With a few shining exceptions, researchers have left unexplored how the Middle East’s institutional heritage may have constrained its political possibilities. Both colonial and post- colonial political institutions were superimposed on a deeply rooted institutional complex that was 1 For present purposes the “Middle East” consists of the 22 members of the Arab League plus Iran and Turkey. 2 On a standardized 0-10 scale (10 best), the population-weighted Freedom House civil liberties score of the Middle East is 4.7, as against 8.6 for the OECD; and the rule of law index of the World Bank is 3.7 for the Middle East, as against 8.0 for the OECD. In both calculations, Turkey is included in the Middle East and excluded from the OECD. 3 Evidence in sect. 12 below. 4 Bohnet, Herrmann, and Zeckhauser 2010. 5 According to the 2012 Corruption Perceptions Index of Transparency International (http://www.transparency.org), the population-weighted average government cleanliness score of the Middle East is 3.0 on a 0-10 scale, as against 6.6 for the OECD, the club of advanced industrial democracies (the latter figure excludes Turkey). 6 Diamond 2010, Sarkissian 2012, and Fish 2002 critique the most influential explanations. 7 Ross 2001 provides evidence that oil wealth hinders democratization. 8 Ismael and Ismael 1997. 9 The most insightful contributions include Yom 2005, Langohr 2004, Bayat 2002, and Wiktorowitz 2000. 10 Bayat 2002, 8. T. Kuran, “Institutional Roots of Authoritarian Rule in Middle East: Political Legacies of the Waqf” (11 December 2013) 2 unsuited to basic human rights and the rule of law. What I shall call the region’s “Islamic institutional complex” has barely been examined from the perspective of its consonance with democratization.11 This article shows how one particular pre-modern Islamic institution, which played an important economic role for a millennium, hindered democratization. This institution is the Islamic waqf, which is called habous in parts of North Africa and bonyad in Iran.12 It is distinct from the modern waqf, which has come on the scene in Turkey and, in a different form, in Iran.13 The Islamic waqf is a foundation established and maintained under pre-modern Islamic law. Within the pre-modern Islamic legal system, it is the closest thing to an autonomous private organization. As such, it might have promoted political participation, collective action by the masses, and political accountability, among other indicators of democratization. It might have generated a vibrant civil society capable of constraining rulers and majorities. Civil society refers to the “arena, outside the family, the state, and the market where people associate to advance common interests.”14 Although political checks and balances can be built into the state itself, as with the tri-partite government of the United States, no known democracy relies solely on a division of powers. As generations of thinkers have recognized, civil society is essential to democratic life. To be sure, the concept has proven difficult to quantify. Observers characterizing Middle Eastern civil society as weak have struggled to establish this claim independently of its purported effect, authoritarian rule. But it is easier to identify and measure certain manifestations of civil society, such as political participation and collective action. Hence, in exploring the waqf’s political effects, it makes sense to ask how it may have shaped social factors with which civil society is typically associated, rather than civil society per se. There is another analytical justification for this strategy. Today’s democratic societies attained their present political characteristics through multiple paths. Beginning their transformations at different times, they also experienced different social cleavages. Their features characteristic of democracyenforced human rights, broad political participation through parties and lobbies, autonomous legislatures and judiciaries, universal suffragedid not develop in lockstep.15 Hence, focusing on the manifestations of civil society allows one to look at the experiences of other regions for hints concerning the Middle East’s political trajectory, and to do so without treating Britain, or France, or the United States as the only model of success. The multiplicity of Western paths suggests that the Middle East could have followed a distinct path, even several paths unique to sub-regions. For all their differences, the European paths to democracy also share some family resemblances. First, they all involved protracted struggles involving perpetual private associations, with setbacks along the way, as impoverished, dominated, and relatively poor groups learned to get organized effectively. Second, all of the paths produced checks and balances of some sort. Thus, investigating the waqf’s political consequences amounts to asking why the Middle Eastern counterpart of European private organizations achieved less political power. A fine-grained 11 The elements of this complex varied across time and space. But from around the tenth century to the reforms of the nineteenth century their core elements remained stable. 12 In English it is sometimes called a pious foundation or an Islamic trust. 13 See sect. 11 below. 14 Heinrich 2010, 12-34. 15 The roles of peasants, cities, and merchants in reining in the monarch all differed across contexts. Although England’s Glorious Revolution (1688) and the French Revolution (1789) both instituted democratic checks and balances, the key coalitions differed substantially. See Ziblatt 2006, Tilly 2005, Anderson 1974, and Moore 1966. T. Kuran, “Institutional Roots of Authoritarian Rule in Middle East: Political Legacies of the Waqf” (11 December 2013) 3 identification of the waqf’s political functions offers two further advantages. It may suggest where a Middle Eastern democratization process might have started. It also helps to identify critical obstacles to democratization in the present. In what follows I argue that the waqf limited democratization through several mutually supportive mechanisms. First of all, by design its use of resources was essentially set by its founder, which limited its capacity to meet new political challenges. Second, in disregarding the preferences of its beneficiaries, it limited political participation. Third, it could not pool resources with other entities, which kept it from joining durable political coalitions. Fourth, it limited political participation further by denying its beneficiaries a say in the selection of officers. A fifth problem is that circumventing stringent waqf rules required a court’s permission; together with the lack of transparency in its activities, this requirement fueled corruption. Finally, the process of appointing successive officials promoted and legitimized nepotism. Thus, for all the resources it controlled, the waqf remained a minor player in Middle Eastern politics. Through the corruption it invited, it hindered rule of law. It contributed, on the one hand, to keeping the Middle Eastern peoples politically docile, ignorant, and quiescent, and, on the other, to routinizing practices lacking legitimacy. As a key component of the institutional complex that kept the state unmonitored and unchecked by civil society, the waqf set the stage for the region’s corrupt authoritarian regimes of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Unrestrained power usually breeds bad governance. Indeed, the legitimacy deficit of incumbent Middle Eastern regimes is a legacy of political patterns rooted in the traditional waqf. In the modern Middle East, the corporation, which is a self-governing organization conducive to politics, has taken over many social functions long performed by the Islamic waqf. Notwithstanding its name that harkens to early Islam, even the modern waqf is a non-profit or charitable corporation. Islamic charities tend to be organized as modern waqfs, rather than as Islamic waqfs. This makes it especially useful, in identifying the Islamic waqf’s political consequences, to keep an eye on corresponding developments in Western Europe, the region where the corporation first contributed to democratization. 2. The Islamic waqf and its economic significance Under classical Islamic law, which took shape between the seventh and tenth centuries, a waqf was a foundation that a Muslim individual established by turning privately held real estate into a revenue-producing endowment. The endowment was to provide a designated service in perpetuity. Ordinarily a judge (kadi) ratified the waqf’s purpose. Along with the assets placed in the endowment, he recorded the founder’s stipulations regarding maintenance and the disposition of income.16 The resulting deed (waqfiyya) was meant to govern the waqf’s operation forever. To ensure its survival and minimize disputes over the founder’s intentions, a major waqf might have its deed carved into the façade of an imposing building.17 It became customary to set a legal precedent for the deed’s immutability by having the founder sue for modifications; the record of the court’s refusal would demonstrate the permanence of his stipulations. The service could be anything legitimate under Islamic law. Thus, waqfs were commonly established to support mosques, schools, fountains, hospitals, soup kitchens, bathhouses, inns, parks, and funerary complexes. Whatever the particular service, the endowment would be expected 16 There existed waqfs founded by an oral declaration before witnesses (Beldiceanu 1965, p. 29). 17 For general accounts of waqf rules and practices, see Barnes 1987, Schoenblum 1999, and Kuran 2001. T. Kuran, “Institutional Roots of Authoritarian Rule in Middle East: Political Legacies of the Waqf” (11 December 2013) 4 to support operational expenses, including repairs and staff salaries.18 Sometimes the deed explicitly named the beneficiaries: a particular family, or the indigents of a particular town, or some neighborhood’s taxpayers. When no beneficiaries were specified, the locational choice might privilege certain communities. The patients of a Damascus hospital would consist disproportionately of Damascenes. Ordinarily the waqf’s income was exempt from taxation, as were its payments to employees and its services.19 Responsibility for managing the waqf’s endowment and implementing its deed fell to a caretaker (mutawalli). The caretaker rented out properties, authorized repairs, hired and supervised employees, and delivered services. He performed these duties as the founder’s agent; expected to adhere to the deed, he was supposed to implement the wishes it expressed. The initial caretaker of a waqf was selected by the founder, who could specify how his successors would be appointed. Sometimes he would name a sequence of individuals. Another common pattern was to reserve the position for a particular office holder, such as the imam of a certain mosque. Some founders simply included the succession decision among the caretaker’s duties. As a rule, the position was a lifetime appointment. When a caretaker died in office without a designated successor, the nearest judge made the new appointment. The local judge played other roles, too. It was among his duties to enforce the deeds of the waqfs that delivered services or held properties in his area.20 In this capacity, he could remove a caretaker for shirking or embezzlement. He thus provided the waqf’s main line of defense against mismanagement. Before modern times, expropriation was common in the Middle East. A waqf enjoyed considerable immunity against confiscation because of the belief that its charitable functions made its assets sacred.21 Sacredness thus served as a credible commitment device. Knowing that a ruler could not confiscate a waqf without appearing impious, people expected him to respect the inalienability of endowed assets. The exceptions generally took place during regime changes or major internal challenges. Rulers would declare a cluster of waqfs invalid, usually on the ground that the founders did not own the endowed assets, as waqf law required. In the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries, waves of confiscations occurred under Mamluk sultans facing an acute military threat; when the Ottoman sultan Mehmet II wiped out Anatolia’s Turcoman aristocracy during a struggle for control over his expanding realms; and when the Ottomans conquered Syria and Egypt. But even these exceptions prove the rule. The Mamluk sultans generally backed down in the face of resistance; the expropriations of Mehmet II sowed enough resentment to make his successor Bayezid II restore some of the destroyed waqfs; and, likewise, Egypt’s Ottoman administrators reversed many of their waqf annulments. On balance, an asset was much less likely to be confiscated if it belonged to a waqf than if it was privately owned.22 18 Certain modest waqfs offered services without any dedicated physical structure. They included those established for paying a neighborhood’s taxes, assisting widows, liberating indebted prisoners, or conducting prayers for the dead. 19 Barnes 1989, 38-40; Leeuwen 1999, 53-54. 20 The geographic contours of a judge’s jurisdiction were not sharply defined. Two or more judges could be involved in monitoring any given waqf. Custom often dictated which court had jurisdiction. 21 The sacredness belief was reinforced through waqf deeds, which typically stated that anyone who harms a waqf will suffer both on earth and in the afterlife (Öztürk 1995, 23). 22 On the three examples, see Oğuzoğlu 2000, 37-38; Winter 1992, 11; Lev 2005, 155; Leeuwen 1999, 88-89, 96; Barnes 1986, 38; Behrens-Abouseif 2002, 64-66; Irwin 1986, 96, 141; and Yediyıldız 1982, 161. T. Kuran, “Institutional Roots of Authoritarian Rule in Middle East: Political Legacies of the Waqf” (11 December 2013) 5 Tax revenue Estimation Source Place Date accruing to Waqf assets method waqfs Aggregation of Three-quarters of Ubicini 1853 Turkey 1800 official opinions, landed property reports Behrens- Ottoman land Abouseif Egypt 1517 Half of land survey 2002 Half of buildings French land Berque 1974 Algiers 1830 in city survey Damascus Deguilhem More than half of Impressions of and 1922 2004 real estate historians environs Barkan and Statistical Anatolia 1530 27% Ayverdi 1970 sampling Yediyıldız 1601- Statistical Anatolia 26.8% 1984 1700 sampling 1801- Statistical Öztürk 1995 Anatolia 15.8% 1900 sampling Table 1. Waqf assets or revenues: Estimates Precisely for this reason, vast resources poured into waqfs. Although no comprehensive data set exists, various indicators testify to their economic significance. First of all, practically every monograph on the socio-economic life of a pre-modern Middle Eastern city or region devotes at least a chapter to local waqfs, invariably establishing that they carried great weight in the local economy. Second, the available estimates of waqf assets and income involve huge figures (Table 1). The three studies using statistical sampling show that the share of tax revenue accruing to Anatolian waqfs was 27 percent in the 1530s, 26.8 percent in the seventeenth century, and 15.8 percent in the nineteenth century.23 The Ottoman treasury received about half of its tax revenue from real estate; poll taxes and opportunistic taxes (avarız) formed the other major categories. Hence, at least until the nineteenth century, which marked the start of fundamental reforms, waqfs received at least half of all revenues from land and buildings. The dip in the nineteenth century (last row) accords with the nationalizations that accompanied the reforms; they are discussed below. A third indicator is that waqf-related cases appear very frequently in court records. Of 9,074 commercial cases in a judicial data base of seventeenth-century Istanbul, 17 percent concerned a waqf matter. By contrast, a state official was involved in just 7.6 percent of the cases.24 Finally, a 23 Barkan and Ayverdi 1970, 17; Yediyıldız 1984, 26; Öztürk 1995, 54. 24 Kuran 2010-13. Pro-state biases of the judges, documented in Kuran and Lustig 2012, may have limited the latter number. T. Kuran, “Institutional Roots of Authoritarian Rule in Middle East: Political Legacies of the Waqf” (11 December 2013) 6 large majority of all surviving Middle Eastern buildings from before the nineteenth century were financed through waqfs. The main exceptions are palaces, fortresses, and harbors. Whatever the spatial variations, waqfs held abundant assets in both cities and the countryside, which made them potentially powerful political players. They might have used their resources to constrain the state on behalf of the beneficiaries they were supposed to serve. In the process, the nucleus of a civil society capable of advancing political objectives might have emerged. The resulting decentralization of power could have placed the Middle East on the road to democratization. To see how, remember that a waqf caretaker’s authority was grounded in the waqf’s deed. Whatever the circumstances of his appointment, he controlled the waqf’s assets and its staff, who served at his discretion. These factors alone made him a respected person.25 In charge of an organization commanding income-producing assets, a waqf caretaker was also the natural leader of the constituency that his waqf served—the teachers and students of a school, the poor who depended on a soup kitchen, or the community living near a particular fountain. With each such constituency, the caretaker provided a focal point for coordinating individual demands. Hence, every waqf constituency formed a community potentially capable of collective action. Insofar as waqf beneficiaries undertook collective action to advance their joint interests, they might have developed the organizational, communicational, and strategic skills to pursue collective action in other contexts and through different groups. Waqfs could have turned the Middle East into a region hospitable to initiatives requiring social organization, in other words, rich in “social capital.”26 Such initiatives could have included campaigns to influence state policies. The political passivity of waqfs is the puzzle at hand. 3. Origins of the waqf’s political features Nothing is certain about the waqf’s origins except that it is not among Islam’s original institutions. The Quran does not mention it, which suggests that it played no significant role in the Arabian society that counted Muhammad among its members.27 Although subsequently recorded remembrances about early Islam (hadīth) mention that Muhammad’s companions formed waqfs, these accounts were probably concocted to legitimize an addition to the Islamic institutional complex.28 Institutions resembling the waqf were present in pre-Islamic civilizations. In the Sassanid and Byzantine empires temples had long been financed through some form of trust.29 In all likelihood, the idea of endowing assets to provide a permanent service was appropriated from these empires during Islam’s expansion into Syria and Iraq. At the death of the caliph Ali in 661 about half of the Byzantine Empire and most Sassanid territories were within the Islamic fold. With conquests continuing, Muslims gained familiarity with Byzantine and Sassanid practices. Their 25 A common theme in historical accounts of Middle Eastern cities involves the esteem enjoyed by waqf caretakers (Behar 2003, 65-83; Leeuwen 1999, ch. 4). In court records waqf caretakers almost always carry an honorific title, which points to the institutionalization of their elevated social status. 26 There is a rich modern literature that treats social capital as a key ingredient of economic development. See, for example, Banfield 1958, ch. 5-8; Coleman 1990, ch. 12; Fukuyama 1995, 3-57; Putnam 1993; and Guiso, Sapienza, and Zingales 2008. On the Middle East specifically, see Jamal 2007, especially ch. 6. 27 Oberauer 2013. 28 Hâtemî 1969, 29-38. During Islam’s first few centuries leading scholars dismissed hundreds of thousands of such recollections as apochryphal, and modern investigators consider most of the remainder fabricated (Brown 2011). 29 Thomas 1987. T. Kuran, “Institutional Roots of Authoritarian Rule in Middle East: Political Legacies of the Waqf” (11 December 2013) 7 administrations started to draw on the talents of bureaucrats who had served other states.30 The year 661 marks also the start of the first Muslim dynasty, the Umayyads, and the shift of the Islamic seat of power from Medina to Damascus. The ensuing decades involved many adaptations and innovations. The Umayyads ruled until 750, when they were overthrown everywhere but in Spain. Power passed to a new dynasty, the Abbasids.31 Two patterns of governance are pertinent here. First, under both dynasties the consolidation of power involved higher taxes on various groups, with exemptions provided to exploit opportunities and accommodate political pressures. Second, the fiscal policies of both regimes bred insecurity among administrative cadres. Although a talented person could prosper by serving an Umayyad or Abbasid caliph, he was always at risk of being fired, expropriated, even executed; a misjudgment or a rumor could make him lose everything suddenly. The resulting insecurity would have fueled a quest for institutions capable of alleviating the risks in question. The debated alternatives are evident in the earliest work aimed at developing a coherent set of waqf rules, al-Khassaf’s Kitāb ahkām al awqāf, published in the ninth century.32 This treatise indicates that the waqf entered the Islamic institutional complex during the Umayyad and early Abbasid eras. We learn also that the principle of freezing the use of waqf assets in perpetuity drew clerical opposition. The rules that emerged from the negotiations were legitimized through late-appearing recollections of Muhammad’s life. Collectively they gave powerful constituencies a stake in the waqf. State officials obtained material security through the right to shelter wealth from unpredictable rulers. Religious officials (ulamā) gained access to substantial rents through their supervisory authority over waqfs. As for rulers, they benefited in various ways. First, officials would serve them more willingly. Second, they themselves would obtain insurance against a palace coup through the ability to shelter wealth for their own families and descendants. Finally, waqf-supplied social services would reflect well on their regimes. The achieved agreement allowed state officials, including the ruler himself, to establish socially beneficial waqfs in return for secure control over their income-producing assets and the right to receive some of the income themselves. From the eighth century onward, some of the largest waqfs were established by members of the ruling family. Known as imperial waqfs, they include the Complex of Sultan Barquq in Cairo (1384) and the Süleymaniye Complex in Istanbul (1557).33 Relatives of a sultan found it advantageous to form imperial waqfs as insurance against loss of intra-dynastic power. The mother of the crown-prince could want an autonomous financial base in case her son died prematurely or was outmaneuvered by a rival claimant. An imperial waqf also provided security against changes in state priorities. By virtue of the sacredness of its assets, a waqf built in the name of Sultan Süleyman II could endure even if his descendants spurned its objectives. No matter how strong or popular, every ruler had to worry about predation by future rulers. Two waqf characteristics, both already mentioned, betray that the benefits of forming a waqf were expected to accrue primarily to high officials and their families. The immovability requirement favored state officials, who were rewarded with land grants for their services. This restriction discriminated against merchants, whose wealth typically consisted of movable goods. 30 Köprülü 1931. Providing a more nuanced interpretation, Yıldırım 1999 shows that in certain respects the waqf and the Byzantine “pious foundation” developed in parallel, influencing one another. 31 Ruling initially from Kufa, the Abbasids then shifted their capital to Baghdad. On the Middle East’s political evolution during this period, see Lapidus 1988, ch. 3-8. Crone 2004, ch. 17-22 surveys the associated evolution of political thought. 32 For an English translation, see Verbit 2008. 33 A waqf complex provided multiple services. Typically it included a mosque, along with several charities. T. Kuran, “Institutional Roots of Authoritarian Rule in Middle East: Political Legacies of the Waqf” (11 December 2013) 8 The requirement that the founder be a Muslim also points to favoritism toward political elites. By birth or conversion most officials were Muslim. In denying non-Muslims the right to shelter wealth, architects of the waqf monopolized the resulting benefits. The rules allowed strategically valuable non-Muslim officials to form a functionally similar organization by special permission. The claim that the waqf was designed to serve primarily landowning Muslim officials conflicts with a huge literature that treats it as an expression of pious charity.34 But it is consistent with the lack of restrictions on non-Muslims with regard to the use of waqf services. Ordinarily Christians and Jews were eligible to drink water from waqf-maintained fountains, stay in waqf- funded inns, and receive treatment in waqf-financed hospitals. True, non-Muslims were unwelcome in mosques, unless they intended to convert; and waqf founders were free to restrict services to Muslims. However, the resulting consumption exclusions reflected separatist biases that infused daily life rather than a requirement intrinsic to the waqf system. A Muslim could legitimately establish a waqf for the benefit of a predominantly Christian or Jewish neighborhood. Also revealing is that religious minorities freely used another Islamic institution that absorbed private capital: the Islamic partnership. Under Islamic law, an Islamic partnership’s capital had to be liquid, and in practice it served short-lived cooperative ventures.35 Hence, it was unsuitable to sheltering wealth. This explains why Christians and Jews, banned from forming waqfs, were given use of Islamic partnership law (Table 2). Various specifics of Islamic law accord, then, with the waqf’s emergence as a device to shelter wealth for high state officials and their families. Although some officials participated in commerce, their wealth was concentrated in real estate. In adapting pre-Islamic models of the trust creatively, they established rules that gave themselves the lion’s share of the gains. There is evidence that they continued to capture the lion’s share of the gains up to the modern era. In the eighteenth century, 42.7 of all Anatolian waqfs were founded by state officials, and an additional 16 percent by religious functionaries who enjoyed similar privileges and were generally allied with the sultan.36 Given that the largest waqfs tended to be formed by officials, the disproportion in question was even greater in relation to control of waqf assets. The Umayyad and Abbasid rulers who consented to the waqf’s inclusion in the Islamic institutional complex must have understood that in sheltering wealth officials would enhance their capacity to challenge the political status quo. They would have had an interest in restricting the uses of waqf assets. The potential for waqf-based opposition was dampened through several rules discussed in sections ahead: the requirement to follow the founder’s instructions, the courts’ duty to monitor waqf operations, and obstacles to waqf mergers. These rules show that in giving high officials considerable material security rulers avoided destabilizing their regimes. It matters that many high officials of Muslim-governed states were foreign-born slaves.37 In privileging officials materially, rulers also retained the ability to fire, persecute, and even execute those who posed a threat. They thus extended the right to shelter assets without giving any official legal immunity. 34 Examples include Lev 2005 and Peri 1992. 35 Kuran 2011, 48-52, 59-68. 36 Yediyıldız 1990, 121-22. 37 Goodwin 1994, Pipes 1981, and Uzunçarşılı 1943. T. Kuran, “Institutional Roots of Authoritarian Rule in Middle East: Political Legacies of the Waqf” (11 December 2013) 9 Islamic waqf Islamic partnership Faith of founder Must be Muslim Unrestricted Type of investment Real estate Currency Table 2. Restrictions on the two main investment instruments of Islamic law This interpretation is consistent with recorded correlations between the “democratic deficit” of the modern Middle East and the diffusion of the Islamic institutional complex. Highlighting the reliance of Muslim sultans on slave armies, Lisa Blaydes and Eric Chaney (2013) find that this pattern of military recruitment caused Middle Eastern rulers to lag behind west European rulers in legitimacy. Extending this argument, Chaney (2012) identifies a positive relationship between the share of a country’s landmass that early Muslim armies conquered and its democratic deficit in the early twenty-first century.38 Insofar as pre-modern military recruitment affected modern politics, the influences would have operated through the entire institutional complex associated with slave armies. As both works underscore, foreign-born slave soldiers had difficulty forming coalitions with disgruntled local groups. However, slave soldiers and their descendants came to control enormous wealth. Besides, the families of slaves often got assimilated into local communities. These two factors would have undermined the objective of keeping officials loyal to the sultan. They would have enabled power centers beyond the ruler’s control. The Blaydes-Chaney observation about the reliance on slave soldiers implies, then, that rulers would have taken measures to keep these soldiers from forming opposition movements. Because of its indefinite life, the most pertinent institution was the waqf. Under the adopted rules, the waqfs of slave soldiers would have kept the ruler’s power unchallenged.39 Islamic legal discourses customarily distinguish between the charitable waqf (waqf khayrī), whose stated objective is to serve a broad constituency such as a neighborhood or the poor, and the family waqf (waqf ahlī), established to provide an income stream to a family. In practice, these legal categories represented the ends of a continuum. Many family waqfs used some of their income to provide a public service. As for charitable waqfs, typically they benefited the founder’s family disproportionately; thus, their caretakers often belonged to the founder’s family.40 For his services a caretaker received a fixed salary, or a proportion of the waqf’s revenue, or its residual revenue after deed-specified expenses had been met; hybrid patterns were not uncommon.41 As Table 3 shows, family waqfs were typically minuscule in terms of assets, which is consistent with the objective of limiting autonomous centers of power. The third canonical category is the imperial 38 Chaney measures democratic deficit according to the polity scores of the Polity IV Project. 39 Another key element of the institutional complex was the bundling political and religious authority; Rubin 2011 and Lewis 1993, ch. 21 explore its implications for political development. Still another consisted of rules that kept private businesses atomistic; Kuran 2013 links them to the region’s political trajectory. 40 Local social norms determined the dividing lines between family waqfs and charitable waqfs. 41 For deeds involving a fixed salary, see, in Kuran 2010-13, Istanbul 3 (1618), 31b/4, 85b/1, 62a/2; Istanbul 9 (1662), 167b/1; and for a stipulation of residual income, Galata 41 (1617), 36b/3. Baer 1969, 80, refers to salaries proportional to the endowment. For examples of all payment patterns, see Öcalan, Sevim, and Yavaş, editors, 2013 (fixed 361; proportional 190, 378, 388, 415, 556; residual 397, 550; hybrid 455, 479).