Timur Kuran
Biographic Data
| ID | 112902 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Timur Kuran |
| GIVEN NAMES | Timur |
| FAMILY NAME | Kuran |
| SIGNATURE | KURAN T |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Southern California |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3006-4983 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 42 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1198 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 41 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1986 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
Freedoms Delayed: Political Legacies of Islamic Law in the Middle East
Zakat: Islam’s missed opportunity to limit predatory taxation
The Financial Power of the Powerless: Socio‐Economic Status and Interest Rates Under Partial Rule of Law
In advanced economies interest rates vary inversely with the risk of default, which itself is negatively related to the borrower’s socio‐economic status. The former relationship depends on the impartiality of the law. Where the law is markedly biased in favour of certain groups, these groups will pay a surcharge for capital. Legal power, as measured by privileges before the law, thus undermines financial power, the capacity to borrow cheaply. Dev…
Institutions and Comparative Economic Development
Legal Roots of Authoritarian Rule in the Middle East: Civic Legacies of the Islamic Waqf
In the legal system of the premodern Middle East, the closest thing to an autonomous private organization was the Islamic waqf. This non-state institution inhibited political participation, collective action, and rule of law, among other indicators of democratization. It did so through several mechanisms. Its activities were essentially set by its founder, which limited its capacity to meet political challenges. Being designed to provide a servic…
The political consequences of Islam’s economic legacy
Several of the Middle East’s traditional economic institutions hampered its political development by limiting checks on executive power, preventing the formation of organized and durable opposition movements, and keeping civil society weak. They include Islam’s original tax system, which failed to protect property rights; the waqf, whose rigidity hampered the development of civil society; and private commercial enterprises, whose small scales and…
Economic Modernization in Late British India: Hindu-Muslim Differences
In South Asia, Muslims made the transition to modern economic life more slowly than Hindus. In the first half of the twentieth century, they were less likely to use large-scale and perpetual commercial organizations and less likely to serve on corporate boards. Providing evidence, this article also explores the institutional roots of the difference in communal trajectories. Whereas Hindu inheritance practices favored capital accumulation within f…
Judicial Biases in Ottoman Istanbul: Islamic Justice and Its Compatibility with Modern Economic Life
The transition to impersonal exchange and modern economic growth has depended on courts that enforce contracts efficiently. This article shows that Islamic courts of the Ottoman Empire exhibited biases that would have limited the expansion of trade in the eastern Mediterranean, particularly that between Muslims and non-Muslims. It thus explains why economic modernization in the Middle East involved the establishment of secular courts. In quantify…
Institutions and patterns of economic development
Synergies between Middle Eastern Economic History and the Analytic Social Sciences
Over the past half century, the scholarly literature on Middle Eastern economic history has grown substantially. By mining the surviving records of states and towns, scholars steeped in the region's languages have produced detailed studies of waqfs, guilds, taxation, government expenditures, monetary trends, production, land use, charity, and court systems, among many other topics. In carrying out their work, Middle Eastern historians can now dra…
Islam and Mammon: The Economic Predicaments of Islamism
Revue des revues
partie, sous quelque forme et de quelque manire que ce soit, est interdite sauf accord pralable et crit de l'diteur, en dehors des cas prvus par la lgislation en vigueur en France. Il est prcis que son stockage dans une base de donnes est galement interdit
Sous-développement économique au Moyen-Orient: Le rôle historique de la culture, des institutions et de la religion
Les différences de niveau de développement à travers le monde peuvent-elles être expliquées par des facteurs institutionnels ou culturels ? Selon Timur Kuran, le retard de développement des pays du Moyen-Orient trouve son explication dans des facteurs structurels qui tiennent aux institutions islamiques plus qu’à la culture islamique. Les attitudes et les comportements classiquement attribués à la culture islamique n’en sont en réalité que l’expr…
Sex Differences in the Acceptability of Discrimination
A large telephone survey conducted after the attacks of September 11, 2001, suggests that the willingness to tolerate discrimination varies significantly across domains, with a very high tolerance of discrimination against poorly educated immigrants and a strikingly low tolerance of discrimination against the genetically disadvantaged. Regardless of domain, tolerance is greater among men than among women. A survey conducted simultaneously over th…
The Absence of the Corporation in Islamic Law: Origins and Persistence
Classical Islamic law recognizes only natural persons; it does not grant standing to corporations. This article explores why Islamic law did not develop a concept akin to the corporation, or borrow one from another legal system. It also identifies processes that delayed the diffusion of the corporation to the Middle East even as its role in the global economy expanded. Community building was central to Islam's mission, so early Muslim jurists had…
Expanding Discrimination Research: Beyond Ethnicity and to the Web
Objective. This article aims to expand research about perceptions of discrimination both substantively and methodologically beyond the domains of race and ethnicity, relying partly on web‐based surveys. Methods. We conducted parallel surveys over the telephone and the World‐Wide Web, using standard random‐digit dial (RDD) techniques for the former, and a large volunteer panel for the latter. Results. Both modes, phone and web, revealed that respo…
Islam and Mammon: The Economic Predicaments of Islamism
Why the Middle East is Economically Underdeveloped: Historical Mechanisms of Institutional Stagnation
Although a millennium ago the Middle East was not an economic laggard, by the 18th century it exhibited clear signs of economic backwardness. The reason for this transformation is that certain components of the region's legal infrastructure stagnated as their Western counterparts gave way to the modern economy. Among the institutions that generated evolutionary bottlenecks are the Islamic law of inheritance, which inhibited capital accumulation; …
The Islamic Commercial Crisis: Institutional Roots of Economic Underdevelopment in the Middle East
During the second millennium, the Middle East's commerce with Western Europe fell increasingly under European domination. Two factors played critical roles. First, the Islamic inheritance system, by raising the costs of dissolving a partnership following a partner's death, kept Middle Eastern commercial enterprises small and ephemeral. Second, certain European inheritance systems facilitated large and durable partnerships by reducing the likeliho…
Aptullah Kuran
of Ottoman architecture and founding president of
The Provision of Public Goods under Islamic Law: Origins, Impact, and Limitations of the Waqf System
The Islamic waqf appears to have emerged as a credible commitment device to give property owners economic security in return for social services. Throughout the Middle East, it long served as a major instrument for delivering public goods in a decentralized manner. In principle, the manager of a waqf had to obey the stipulations of its founder to the letter. In practice, the founder's directives were often circumvented. An unintended consequence …
Speculations on Islamic Financial Alternatives
Availability Cascades and Risk Regulation
An availability cascade is a self-reinforcing process of collective belief formation by which an expressed perception triggers a chain reaction that gives the perception increasing plausibility through its rising availability in public discourse. The driving mechanism involves a combination of informational and reputational motives: Individuals endorse the perception partly by learning from the apparent beliefs of others and partly by distorting …
The International Spread of Ethnic Conflict: Fear, Diffusion, and Escalation
Ethnic Norms And Their Transformation Through Reputational Cascades
Ethnic norms are the ethnically symbolic behavioral codes that individuals must follow to retain social acceptance. They are sustained partly by sanctions that individuals impose on each other in trying to establish good credentials. This essay analyzes the “ethnification” process through which ethnic norms become more demanding. The argument hinges on interdependencies among individual behaviors. These allow one person's adjustments to trigger a…
Now out of Never: The Element of Surprise in the East European Revolution of 1989
Like many major revolutions in history, the East European Revolution of 1989 caught its leaders, participants, victims, and observers by surprise. This paper offers an explanation whose crucial feature is a distinction between private and public preferences. By suppressing their antipathies to the political status quo, the East Europeans misled everyone, including themselves, as to the possibility of a successful uprising. In effect, they conferr…
Sparks and prairie fires: A theory of unanticipated political revolution
Private Truths, Public Lies
The Inevitability of Future Revolutionary Surprises
Although social scientists have written extensively on revolutions, none of their theories has shown much predictive success in practice. Recent revolutions surprised social scientists as much as anyone else. This article proposes that revolutionary surprises will occur repeatedly, although it is possible to identify countries relatively likely to experience a sudden explosion. The argument hinges on preference falsification-the act of misreprese…
Why the Middle East is Economically Underdeveloped: Historical Mechanisms of Institutional Stagnation
Although a millennium ago the Middle East was not an economic laggard, by the 18th century it exhibited clear signs of economic backwardness. The reason for this transformation is that certain components of the region's legal infrastructure stagnated as their Western counterparts gave way to the modern economy. Among the institutions that generated evolutionary bottlenecks are the Islamic law of inheritance, which inhibited capital accumulation; …
Preference Falsification, Policy Continuity and Collective Conservatism
Journal Article Preference Falsification, Policy Continuity and Collective Conservatism Get access Timur Kuran Timur Kuran University of Southern California Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Economic Journal, Volume 97, Issue 387, 1 September 1987, Pages 642–665, https://doi.org/10.2307/2232928 Published: 01 September 1987
The Provision of Public Goods under Islamic Law: Origins, Impact, and Limitations of the Waqf System
The Islamic waqf appears to have emerged as a credible commitment device to give property owners economic security in return for social services. Throughout the Middle East, it long served as a major instrument for delivering public goods in a decentralized manner. In principle, the manager of a waqf had to obey the stipulations of its founder to the letter. In practice, the founder's directives were often circumvented. An unintended consequence …
Availability Cascades and Risk Regulation
An availability cascade is a self-reinforcing process of collective belief formation by which an expressed perception triggers a chain reaction that gives the perception increasing plausibility through its rising availability in public discourse. The driving mechanism involves a combination of informational and reputational motives: Individuals endorse the perception partly by learning from the apparent beliefs of others and partly by distorting …
The Absence of the Corporation in Islamic Law: Origins and Persistence
Classical Islamic law recognizes only natural persons; it does not grant standing to corporations. This article explores why Islamic law did not develop a concept akin to the corporation, or borrow one from another legal system. It also identifies processes that delayed the diffusion of the corporation to the Middle East even as its role in the global economy expanded. Community building was central to Islam's mission, so early Muslim jurists had…
Sex Differences in the Acceptability of Discrimination
A large telephone survey conducted after the attacks of September 11, 2001, suggests that the willingness to tolerate discrimination varies significantly across domains, with a very high tolerance of discrimination against poorly educated immigrants and a strikingly low tolerance of discrimination against the genetically disadvantaged. Regardless of domain, tolerance is greater among men than among women. A survey conducted simultaneously over th…
The Economic System in Contemporary Islamic Thought: Interpretation and Assessment
Since the late 1940s, and especially since the mid-1960s, a wealth of pamphlets, articles, and books have appeared that constitute the corpus of what is now known as “Islamic economics.” This literature, whose exponents call themselves “Islamic economists,” purports to provide the blueprint of an economic system consonant with the original sources of Islam. The central feature of the proposed system is that individuals are guided in their economi…
Islamic Economics and the Islamic Subeconomy
Although Islamic economics was developed to serve cultural and political ends, efforts have been made to put its ideals into practice. There now exist Islamic banks, which claim to offer an interest-free alternative to conventional banking, and government-run Islamic redistribution systems, which were established to reduce inequalities. These institutions have not revolutionized the economic lives of Muslims. Yet, along with a wide variety of ent…
The Islamic Commercial Crisis: Institutional Roots of Economic Underdevelopment in the Middle East
During the second millennium, the Middle East's commerce with Western Europe fell increasingly under European domination. Two factors played critical roles. First, the Islamic inheritance system, by raising the costs of dissolving a partnership following a partner's death, kept Middle Eastern commercial enterprises small and ephemeral. Second, certain European inheritance systems facilitated large and durable partnerships by reducing the likeliho…
On the Notion of Economic Justice in Contemporary Islamic Thought
In the massive contemporary literature that has come to be known as “Islamic economics,” 1 the claim is repeatedly made that an Islamic economic system would achieve a greater degree of economic justice than existing capitalist and socialist systems. An Islamic system, it is said, would be free, on the one hand, of the exploitation and severe inequalities that characterize capitalism, and on the other, of the class struggles and intolerable restr…
Insincere deliberation and democratic failure
An enduring challenge of democracy is to give citizens an effective say in collective decision making by ensuring broad participation in political discourse. Deliberative opinion polling aims to meet this challenge by providing new opportunities for ordinary citizens to form educated opinions. This approach to broadening deliberation does not aim to control substantive outcomes, unlike conceptions of deliberative democracy that promote improved d…
Chameleon voters and public choice
Legal Roots of Authoritarian Rule in the Middle East: Civic Legacies of the Islamic Waqf
In the legal system of the premodern Middle East, the closest thing to an autonomous private organization was the Islamic waqf. This non-state institution inhibited political participation, collective action, and rule of law, among other indicators of democratization. It did so through several mechanisms. Its activities were essentially set by its founder, which limited its capacity to meet political challenges. Being designed to provide a servic…
The Financial Power of the Powerless: Socio‐Economic Status and Interest Rates Under Partial Rule of Law
In advanced economies interest rates vary inversely with the risk of default, which itself is negatively related to the borrower’s socio‐economic status. The former relationship depends on the impartiality of the law. Where the law is markedly biased in favour of certain groups, these groups will pay a surcharge for capital. Legal power, as measured by privileges before the law, thus undermines financial power, the capacity to borrow cheaply. Dev…
Economic Modernization in Late British India: Hindu-Muslim Differences
In South Asia, Muslims made the transition to modern economic life more slowly than Hindus. In the first half of the twentieth century, they were less likely to use large-scale and perpetual commercial organizations and less likely to serve on corporate boards. Providing evidence, this article also explores the institutional roots of the difference in communal trajectories. Whereas Hindu inheritance practices favored capital accumulation within f…
Islam and Mammon: The Economic Predicaments of Islamism
Zakat: Islam’s missed opportunity to limit predatory taxation
The political consequences of Islam’s economic legacy
Several of the Middle East’s traditional economic institutions hampered its political development by limiting checks on executive power, preventing the formation of organized and durable opposition movements, and keeping civil society weak. They include Islam’s original tax system, which failed to protect property rights; the waqf, whose rigidity hampered the development of civil society; and private commercial enterprises, whose small scales and…
Expanding Discrimination Research: Beyond Ethnicity and to the Web
Objective. This article aims to expand research about perceptions of discrimination both substantively and methodologically beyond the domains of race and ethnicity, relying partly on web‐based surveys. Methods. We conducted parallel surveys over the telephone and the World‐Wide Web, using standard random‐digit dial (RDD) techniques for the former, and a large volunteer panel for the latter. Results. Both modes, phone and web, revealed that respo…
The Unthinkable and the Unthought
When people misrepresent their beliefs in response to social pressures, public discourse gets impoverished. Because public discourse is a basic determinant of individual perceptions and understandings, a by-product is the distortion of private knowledge. This article highlights a tendency for beliefs treated as unthinkable to disappear from society's repertoire of ideas, that is, to become unthought. Two mechanisms are identified as the vehicles …
Mitigating the tyranny of public opinion: Anonymous discourse and the ethic of sincerity
The Economic System in Contemporary Islamic Thought: Interpretation and Assessment
Since the late 1940s, and especially since the mid-1960s, a wealth of pamphlets, articles, and books have appeared that constitute the corpus of what is now known as “Islamic economics.” This literature, whose exponents call themselves “Islamic economists,” purports to provide the blueprint of an economic system consonant with the original sources of Islam. The central feature of the proposed system is that individuals are guided in their economi…
Chameleon voters and public choice
Preference Falsification, Policy Continuity and Collective Conservatism
Journal Article Preference Falsification, Policy Continuity and Collective Conservatism Get access Timur Kuran Timur Kuran University of Southern California Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Economic Journal, Volume 97, Issue 387, 1 September 1987, Pages 642–665, https://doi.org/10.2307/2232928 Published: 01 September 1987
Sparks and prairie fires: A theory of unanticipated political revolution
On the Notion of Economic Justice in Contemporary Islamic Thought
In the massive contemporary literature that has come to be known as “Islamic economics,” 1 the claim is repeatedly made that an Islamic economic system would achieve a greater degree of economic justice than existing capitalist and socialist systems. An Islamic system, it is said, would be free, on the one hand, of the exploitation and severe inequalities that characterize capitalism, and on the other, of the class struggles and intolerable restr…
A Reply to Muhammad Khan
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Now out of Never: The Element of Surprise in the East European Revolution of 1989
Like many major revolutions in history, the East European Revolution of 1989 caught its leaders, participants, victims, and observers by surprise. This paper offers an explanation whose crucial feature is a distinction between private and public preferences. By suppressing their antipathies to the political status quo, the East Europeans misled everyone, including themselves, as to the possibility of a successful uprising. In effect, they conferr…
Explanatory Success Does Not Imply Predictive Power
Mitigating the tyranny of public opinion: Anonymous discourse and the ethic of sincerity
The Unthinkable and the Unthought
When people misrepresent their beliefs in response to social pressures, public discourse gets impoverished. Because public discourse is a basic determinant of individual perceptions and understandings, a by-product is the distortion of private knowledge. This article highlights a tendency for beliefs treated as unthinkable to disappear from society's repertoire of ideas, that is, to become unthought. Two mechanisms are identified as the vehicles …
Seeds of racial explosion
Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification
Islamic Economics and the Islamic Subeconomy
Although Islamic economics was developed to serve cultural and political ends, efforts have been made to put its ideals into practice. There now exist Islamic banks, which claim to offer an interest-free alternative to conventional banking, and government-run Islamic redistribution systems, which were established to reduce inequalities. These institutions have not revolutionized the economic lives of Muslims. Yet, along with a wide variety of ent…
The Inevitability of Future Revolutionary Surprises
Although social scientists have written extensively on revolutions, none of their theories has shown much predictive success in practice. Recent revolutions surprised social scientists as much as anyone else. This article proposes that revolutionary surprises will occur repeatedly, although it is possible to identify countries relatively likely to experience a sudden explosion. The argument hinges on preference falsification-the act of misreprese…
Leben in Lüge: Präferenzverfälschungen und ihre gesellschaftlichen Folgen
Leben in Lüge. Präferenzverfälschungen und ihre gesellschaftlichen Folgen
The International Spread of Ethnic Conflict: Fear, Diffusion, and Escalation
Ethnic Norms And Their Transformation Through Reputational Cascades
Ethnic norms are the ethnically symbolic behavioral codes that individuals must follow to retain social acceptance. They are sustained partly by sanctions that individuals impose on each other in trying to establish good credentials. This essay analyzes the “ethnification” process through which ethnic norms become more demanding. The argument hinges on interdependencies among individual behaviors. These allow one person's adjustments to trigger a…
Private Truths, Public Lies
Insincere deliberation and democratic failure
An enduring challenge of democracy is to give citizens an effective say in collective decision making by ensuring broad participation in political discourse. Deliberative opinion polling aims to meet this challenge by providing new opportunities for ordinary citizens to form educated opinions. This approach to broadening deliberation does not aim to control substantive outcomes, unlike conceptions of deliberative democracy that promote improved d…
Availability Cascades and Risk Regulation
An availability cascade is a self-reinforcing process of collective belief formation by which an expressed perception triggers a chain reaction that gives the perception increasing plausibility through its rising availability in public discourse. The driving mechanism involves a combination of informational and reputational motives: Individuals endorse the perception partly by learning from the apparent beliefs of others and partly by distorting …
The Provision of Public Goods under Islamic Law: Origins, Impact, and Limitations of the Waqf System
The Islamic waqf appears to have emerged as a credible commitment device to give property owners economic security in return for social services. Throughout the Middle East, it long served as a major instrument for delivering public goods in a decentralized manner. In principle, the manager of a waqf had to obey the stipulations of its founder to the letter. In practice, the founder's directives were often circumvented. An unintended consequence …
Speculations on Islamic Financial Alternatives
Aptullah Kuran
of Ottoman architecture and founding president of
The Islamic Commercial Crisis: Institutional Roots of Economic Underdevelopment in the Middle East
During the second millennium, the Middle East's commerce with Western Europe fell increasingly under European domination. Two factors played critical roles. First, the Islamic inheritance system, by raising the costs of dissolving a partnership following a partner's death, kept Middle Eastern commercial enterprises small and ephemeral. Second, certain European inheritance systems facilitated large and durable partnerships by reducing the likeliho…
Expanding Discrimination Research: Beyond Ethnicity and to the Web
Objective. This article aims to expand research about perceptions of discrimination both substantively and methodologically beyond the domains of race and ethnicity, relying partly on web‐based surveys. Methods. We conducted parallel surveys over the telephone and the World‐Wide Web, using standard random‐digit dial (RDD) techniques for the former, and a large volunteer panel for the latter. Results. Both modes, phone and web, revealed that respo…
Political science (32 works) · Economics (23 works) · Law (22 works) · Islamic Finance and Banking Studies (17 works) · Sociology (16 works) · Islam (15 works) · Islamic Studies and History (14 works) · Law (13 works) · Politics (13 works) · Geography (11 works)