Timur Kuran is a
Turkish-American economist and political scientist, Professor of Economics and Political Science, and Gorter Family Professor of Islamic Studies at
Duke University. His work spans economics, political science, history, and law.
Early life and education
Kuran was born in New York City in 1954, where his parents were graduate students at
Yale University
Yale University is a Private university, private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the List of Colonial Colleges, third-oldest institution of higher education in the United Sta ...
. They returned to Turkey, and he spent his early childhood in Ankara, where his father,
Aptullah Kuran, taught at
Middle East Technical University. The family moved to Istanbul in 1969, when the senior Kuran joined the faculty of
Robert College, whose higher education side became
Boğaziçi University in 1971.
Kuran obtained his secondary education in Istanbul, graduating from
Robert College in 1973. He went on to study economics at Princeton University, graduating magna cum laude in 1977.
He obtained his doctorate at Stanford University, under the supervision of
Kenneth Arrow
Kenneth Joseph Arrow (23 August 1921 – 21 February 2017) was an American economist, mathematician, writer, and political theorist. He was the joint winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with John Hicks in 1972.
In economics ...
.
Career
Kuran taught at
University of Southern California
, mottoeng = "Let whoever earns the palm bear it"
, religious_affiliation = Nonsectarian—historically Methodist
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, accreditation = WSCUC
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between 1982 and 2007, where he held the King Faisal professorship in Islamic Thought and Culture from 1993 onwards. He moved to Duke University in 2007, as Gorter Family Professor of Islamic Studies and with a joint appointment in the departments of Economics and Political Science.
Kuran’s visiting positions include:
Institute for Advanced Study
The Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), located in Princeton, New Jersey, in the United States, is an independent center for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry. It has served as the academic home of internationally preeminent schola ...
(1989-90), Graduate School of Business,
University of Chicago
The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, U of C, or UChi) is a private university, private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its main campus is located in Chicago's Hyde Park, Chicago, Hyde Park neighborhood. The University of Chic ...
; (1996-1997), Economics Department,
Stanford University (2004-2005), Law School,
Yale University
Yale University is a Private university, private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the List of Colonial Colleges, third-oldest institution of higher education in the United Sta ...
(2020).
From 2008 to 2014 Kuran served on the Executive Committee of the
International Economic Association
The International Economic Association (IEA) is an NGO established in 1950, at the instigation of the Social Sciences Department of UNESCO. To date, the IEA still shares information and maintains consultative relations with UNESCO. In 1973 the IE ...
. He is a founding member of the Association for Analytic Learning about Islam and Muslim Societies
AALIMS, which he has directed since its establishment in 2011.
Kuran was the founding editor of the University of Michigan Press book series �
Economics, Cognition, and Society�� (1989-2006). Since 2009, he been co-editor of the Cambridge University Press series �
Cambridge Studies in Economics, Choice, and Society” which he co-founded with
Peter Boettke. He has co-edited the
Journal of Comparative Economics since 2017.
Kuran is a promoter of freedom of expression, within and outside academia. In 2021, he became a co-founding member of the
Academic Freedom Alliance (AFA). In 2022, he joined the Advisory Council of the
Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE).
Research
Four themes stand out in Timur Kuran’s works: preference falsification, the roles of Islamic institutions in the economic performance of the Middle East, the economic agenda of contemporary Islamism, and the political legacies of Islamic institutions in the Middle East. The last three themes benefit from his passion for collecting Ottoman and Turkish documents.
Preference falsification
Kuran coined the term
preference falsification Preference falsification is the act of misrepresenting a preference under perceived public pressures. It involves the selection of a publicly expressed preference that differs from the underlying privately held preference (or simply, a public prefer ...
in a 1987 article to describe the act of misrepresenting one’s wants under perceived social pressures. It involves tailoring one’s expressed preferences to what appears socially acceptable or politically advantageous. His subsequent works argue that the phenomenon is ubiquitous and that it can have huge social, political, and economic consequences. The effects hinge on interdependencies between the personal preferences that individuals choose to express publicly. A broad statement of his argument is in
Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification'' This 1995 book explains how preference falsification shapes collective decisions, orients structural change, distorts human knowledge, and conceals political possibilities.
An April 1989 article by Kuran, “Sparks and prairie fires: A theory of unanticipated political revolution,” presented the
French Revolution
The French Revolution ( ) was a period of radical political and societal change in France that began with the Estates General of 1789 and ended with the formation of the French Consulate in coup of 18 Brumaire, November 1799. Many of its ...
(1789), the
Russian Revolution (1917), and the
Iranian Revolution
The Iranian Revolution ( fa, انقلاب ایران, Enqelâb-e Irân, ), also known as the Islamic Revolution ( fa, انقلاب اسلامی, Enqelâb-e Eslâmī), was a series of events that culminated in the overthrow of the Pahlavi dyna ...
(1979) as examples of events that stunned the world; and it explained how preference falsification, combined with interdependencies among publicly expressed preferences, keeps us from anticipating political earthquakes that are easily explained in retrospect. After the
East European Revolutions of late 1989, Kuran explained why seasoned experts of the
Communist Bloc were caught off guard in “Now Out of Never: The Element of Surprise in the East European Revolution of 1989.” These papers and ''Private Truths, Public Lies'' suggest that political revolutions and big shifts in
public opinion
Public opinion is the collective opinion on a specific topic or voting intention relevant to a society. It is the people's views on matters affecting them.
Etymology
The term "public opinion" was derived from the French ', which was first use ...
will surprise the world repeatedly, because of people’s readiness, under perceived social pressures, to conceal their political dispositions.
Kuran has used his theory to shed light on the persistence of
East European communism despite its inefficiencies, why India’s
caste system has remained a powerful institution for millennia, transformations of
American race relations, the aggravation of
ethnic conflicts through a self-reinforcing process whereby ethnic symbols gain salience and practical significance, (with
Cass Sunstein) the eruption of mass hysteria over minor risks, and American polarization.
Islam and economic performance of the Middle East
In the mid-1990s, Kuran started exploring the drivers of the Middle East’s economic trajectory from the
birth of Islam to the present. His focus has been on the roles of
Islamic law (Sharia) in shaping economic opportunities.
During Islam’s early centuries, Kuran observes, the economic content of Islamic law was well-suited to global economic conditions. As such, the Middle East was an economically advanced region. Subsequently, it failed to match the institutional transformation through which Western Europe vastly increased its capacity to pool resources, coordinate production, and conduct trade. Although the Middle East’s economic institutions never froze, in certain areas central to economic modernization changes were minimal until the 1800s, at least in relation to structural transformations in the West.
''The'' ''Long Divergence: How Islamic Law Held Back the Middle East''is Kuran’s broadest account of this thesis. There, he suggests that several elements of Islamic law helped to turn the Middle East into an economic laggard. Because of its egalitarian character, the
Islamic law of inheritance inhibited capital accumulation, and it curtailed needs for organizational innovations to scale up the pooling of capital and labor. The lack of an Islamic concept of
corporation
A corporation is an organization—usually a group of people or a company—authorized by the state to act as a single entity (a legal entity recognized by private and public law "born out of statute"; a legal person in legal context) and ...
also hindered organizational development; in addition, it kept entrepreneurs politically weak. The
waqf, Islam’s distinct form of trust, locked vast resources into organizations prone to becoming dysfunctional.
None of these institutions were disadvantageous at their emergence, suggests Kuran; they solved identifiable problems. None caused an absolute decline in economic activity. Each became a handicap by perpetuating itself during the millennium when Western Europe spearheaded economic modernization.
A popular argument is that Islam fosters a conservative ethos that promotes resistance to adaptation. Had conservatism per se made the Middle East fall behind, Kuran says, adjustments would have lagged across the board. But even as institutions of the private economy stalled, military and taxation systems were reformed repeatedly. That commercial and financial organizations were not scaled up points to an institutional trap, not conservative attitudes. Inefficient institutions perpetuated themselves as their interactions dampened incentives to innovate. When in the 1800s the
rise of the West created an existential threat, institutional transplants followed. The borrowed institutions perform functions long met through Islamic institutions.
The Islamic institutions that delayed the Middle East’s economic modernization no longer block economic development directly, claims Kuran. But patterns they fostered, including low trust in institutions, rampant corruption, and widespread nepotism, are impeding the region’s catch-up.
Kuran’s research on the Middle East’s economic history draws on data collected from Istanbul’s Islamic court archives. His data from the 1600s has been published as a ten-volume bilingual set.
The functions of Islamic economics
Kuran’s research agenda has included exploring the origins, logic, and initiatives of
Islamic economics
Islamic economics ( ar, الاقتصاد الإسلامي) refers to the knowledge of economics or economic activities and processes in terms of Islamic principles and teachings. Islam has a set of special moral norms and values about individua ...
, a doctrine that claims to offer an alternative to
capitalism
Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit. Central characteristics of capitalism include capital accumulation, competitive markets, price system, priva ...
and
socialism
Socialism is a left-wing Economic ideology, economic philosophy and Political movement, movement encompassing a range of economic systems characterized by the dominance of social ownership of the means of production as opposed to Private prop ...
. Its initiatives include the establishment of
Islamic financial institutions meant to avoid interest. It also promotes Islamic behavioral norms and has founded anti-poverty systems inspired by
zakat
Zakat ( ar, زكاة; , "that which purifies", also Zakat al-mal , "zakat on wealth", or Zakah) is a form of almsgiving, often collected by the Muslim Ummah. It is considered in Islam as a religious obligation, and by Quranic ranking, is ...
practices in seventh-century Arabia, in Islam’s earliest decades.
Timur Kuran argues that the doctrine of Islamic economics is incoherent and largely irrelevant to present challenges. Its practical applications have had no discernible effects on efficiency, trust, or poverty reduction. Its real purpose has not been economic improvement but the cultivation of a distinct Islamic identity. It has served global
Islamism (known also as Islamic fundamentalism) by fueling the illusion that modern Muslim societies can live by economic rules based on Islam.
A comprehensive statement of Kuran’s analysis and interpretation of Islamic economics is
Islam and Mammon: The Economic Predicaments of Islamism'. Islamic financial firms deal in interest routinely, he argues there, through ruses that make interest appear as a return to risk. Their operations do not differ, except symbolically, from those of conventional financial firms with which they compete. He also observes that modern zakat systems shuffle resources within the middle class or redistribute from poor to rich. Finally, he points to the lack of evidence that Islamic economics has improved trust or trustworthiness.
Following
Fazlur Rahman, Kuran argues that Islamic economics misunderstands the original functions of Quran-based Islamic institutions.
Kuran has written on the Islamic controversy over the permissibility of interest; the origins, historical functions, and modern variants of zakat; and Islamic credit cards.
Islam and political performance of the Middle East
With a focus on the Middle East’s institutional history, Kuran has explored why its modern states tend to be governed autocratically and why the region fares poorly in global indices of freedom. He proposes that three Islamic institutions played critical roles. Though designed to bind the state, Islam’s original tax system was sidelined within a couple of generations. This Islamic waqf (as opposed to the modern waqf, which is a corporation) kept civic life anemic by restricting political participation and hindering collective action from below. And private commercial enterprises remained small and ephemeral, hindering the formation of stable coalitions capable of bargaining with the state.
Ottoman and Turkish documents
In his childhood and early adulthood, Timur Kuran collected postal stamps. As his academic career began and research foci changed, his collecting interests turned to poorly studied areas: (1) Ottoman and Turkish
postal history and
postal stationery
A piece of postal stationery is a stationery item, such as a stamped envelope, letter sheet, postal card, lettercard, aerogram or wrapper, with an imprinted stamp or inscription indicating that a specific rate of postage or related serv ...
; (2) Ottoman and Turkish
revenue stamps; and, increasingly, (3) Ottoman and Turkish documents, with an emphasis on evidence relating to the modernization of economic and civic life.
In the third category, his major collections are on the following topics: official revenue stamps and their usages; Ottoman occupations; foreign occupations of Ottoman territories; private and semi-official social assistance; printing, the press, and publishing; banking and insurance; political organizations; education; and lotteries. These collections are furnishing data to Kuran’s ongoing academic research on Ottoman and Turkish modernization from the late 1700s.
He has co-authored, with Mehmet Akan, volume 1 of an intended bilingual trilogy on the microhistory of the Turkish postal system.
References
External links
Timur Kuran's website at Duke
{{DEFAULTSORT:Kuran, Timur
1954 births
Living people
American people of Turkish descent
20th-century American economists
American political scientists
American Islamic studies scholars
Duke University faculty
Scholars of Islamic jurisprudence
University of Southern California faculty
21st-century American economists
Economists from New York (state)
People from New York City
Princeton University alumni
Stanford University alumni
Robert College alumni
Political economists
Turkish philatelists
Historians of the Middle East
Historians of Islam
Historians of Turkey
Scholars of Ottoman history