Timur Kuran has spent much of the last decade investigating the economic and institutional development of the Middle East. The Long Divergence: How Islamic Law Held Back the Middle East brings the results of this research together to provide an explanation for the decline in the region’s economic fortunes. Although generations of scholars have sought to understand the Middle East’s economic dec...

This paper investigates the ways in which terrorism is linked to education and poverty using data newly culled from Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) documentary sources. The paper presents a statistical analysis of the determinants of participation in terrorist activities by members of the Hamas and PIJ between the late 1980s and May 2002. The resulting evidence suggests that both high...

Since at least the sixteenth century, the areas of the present day regions of Harar and Wallo have been important centres of teaching and diffusion of Islam as well as of preservation of Islamic culture and education. Preachers and scholars from these areas played a decisive role in the introduction and dissemination of the faith in the country, especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centu...

Postmortem examinations have recently become common practice in Western medicine: they are used to verify the cause of death and to obtain additional scientific information on certain diseases, as well as to train medical students. For religious people of the monotheistic faiths postmortems present several ethical questions even though the advantages attributed to postmortems in the West are al...

The MULINEM (The Medieval Urban Landscape in Northeastern Mesopotamia) project is aiming to investigate a Late Sasanian and Islamic urban network in the land of Erbil, historic province of Hidyab (Adiabene) that is located in the northern Iraq. The research of the hierarchical urban network in a defined area belongs to approaches rarely used in the study of the Islamic urbanism. The project foc...

Islamic medicine is regarded as a comprehensive medical school with a long, glorious and worldwide reputation. Some of the physicians of this school are famous worldwide and have contributed valuable services to the scientific world. Given the dramatically increasing prevalence of cancer and the relative inefficacy of current medications, there is a great demand for the introduction of effectiv...

The advent of evolutionary medicine in the last two decades has provided new insights into the causes of human disease and possible preventative strategies. One of the strengths of evolutionary medicine is that it follows a multi-disciplinary approach. Such an approach is vital to future biomedicine as it enables for the infiltration of new ideas. Although evolutionary medicine uses Darwinian e...

Objective The analysis in this paper represents the first step of a multi-phase effort to understand the disease burden, and to develop strategies for tackling the health problems of Islamic populations. In this starting phase of the analysis, an overview of the burden of disease for selected Islamic populations is presented. Criteria Used for Country Selection Countries included in the analysi...

Although a millennium ago the Middle East was not an economic laggard, by the 18 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 ...