Big in Turkey

When I turned the TV on yesterday morning, SBS was showing its re-broadcast of foreign news services, and the one from Turkey was just beginning.  After about 20 minutes of (I think) a 30 minute evening news show, I switched over, because it was still talking about Hagia Sophia going back to being a mosque.

It was, it would seem, a popular move amongst most Turks.  Some polling would indicate that's right.

Yet some polling earlier in the year indicated that private religious beliefs were not as devout as they were a decade ago.  The suggestion is that it might be a bit of youth rebellion against their conservative government trying to get people to be more religious.

Going more conservative in Islam in particular has probably never turned out well for a country's economic development, has it?   I see now, Googling the topic of Islam and economic development generally, there's been some pretty negative analysis around for a long time. Here's an abstract:

This essay critically evaluates the analytic literature concerned with causal connections between Islam and economic performance. It focuses on works since 1997, when this literature was last surveyed. Among the findings are the following: Ramadan fasting by pregnant women harms prenatal development; Islamic charities mainly benefit the middle class; Islam affects educational outcomes less through Islamic schooling than through structural factors that handicap learning as a whole; Islamic finance hardly affects Muslim financial behavior; and low generalized trust depresses Muslim trade. The last feature reflects the Muslim world's delay in transitioning from personal to impersonal exchange. The delay resulted from the persistent simplicity of the private enterprises formed under Islamic law. Weak property rights reinforced the private sector's stagnation by driving capital out of commerce and into rigid waqfs. Waqfs limited economic development through their inflexibility and democratization by restraining the development of civil society. Parts of the Muslim world conquered by Arab armies are especially undemocratic, which suggests that early Islamic institutions, including slave-based armies, were particularly critical to the persistence of authoritarian patterns of governance. States have contributed themselves to the persistence of authoritarianism by treating Islam as an instrument of governance. As the world started to industrialize, non-Muslim subjects of Muslim-governed states pulled ahead of their Muslim neighbors by exercising the choice of law they enjoyed under Islamic law in favor of a Western legal system. 

To be honest, I would have thought that the Ramadan fast would not apply to pregnant women, and the issue of it hurting pre-natal development is something I hadn't heard of before.*   The full paper for that abstract is available here.  It's very long, so I skipped to the end summary, and yeah, things look bad for the connection between Islam and economic development.  (Unless, I guess, you're a tiny country sitting on top of a giant pool of oil.)


* Or maybe I have, but forgotten.  When I Google the topic, there are lots of articles about it as a controversial topic.  Apparently, pregnant women are told that they do not have to fast if they are concerned bout the health of their fetus, but many chose to do so anyway.   One study from Iraq seem to say that more of the better educated chose not to fast.  I find it hard to imagine how pregnant mothers in the countries with severe heat during it can think that not drinking during the day is OK for the baby.