Islam and economic development: the case of non-muslim minorities in the Middle East and north Africa

Mohamed Saleh

Post-Print from HAL

Abstract: This chapter investigates a long-standing puzzle in the economic history of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region: why do MENA's native non-Muslim minorities have better socioeconomic (SES) outcomes than the Muslim majority, both historically and today? Focusing on the case of Coptic Christians in Egypt, the largest non-Muslim minority in absolute number in the region, and employing a wide range of novel archival data sources, the chapter argues that Copts' superior SES can be explained neither by Islam's negative impact on Muslims' SES (where Islam is defined as a set of beliefs or institutions) nor by colonization's preferential treatment of Copts. Instead, the chapter traces the phenomenon to self-selection on SES during Egypt's historical conversion from Coptic Christianity to Islam in the aftermath of the Arab Conquest of the then-Coptic Egypt in 641 CE. The argument is that the regressivity-in-income of the poll tax on non-Muslims (initially all Egyptians) that was imposed continuously from 641 to 1856 led to the shrinkage of (non-convert) Copts into a better-off minority. The Coptic-Muslim SES gap then persisted due to group restrictions on access to white-collar and artisanal skills. The chapter opens new areas of research on non-Muslim minorities in the MENA region and beyond.

Keywords: Poll tax; Conversion; Inequality; Non-Muslim minorities; Copts; Religion; Human capital; Islam; Middle East; Egypt (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-03231145v1
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published in Melani Cammett; Pauline Jones. The Oxford Handbook of Politics in Muslim Societies., Oxford University Press, 2021, 9780190931056. ⟨10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190931056.013.27⟩

Downloads: (external link)
https://hal.science/hal-03231145v1/document (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-03231145

DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190931056.013.27

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().