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In this book, economist Jean-Philippe Platteau addresses the question: does Islam, the religion of Muslims, bear some responsibility for a lack of economic development in the countries in which it dominates? In his nuanced approach, Platteau challenges the widespread view that the doctrine of Islam is reactionary in the sense that it defends tradition against modernity and individual freedom. He also questions the view that fusion between religion and politics is characteristic of Islam and predisposes it to theocracy. He disagrees with the substantivist view that Islam is a major obstacle to modern development because of a merging of religion and the state, or a fusion between the spiritual and political domains. But he also identifies how Islam's decentralized organization, in the context of autocratic regimes, may cause political instability and make reforms costly

Because the methodology of historical research gives primary importance to the study of the context in which events occur, it is often seen as antithetical to theory. Theory implies an abstraction from the details of historical reality—it is constructed on the basis of stylized facts—and seems therefore incompatible with the historian's approach. The latter purports to interpret the raw facts in all their richness and complexity. Interpretation is needed not only because all the facts are not known with certainty but also because the manner in which their effects interact is often open to debate. In the eyes of most historians, however, the ambition to interpret the raw facts in all their richness and complexity excludes any recourse to the artifact of a model, on the grounds that it is always a simplified version of reality that adds an unnecessary second-order elaboration of the facts.

European Report on Development ; The empirical literature has established a strong link between the fact of being a Muslim-dominated country and indicators of political performance and democracy. This suggests the possible existence of a relation between religion, Islam in this instance, and societal characteristics. Bernard Lewis and others have actually argued the case for such a relation, pointing to aspects of the Islamic religion and culture that make the advent of democracy especially difficult. These arguments fall into the general idea of the "Clash of civilisations" put forward by Samuel Huntington. In this paper, we discuss this sort of argument and show that there is a systematic misconception about the true nature of the relationship between Islam and politics: far from being merged into the religious realm, politics tends to dominate religion. Because of the particular characteristics of Is-lam, namely, the lack of a centralised religious authority structure and the great variability of interpretations of the Islamic law, there is a risk of an "obscurantist deadlock" in the form of a vicious process whereby both the ruler and his political opponents try to outbid each other by using the religious idiom. This risk looms particularly large in crisis situations accentuated by international factors.