None of these models come even close to satisfying the requirement of convincing even a small fraction of the world that they are more desirable end-states or equilibriums than mature Western liberal democracies. (“Caliphism, comrades, has never truly been tried!”) There is no credible alternatives for current humans—although I cannot frame any hypotheses about what the ideal post-human society or governance will be.

This story [a Nigerian suicide bomber for Boko Haram ] is emblematic of something I’ve noticed seems increasingly common in the 21st century—political movements that appear exceedingly stupid…To an educated westerner the statements made by the anti-western leaders (as well as terrorist groups like ISIS and Boko Haram) don’t just seem offensive, they seem extremely stupid. I’ve talked to Venezuelans who told me that Chavez would give long speeches on TV that were almost mind-bogglingly stupid. Anyone who has read the various laughable claims made for the Kim family in North Korea has to wonder what the North Korean people make of the absurd propaganda…Both the US and Soviets, as well as their allies, at least tried to make their political models look appealing to the nonaligned countries, and to intellectuals. And to some extent they succeeded—lots of western intellectuals were on each side of the debate. There is almost no western intellectual support for the militarism and gay bashing of Putin, or the racism of Mugabe, or the stoning to death of adulterers and homosexuals. Nor for the kidnapping of school girls that get sold into slavery. The North Korean dynasty is treated like a bad joke. Only Chavez had a bit of support among western intellectuals, and that’s mostly gone now, as Venezuela keeps deteriorating under his replacement.

The only system out there that would appear to be at all competitive with liberal democracy is the so-called “China model,” which mixes authoritarian government with a partially market-based economy and a high level of technocratic and technological competence. Yet if asked to bet whether, 50 years from now, the U.S. and Europe would look more like China politically or vice versa, I would pick the latter without hesitation.

We could say something very similar about China, as well. In particular with China, we have explosive growth papering over huge problems in the underlying levels of corruption, economic equity, separatism, liberalizing population, and parking children and wealth overseas. People praising the Communist Party there seem to ignore the striking parallels to Japanese growth in the 1980s, where its own overweening government agencies & practices of questionable integrity & sclerotic consensus-building were praised as a unique new form of national & corporate governance—right up until the crash revealed the truth and largely discredited them. As Fukuyama comments in his 2014 retrospective evaluation of how well the thesis is doing :

Similar comments hold for Russia: crony capitalism & ethnic prejudice might be inspirational for dictators like Kim Jong-Eun thinking about how to ride the economic growth tiger without being deposed, but no intellectuals or masses believe it is superior to Western liberal democracy. Growth is based principally on resource extraction, wealthy Russians maintain overseas ties to hide their wealthy from the regime and ensure themselves an escape route, Putin has allied himself with the Orthodox Church for support and manpower, and there are occasional protests despite surveillance, routine executions of journalists, etc. Where are the Communist apologists of yesteryear?

Iran’s “Islamic Revolution”? Iran never had any sway in the Sunni Muslim world, and what it did, it has likely forfeited due to its support for Bashar Assad trying to roll back his personal Arab Spring; the urban protests belie any claim that the regime can earn legitimacy in the face of Western liberal democratic memes, and the uniquely Iranian aspects of their democracy like the Council of Guardians banning presidential candidates inspire no admiration either in or outside the country. The Iranian economic model has fostered massive corruption due to the Revolutionary Guards and the bonyads, failed to provide jobs for a youth bulge, is not robust against sanctions, and is running perilously high inflation. No one admires the Iranian economic model. The Islamic Revolution is not a counter-argument to Fukuyama, and no one suggested this in 1992 either though the revolution happened decades before.

Well, OK, but what about… um… Hugo Chavez’s “ Chavismo ”? No. Chavez never succeeded in gaining hegemony over Latin America or exporting his ‘revolution’ (a warmed-over socialism), and did succeed in destroying Venezuela’s economy, looting & crippling its oil industry, and died having failed to turn Chavismo into anything but a personality cult combined with standard welfare give-away tactics for gaining votes. It is barely alive in Venezuela and non-existent overseas. This is no refutation.

What about 9/11? Surely if this disproved Fukuyama as so many commentators claimed, it must have demonstrated the rise of a new form of government that would revolutionize key countries, be fervently espoused by millions, and seize the imaginations & minds of intellectuals the world over—surely we can point to many successful revolutions spear-headed by al-Qaeda, to new Caliphates, and to the Caliph consolidating the Dar al-Islam under his benevolent & divinely ordained rule and expanding the realm of peacefulness? People, look at the Arab Spring . It happened before our eyes in exhaustive detail, you have no excuse for ignorance of what the protesters sought or what the results have been. Did it yield any caliphates? Empires? Monarchies? Self-governing city-states? Hanseatic Leagues? Or heck, anarchistic autonomous communes? Of course not. It yielded more representative governments—eg. Tunisia, Egypt. (They are still far from being Western utopias, but who can argue that they are worse than 50 years ago?) On the contrary, radical Islam has been increasingly unpopular as the brutality and ineffectiveness of terrorism became evident, the success of peaceful liberal-style protests became apparent. And in the one country where Islamists (the Muslim Brotherhood) have successfully been elected (note the verb), Egyptians have been learning that being fervent believers is not a job qualification for effective corruption-free government and the President has become increasingly unpopular with both his party and the populace.

Monarchism? It continues its shabbily genteel decline into tourist fodder. I can think of perhaps one counter-example where a monarch may have increased their power (Thailand), but its reliance on thuggish tactics like lèse majesté laws, suggest, if anything, its leaders perceive serious underlying weakness (especially after the 2006 coup), continued internal political division, and the monarch Bhumibol Adulyadej’s substantial age plus multiple military coups suggest Thailand has only postponed its reckoning (après nous, le Déluge?). This is further proof of the Fukuyama thesis, not evidence against.

City-states? There have been no new ones, one of the existing 2 (Hong Kong) has fallen under Chinese sway, and attempts to create new ones in the form of Paul Romer’s charter city have died at the hands of nationalist democracies; they have neither come into existence nor won a global intellectual or mass following. Seasteading is even more obscure and unsuccessful. And it’s worth noting that even though it was famously characterized as a “Disneyland with the death penalty” and commonly put forth as a new kind of governance, the technocratic parliamentary democracy of Singapore has nothing new to it—the American goo-goos , and their Silicon Valley contemporaries, would have approved.

Socialism is not clearly distinguishable from the above summary, and in key countries like the USA, Britain, or France, has been in constant retreat since the days of unions and regulated airlines and government rations of cheese and coal.

I ask simply this: what credible alternatives are there to Western liberal democracy with regulated capitalism? For concreteness’s sake, let us specify Norway as our paradigmatic Western liberal democracy. If you can provide a form of governance which has the allegiance of hundreds of millions of people as improving on Norway as a goal or ideal, then you have succeeded. So many people claim Fukuyama is not just wrong, but laughably incredibly wrong, that this should be easy.

Most of these analyses lack any larger conceptual framework for distinguishing between what is essential and what is contingent or accidental in world history, and are predictably superficial. If Mr. Gorbachev were ousted from the Kremlin or a new Ayatollah proclaimed the millennium from a desolate Middle Eastern capital, these same commentators would scramble to announce the rebirth of a new era of conflict.

I disagree in the strongest possible terms: this is a grossly uncharitable reading of Fukuyama and a shocking misunderstanding of the last 20 years of geopolitical changes & key historic events. History has not proved Fukuyama wrong, it has proven him right. And he foresaw both this and that people would be unable to understand this; the very first paragraph of his 1989 article “The End Of History?” ends in a line that should shock the average reader of 2015 to their core:

This isn’t the same thing as the ‘expanding circle thesis’, but rather an almost trivial observation that Western liberal democracy has steadily expanded the ranks of believers and as time passes, ever more countries slip into liberal democracies (of varying qualities) and few slip back into some alternative form like a divine-right absolute monarchy. Curiously, one sometimes sees descriptions of Fukuyama as debunked by 9/11, such as this gem in a National Interest review :

What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.

Western liberal socialist capitalism is the attractor state for industrialized humanity for the foreseeable future, and that barring existential risks etc, we will see a long-term trend (possibly very noisy in the short-term) towards that; alternative systems of economics & governance may have sporadic successes but fundamentally have no broad allegiance among the intelligentsia and richer countries; and that most criticisms of the Fukuyama thesis are based on misunderstandings, pop-culture simplifications, ignorance, reasoning from anecdotes, and ignoring long-term trends in favor of some brief regressions.

Excerpts of articles by Timur Kuran reviewing the Islamic corporate charity form of the waqf: charities with perpetual endowments which are locked into narrow missions by founding documents. Kuran argues that this structure, while gradually engrossing every more of the economy, was corrupt and inefficient, damaging growth of Islamic countries which employed it.

A waqf is an unincorporated trust established under Islamic law by a living man or woman for the provision of a designated social service in perpetuity. Its activities are financed by revenue-bearing assets that have been rendered forever inalienable. Originally the assets had to be immovable, although in some places this requirement was eventually relaxed to legitimize what came to be known as a “cash waqf.”

Waqfs were not an Islamic innovation, exactly; may have had Persian antecedents, but certainly we can find earlier analogies:

One inspiration for the waqf was perhaps the Roman legal concept of a sacred object, which provided the basis for the inalienability of religious temples. Another inspiration might have been the philanthropic foundations of Byzantium, and still another the Jewish institution of consecrated property (hekdesh). But there are important differences between the waqf and each of these forerunners. A Roman sacred object was authorized, if not initiated, by the state, which acted as the property’s administrator (K6prluii 1942:7–9; Barnes 1987:5–8). By contrast, a waqf was typically established and managed by individuals without the sovereign’s involvement. Under Islamic law, the state’s role was limited to enforcement of the rules governing its creation and operation. A Byzantine philanthropic foundation was usually linked to a church or monastery, and it was subject to ecclesiastical control (Jones 1980:25). A waqf could be attached to a mosque, but often it was established and administered by people outside the religious establishment. Finally, whereas under Jewish law it was considered a sacrilege to consecrate property for one’s own benefit (Elon 1971:280–88), there was nothing to keep the founder of a waqf from appointing himself as its first administrator and drawing a hefty salary for his services.

These perpetuities were huge; modern Iran’s bonyads are estimated at 20% of its GDP and the waqfs may have been bigger and correspondingly active:

Available aggregate statistics on the assets controlled by waqfs come from recent centuries. At the founding of the Republic of Turkey in 1923, three-quarters of the country’s arable land belonged to waqfs. Around the same time, one-eighth of all cultivated soil in Egypt and one-seventh of that in Iran stood immobilized as waqf property. In the middle of the 19th century, one-half of the agricultural land in Algeria, and in 1883 one-third of that in Tunisia, was owned by waqfs (Heffening 1936:1100; Gibb & Kramers 1961:627; Barkan 1939:237; Baer 1968b:79–80). In 1829, soon after Greece broke away from the Ottoman Empire, its new government expropriated waqf land that composed about a third of the country’s total area (Fratcher 1973:114). Figures that stretch back the farthest pertain to the total annual income of the waqf system. At the end of the 18th century, it has been estimated, the combined income of the roughly 20,000 Ottoman waqfs in operation equaled one-third of Ottoman state’s total revenue, including the yield from tax farms in the Balkans, Turkey, and the Arab world (Yediyildlz 1984:26). Under the assumption that individuals cultivating waqf land were taxed equally with those working land belonging to state-owned tax farms, this last figure suggests that roughly one-third of all economically productive land in the Ottoman Empire was controlled by waqfs. …here is abundant evidence that even a single waqf could carry great economic importance. Jerusalem’s Haseki Sultan charitable complex, founded in 1552 by Haseki Hurrem, wife of Suleyman the Magnificent and better known in the West as Roxelana, possessed 26 entire villages, several shops, a covered bazaar, 2 soap plants, 11 flour mills, and 2 bathhouses, all in Palestine and Lebanon. For centuries the revenues produced by these assets were used to operate a huge soup kitchen, along with a mosque and two hostels for pilgrims and wayfarers (Peri 1992:170–71). In the 18th century, a waqf established in Aleppo by Hajj Musa Amiri, a member of the local elite, included 10 houses, 67 shops, 4 inns, 2 storerooms, several dyeing plants and baths, 3 bakeries, 8 orchards, and 3 gardens, among various other assets, including agricultural land (Meriwether 1999: 182–83)…many of the architectural masterpieces that symbolize the region’s great cities, were financed through the waqf system. So were practically all the soup kitchens in operation throughout the region. By the end of the 18th century, in Istanbul, whose estimated population of 700,000 made it the largest city in Europe, up to 30,000 people a day were being fed by charitable complexes (imarets) established under the waqf system (Huart 1927:475).

Such wealth would make them targets just like the Catholic Church was targeted by King Henry—but perhaps with different results (surprising since waqfs seem predicated on ordinary property rights being insecure, especially compared with England):

The consequent weakness of private property rights made the sacred institution of the waqf a convenient vehicle for defending wealth against official predation. Expropriations of waqf properties did occur, especially following conquests or the replacement of one dynasty by another. However, when they occurred, they usually generated serious resistance. During the two and a half centuries preceding Egypt’s fall to the Turks in 1517, no fewer than six revenue-seeking Mameluke rulers attempted to confiscate major waqfs; primarily because of judicial resistance, their efforts were largely unsuccessful (Yediyildlz 1982a:161). In the 1470s the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II expropriated scores of waqfs to raise resources for his army and his unusually broad public works program. His conversion of hundreds of waqf-owned villages into state property generated a strong reaction, and it influenced the succession struggle that followed his death. Moreover, his son Bayezid II, upon acceding to the throne, restored the confiscated lands to their former status (Repp 1988:128–29; Inalclk 1955:533). Such episodes underscored the relative security of waqf property. …Precisely because of the commonness of this motive, when a state attempted to take over a waqf it usually justified the act on the ground that it was illegitimate (Akgunduz 1996:523–61). Accordingly, its officials tried to convince the populace that the expropriated properties belonged to the state to begin with or simply that the waqf founder had never been their legitimate owner.23

The waqf structure did succeed, as economics might predict, in increasing the amount dedicated to charity, as we can see comparing religious groups’ participation:

Accordingly, up to the 19th century Jews and Christians were ordinarily permitted to establish only functionally similar institutions (Akgindfiz 1996:238–41). Unlike waqfs, these would not be overseen by the Islamic courts or enjoy the protection of Islamic law. We know that actual practices varied. In certain periods and regions influential non-Muslims were permitted to establish waqfs.14 Yet, the requirement pertaining to the founder’s religion was generally effective. Non-Muslims were less inclined than equally wealthy Muslims to establish and fund charitable foundations of any kind, even ones to serve mostly, if not exclusively, their own religious communities (Masters 1988:173–74; Jennings 1990:308–9; Marcus 1989:305).15 This pattern changed radically only in the 19th century, when the right to establish waqfs was extended to the members of other faiths (Cadlrcl 1991:257–58). At this point it became common for wealthy Jews and Christians to establish waqfs under a permissive new variant of Islamic law (Shaham 1991:460–72; Afifi 1994:119–22).16

The chief flaw in waqfs was the ‘dead hand’—perpetual meant perpetual:

To start with the former type of rigidity, the designated mission of a waqf was irrevocable. Ordinarily not even the founder of a waqf could alter its goals. Wherever possible, the objectives specified in the waqf deed had to be pursued exactly. This requirement, if obeyed to the letter, could cause a waqf to become dysfunctional. Imagine a richly endowed waqf established to build and support a particular caravanserai. Two centuries later, let us also suppose, a shift in trade routes idles the structure. If the long-dead founder had neglected to permit future mutawallis to use their own judgment in the interest of supporting commerce through the most efficient means, his waqf’s assets could not be transferred from the now dysfunctional caravanserai to, say, the administration of a commercial port. They could not be shifted even to another caravanserai. At least for a while, therefore, the resources of the waqf would be used inefficiently. Probably because this danger of serious efficiency loss gained recognition early on, the architects of the waqf system made the residuary mission of every waqf the benefit of the poor.36 This rule meant that the assets supporting a dysfunctional caravanserai would eventually be transferred to a public shelter or a soup kitchen, thus limiting the misallocation of resources. But in tempering one form of inefficiency this measure created another. The resources devoted to poor relief would grow over time, possibly dampening incentives to work. The earlier-reported evidence of Istanbul’s soup kitchens feeding 30,000 people a day points, then, to more than the waqf system’s success in providing social services in a decentralized manner. Perhaps it shows also that the system could generate a socially costly oversupply of certain services. This is the basis on which some scholars have claimed that the waqf system contributed to the Islamic world’s long economic descent by fostering a large class of indolent beneficiaries (Akdag 1979:128–30; Cem 1970:98–99).37 Not only were these recognized but steps were taken to mitigate them. The typical Ottoman waqf deed contained a standard formulary featuring a list of operational changes the mutawalli was authorized to make. However, unless explicitly stated otherwise, he could make only one set of changes; once the waqf’s original rules had undergone one modification, there could not be another reform (Akgindiiz 1996:257–70; Little 1984:317–18). This point qualifies, but also supports the observation that the waqf system suffered from operational rigidities. Sooner or later every waqf equipped with the standard flexibilities would exhaust its adaptive capacity…It is on this basis that in 1789, some 237 years after the establishment of the Haseki Sultan complex, its mutawalli decided against hiring a money changer, even though some employees wanted the appointment to cope with rising financial turnover (Peri 1992:184–85). Finally, if the founder had not explicitly allowed the waqf to pool its resources with those of other organizations, technically achievable economies of scale could remain unexploited. In particular, services that a single large waqf could deliver most efficiently—road maintenance, piped water—might be provided at high cost by multiple small waqfs. Founders were free, of course, to stipulate that part, even all, of the income of their waqfs be transferred to a large waqf. And scattered examples of such pooling of waqf resources have been found (Cizakga 2000:48).40 The point remains, however, that if a waqf had not been designed to participate in resource pooling it could not be converted into a “feeder waqf” of another, ordinarily larger waqf. Even if new technologies came to generate economies of scale unimaginable at the waqf’s inception, the waqf would have to continue operating independently. Rifaah al-Tahtawi, a major Egyptian thinker of the 19th century, put his finger on this problem when he wrote, “Associations for joint philanthropy are few in our country, in contrast to individual charitable donations and family endowments, which are usually endowed by a single individual” (Cole 2000). On this basis one may suggest that the “static perpetuity” principle of the waqf system was more suitable to a slowly changing economy than to one in which technologies, tastes, and lifestyles undergo revolutionary changes within the span of a generation. Even if adherence to the principle was only partial-as discussed later, violations were hardly uncommon-in a changing economy the efficiency of the waqf system would have fallen as a result of delays in socially desirable adjustments.42 This interpretation is consistent with the fact that in various parts of the modern Islamic world the legal infrastructure of the waqf system has been, or is being, modified to endow mutawallis with broader operational powers. Like many forms of the Western trust, a modern waqf is a corporation-an internally autonomous organization that the courts treat as a legal person.43 As such, its mutawalli, which may now be a committee of individuals or even another corporation, enjoys broad rights to change its services, its mode and rules of operation, and even its goals, without outside interference. This is not to say that a mutawalli is now unconstrained by the founder’s directives. Instead, there is no longer a presumption that the founder’s directives were complete, and the mutawalli, or board of mutawallis, is expected and authorized to be much more than a superintendent following orders. A modern mutawalli is charged with maximizing the overall return on all assets, subject to intertemporal tradeoffs and the acceptability of risk. The permanence of any particular asset is no longer an objective in itself. It is taken for granted that the waqf’s substantive goals may best be served by trimming the payroll to finance repairs or by replacing a farm received directly from the founder with equity in a manufacturing company. …The ongoing reforms of the waqf system amount, then, to an acknowledgment that the rigidities of the traditional waqf system were indeed sources of inefficiency.

Such inefficiency is consistent with one estimate of the beneficial economic effects of the English Dissolution of the Catholic Church’s holdings (Heldring et al 2015). The natural approach was to add in new flexibility by two routes; first, explicit flexibility in the incorporation:

It was not uncommon for founders to authorize their mutawallis to sell or exchange waqf assets (istibddl). Miriam Hoexter (1998:ch. 5) has shown that between the 17th and 19th centuries the mutawallis of an Algerian waqf established for the benefit of Mecca and Medina managed, acting on the authority they enjoyed, to enlarge this waqf’s endowment through shrewd purchases, sales, and exchanges of assets. In the same vein, Ronald Jennings (1990:279–80, 286) has observed that in 16th-century Trabzon some founders explicitly empowered their mutawallis to exercise their own judgment on business matters. He has also found that the courts with jurisdiction over Trabzon’s waqfs tolerated a wide range of adaptations.45 The waqfs in question were able to undertake repairs, adjust payments to suit market conditions, and rent out unproductive properties at rates low enough and for sufficiently long periods to entice renters into making improvements (Jennings 1990:335). Other scholars, in addition to providing examples of founder-endorsed plasticity, have shown that there were limits to the founder’s control over the waqf’s management, especially beyond his or her own lifetime. Said Arjomand (1998:117, 126) and Stephane Yerasimos (1994:43–45) independently note that the waqf deed could suffer damage or even disappear with the passage of time. It could also be tampered with, sowing doubts about the authenticity of all its directives. In such circumstances, the courts might use their supervisory authority to modify the waqf’s organization, its mode of operation, and even its mission. Moreover, even when no disagreements existed over the deed itself judges had the right to order unstipulated changes in the interest of either the waqf’s intended beneficiaries or the broader community. We have seen that such heavy handedness sometimes sparked resistance. Harmed constituencies might claim that the principle of static perpetuity had been violated. However, judges were able to prevail if they commanded popular support and the opponents of change were poorly organized. Yerasimos furnishes examples of 16th-century Ottoman construction projects that involved the successful seizure of ostensibly immobilized waqf properties, sometimes without full compensation. …There are ample indications that modification costs were generally substantial. As Murat (Sizakca 2000:16–21) observes, only some of the Islamic schools of law allowed sales and exchanges of waqf properties, and even these schools imposed various restrictions.

The second approach was to avoid inalienable assets—not real estate, but perhaps money or other financial instruments:

“Cash waqfs” thus emerged as early as the eighth century, earning income generally through interest-bearing loans (Qizakga 2000:ch. 3). Uncommon for many centuries, these waqfs provoked intense controversy as their numbers multiplied, because they violated both waqf law and the prohibition of interest (Mandaville 1979; Kurt 1996:10–21). According to their critics, not only was the cash waqf doubly un-Islamic but it consumed resources better devoted to charity and religion. Interestingly, the defenders invoked neither scripture nor the law. Conceding that the cash waqf violates classical Islamic principles, they pointed to its popularity and inferred that it had to be serving a valuable social function. In effect, they held that the cash waqf should be tolerated because it passes the utilitarian test of the market-the irreligious test now commonly used to justify popular, but perhaps ethically troubling, economic practices. The defenders of the cash waqf, who included prominent clerics, also lamented that their opponents, though perhaps knowledgeable of Islam, were ignorant of both history and the prevailing practical needs of their communities (Mandaville 1979:297–300, 306–8). Because they met important needs and encountered little opposition outside of legal and religious circles, cash waqfs became increasingly popular. By the 16th century, in fact, they accounted for more than half of all the new Ottoman waqfs. Most of them were on the small side, as measured by assets (Cagatay 1971; Yediylldlz 1990:118–22; Masters 1988:161–63). One factor that accounts for their enormous popularity is the ubiquitous quest for wealth protection. Another was that there existed no banks able to meet the demand for consumption loans, only moneylenders whose rates reflected the risks they took by operating outside the strict interpretation of the law. Where and when the cash waqf enjoyed legal approval, it allowed moneylenders to operate more or less within the prevailing interpretation of Islamic law. If nothing else, the sacredness that flowed from its inclusion in the waqf system insulated its interest-based operations from the charge of sinfulness.

Both brought their own problems:

Yet, cash waqfs were by no means free of operational constraints. Like the founder of an ordinary waqf, that of a cash waqf could restrict its beneficiaries and limit its charges. Yediylldlz points to the deed of an 18th-century waqf whose founder required it to lend at exactly 10% and only to merchants based in the town of Amasya (Yediylldlz 1990:122). The restrictions imposed on a cash waqf typically reflected, in addition to the founder’s personal tastes and biases, the prevailing interest rates at the time of its establishment. Over time, these could become increasingly serious barriers to the waqf’s exploitation of profit opportunities. Precisely because the cash waqfs were required to keep their rates fixed, observes Cizakqa (2000:52–53), only a fifth of them survived beyond a century…Revealingly, the borrowers of the 18th-century cash waqfs of Bursa included their own mutawallis. These mutawallis lent on their own account to the moneylenders of Ankara and Istanbul, where interest rates were higher (Cizakqa 1995). Had the endowment deeds of these cash waqfs permitted greater flexibility, the gains reaped by mutawallis could have accrued to the waqfs themselves. Insofar as these methods enhanced the acceptability of corruption, they would also have facilitated the embezzlement of resources ostensibly immobilized for the provision of social services, including public goods and charitable causes. Embezzlement often occurred through sales and exchanges of waqf properties. While such transactions could serve a waqf’s financial interests, and thus its capacity for meeting the founder’s goals, they were subject to abuse. Mutawallis found ways to line their own pockets through transactions detrimental to the waqf, for instance, the exchange of an economically valuable farm for the inferior farm of an uncle. A bribe-hungry judge might approve such a transaction under the pretext of duress, knowing full well that it was motivated more by personal gain than by civic duty. In certain times and places this form of embezzlement became so common that high officials took to treating waqf properties as alienable. In the early 16th century, right before the Ottomans occupied Egypt, a Mameluke judge ruled that the land on which the famous al-Azhar complex stands could be sold to someone looking for a site to build a mansion (Behrens-Abouseif 1994:146–47)…Her waqf was to support, she stated, “the poor and the humble, the weak and the needy… the true believers and the righteous who live near the holy places . . . [and] hold onto the sharia and strictly observe the commandments of the sunna” (Peri 1992:172). Since practically any Muslim resident of greater Jerusalem could qualify as either weak or devout, within a few generations huge numbers of families, including some of the richest, were drawing income from the waqf. Even an Ottoman governor managed to get himself on the waqf’s payroll, and he took to using the waqf as an instrument of patronage (Peri 1992:173–74). As Hfirrem’s waqf turned into a politicized source of supplementary income for people whom she would hardly have characterized as needy, the government in Istanbul tried repeatedly to trim the list of beneficiaries. Evidently it sensed that continued corruption would cause the waqf, and therefore Ottoman rule itself, to lose legitimacy. Yet the government itself benefited from showering provincial notables with privileges, which limited the reach of its reforms. After every crackdown the waqf’s managers returned to creating entitlements for the upper classes (Peri 1992:182–84). Ann Lambton (1997:305) gives examples of even more serious abuses from 14th-century Iran. Based on contemporary observations, she notes that practically all assets of the 500 waqfs in Shiraz had fallen into the hands of corrupt mutawallis bent on diverting revenues to themselves…One must not infer that managerial harm to the efficiency of waqfs stemmed only, or even primarily, from corruption. As Richard Posner (1992:511) observes in regard to charitable trusts in common law jurisdictions, the managers and supervisors of trusts established for the benefit of broad social causes generally lack adequate incentives to manage properties efficiently.

Contrast with European institutions:

Just as the premodern Middle East had inflexible waqfs, one might observe, the preindustrial and industrial West featured restrictions that inhibited the efficient administration of trusts (Fratcher 1973:22, 55, 66–71). …Do such facts invalidate the claim of this section, namely, that inflexibilities of the waqf system held the Middle East back as Europe took the lead in shaping the modern global economy? Two additional facts from European economic history may be advanced in defense of the presented argument. First, over the centuries the West developed an increasingly broad variety of trusts, including many that give a trustee-the counterpart of the mutawalli-greater operational flexibility. These came to include trusts to operate businesses, trusts to manage financial portfolios, and trusts to hold the majority of the voting shares in a corporation. Also, while it is doubtless true that certain Western trusts suffered from the sorts of rigidities that plagued the waqf system, other trusts mitigated these problems by equipping their trustees, or boards of trustees, with powers akin to those of a corporate board. Another important difference concerns the powers of founders. As early as the 14th century, judges in England were discouraging waqf-like “perpetuities” through which donors could micromanage properties indefinitely, well after their deaths. Trusts providing benefits for unborn persons were declared invalid, or valid only if subject to destruction by prior beneficiaries. And in France, a law was instituted in 1560 to keep the founders of fideicommissa, trust-like devices grounded in Roman law, from tying the hands of more than two generations of beneficiaries (Fratcher 1973:11–12, 86). These cases of resistance to static perpetuity show that the immobilization of property also presented dangers in Europe. But they also demonstrate that successful attempts to contain the dangers came much earlier in Europe than in the Middle East, where legal reforms designed to give mutawallis greater discretion had to await the 20th century.

Waqfs are discussed further in “Legal Roots of Authoritarian Rule in the Middle East: Civic Legacies of the Islamic Waqf”, Kuran 2016 & “Islam and Economic Performance: Historical and Contemporary Links”, Kuran 2018:

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…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.

The later Bazzi et al 2019 exploits a natural shock in Indonesian politics which drove a burst of donations to waqf endowments, showing generally negative effects in affected regions (particularly to economic growth).