Reframing orientalism

Weber and Islam

Mohammad Nafissi

pp. 182-201

in: Ralph Schroeder (ed), Max Weber, democracy and modernization, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1998

Abstract

Between 1980 and 1993, the Middle East and North Africa as a region registered the steepest decline in GNP per capita in the world (World Bank 1995: 163). At present, none of the forty-six member states of the Islamic Conference Organization qualify as fully democratic in the conventional sense of the term. Culturally the record is equally discouraging, whatever the criteria used for assessing it.