: Maxime Rodinson
: Islam and Capitalism
: Saqi Books
: 9780863569678
: 1
: CHF 10.80
:
: Volkswirtschaft
: English
: 308
: Wasserzeichen
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: ePUB
Presents a rebuttal of the cultural reductionism of Max Weber and others who have tried to explain the politics and society of the Middle East by reference to some unchanging entity called 'Islam,' typically characterised as instinctively hostile to capitalism. This work looks at the facts, analysing economic texts with his customary common sense.

Maxime Rodinson was a French Marxist historian, sociologist and orientalist. Rodinson's work combined sociological and Marxist theories, which, he said, helped him to understand 'that the world of Islam was subject to the same laws and tendencies as the rest of the human race.'

Introduction


Roger Owen


Maxime Rodinson (1915–2004) described himself in life as many things, on one occasion as an ‘autodidact, doctor of letters and a specialist in several areas in the anthropology of the peoples of the Near East and of Semitic languages’; on another, as a specialist in Islam via the optic of sociology and the history of religions. However, when it comes to his authorship ofIslam and Capitalism it is best to view him as that unusual combination of an Orientalist and someone who, after being a Marxist political activist in his youth, still retained not just an interest in those Marxist socio-historical hypotheses which he still believed to be ‘correct’, but also in the role of ideology and of certain ideological movements of the past, among which he included religious movements.

All this is probably enough to explain whyIslam and Capitalism is, in fact, two books in one. The first four chapters consist of what most later commentators have regarded as a largely successful attempt to demonstrate that, far from discouraging economic development, ‘Islam provides an explicit legitimation of trade and commerce’. Written in a somewhat didactic, as well as often a combative fashion, it combines an erudite reading of a very large number of Arabic texts with the use of a comparative political economy framework by which Islam is treated as a religion like Christianity and Judaism, and the Muslim world as part of the larger, pre-industrial Asian world where what Rodinson calls ‘financial and commercial capitalism’ flourished until checked, first by the Crusades and the Mongol invasions and then by European economic and military advance, including a flood of commodities, beginning in the seventeenth century.

One gets the sense that he feels himself in a thicket of false ideas which, as he also explained in one autobiographical moment, he felt it his duty to confront, however controversial this might be. While it is difficult to reconstruct, at this distance in time, the challenges he felt he faced, they would seem to come from all quarters of the political and religious spectrum, as well as, in the case of what he takes to be certain mistaken ideas of Max Weber, from inside the citadel of social history itself. Others are most instantly recognizable, notably from the ever-present ‘popularizers, general econo