Rodinson's work helped him to understand "that the world of Islam was subject to the same laws and tendencies as the rest of the human race."
Maxime Rodinson (26 January 1915 – 23 May 2004) was a French Marxist historian, sociologist and orientalist. He was the son of a Russian-Polish clothing trader and his wife who both died in the Auschwitz concentration camp. After studying oriental languages, he became a professor of Ethiopian (Amharic) at EPHE (École Pratique des Hautes Études, France). He was the author of a rich body of work, including the book Muhammad, a biography of the prophet of Islam.
Rodinson joined the French Communist Party in 1937 for "moral reasons", but later turned away after the party's Stalinist drift. He was expelled from the party in 1958. He became well-known in France when he expressed sharp criticism of Israel, particularly opposing the settlement policies of the Jewish state. Some credit him with coining the term "Islamic fascism" (le fascisme islamique) in 1979, which he used to describe the Iranian revolution.
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." Hence, his first book was a study of Muhammad ("Muhammad", 1960), setting the Prophet in his social context. This attempt was a rationalist study which tried to explain the economical and social origins of Islam. A later work was "Islam and Capitalism" (1966), the title echoing to Max Weber's famous thesis regarding the development of Capitalism in Europe and the rise of Protestantism. Rodinson tried to rise above two prejudices: the first one widespread in Europe that Islam is a brake for the development of Capitalism and the second one widespread among Muslims that Islam was egalitarian. He emphasized social elements, seeing Islam as a neutral factor. Throughout all of his later works on Islam, Rodinson stressed the relation between the doctrines inspired by Muhammad and the economic and social structures of the Muslim world.
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Both of Maxime's parents were radical immigrant Jewish socialists, and early members of the French CP. Maxime was in Damascus during the war, and so was saved from the Holocaust. He later worked in Beirut, before returning to Paris.
Rodinson was somewhat prophetic in commenting on the ongoing revolution in Iran and Islamic fundamentalism in early Dec. 1978: “the dominant trend is a certain type of archaic fascism (type de fascisme archaïque). By this I mean a wish to establish an authoritarian and totalitarian state whose political police would brutally enforce the moral and social order. It would at the same time impose conformity to religious tradition as interpreted in the most conservative light." (Rodinson. Islam Resurgent? Le Monde, December, 6-8, 1978). At the time in Iran (and in France), many thought a new democratic age was dawning for the country.
His "Israel, fait colonial?" Les Temps Moderne, 1967 published in English as Israel: A Colonial Settler-State? (New York: Pathfinder, 1973) remains a classic analysis, relevant today and worth reading. Israel and the Arabs (Penguin 1968) also still pertinent to get the facts straight.
His essay collection Cult, Ghetto, and State: The Persistence of the Jewish Question (1984) contains many important essays, including a trenchant critique of Stalinism and of ideologically-driven political systems more generally. He saw Zionism in this context. But he stressed any solution had to accord ordinary Israeli Jews a viable future.
Here his obituary in 2004: http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/2004/jun/03/guardianobituaries.france
Posted on January 27, 2011 5:11 AM
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