Rodinson Islam and Capitalism

1. Auflage 2007
ISBN: 978-0-86356-967-8
Verlag: Saqi Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, Band 7, 308 Seiten

Reihe: Saqi Essentials

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.'

Autoren/Hrsg.

Rodinson, Maxime

Leseproben

Introduction

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 of 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 why 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 economists and jurists who make play with a few impressive words of Arabic’ and from whose facile generalizations the lay reader has most definitely to be saved. Not that Rodinson appeared to believe such readers as gullible as they might appear today. Like all great educators he viewed ignorance as only a temporary state of mind which logic and good sense could always overcome.

This is all well and good as far as it goes. By and large his main argument echoes the findings, not just of Marx himself, but of all the many other economic historians who followed him in writing of how a flourishing Asian capitalist sector was threatened, when not actually wiped out, by the import of British and other manufactured goods. True, much of this conventional wisdom has been challenged in the last decades by later economic historians of the Ottoman Empire and, more importantly, of eighteenth century India who have been able to show that eastern manufacturers were much more resilient in the face of the European challenge than previously imagined. But the larger point can still obtain, namely, that further capitalist development in the east was made virtually impossible, not by religion but by the development of material forces specific to the west.

Nevertheless, as Bryan Turner and many other critics have pointed out, the value of such assertions is greatly diminished by Rodinson’s Orientalist framework in which both Islam and Capitalism are presented as largely timeless and undifferentiated categories, with examples drawn from all over the centuries and all over the never fully defined Muslim world. Like others whose intellectual training at institutions like the Langues Orientales in Paris was counter-acted to some extent by wide reading in political economy as well as practical political concerns stemming from many years spent in the Near East and North Africa, knowledge of the social sciences was able to emancipate him a little from some of the reductionism and a-historicist notions of his teachers, but not necessarily very far. And this in turn raises what is really the central issue of whether the questions he raises about the relationship between these two large, and undifferentiated entities is of any great intellectual interest either. As Turner once again points out, any inquiry which begins from the use of the notions of Islam and Capitalism must inevitably get itself bogged down to no particular purpose in ‘false problems’ raised by such other staples of Orientalist historiography, as the debates about the essential character of the Islamic city or the presence or absence of an urban bourgeoisie. To which we might add problems raised by that strange creature entirely of Rodinson’s own devising, the ‘Muslim world market’?

A last point concerns Rodinson’s method of identifying those characteristics of Islamic capitalism which, if they had been allowed to develop, had the potential of transforming themselves into the basis for a full-blown capitalist system. This involves the tricky business of comparing them with similar characteristics to be found in western Europe, characteristics which, as Weber and others have argued, provided the basis for Europe’s singular industrial progress. But are Rodinson’s Islamic versions of the European original really the same? Given the imprecise nature of the categories used – a set of very simplified versions of what he calls financial and commercial capitalism – it is difficult to tell. However, in the light of what we now know of the essential role of legal systems, institutions and markets in supporting such systems, it does not seem reasonable to suppose that he is comparing like with like. Nor can we be sure that Weber and company were correct in identifying just what the magic combination was in the first place, given the criticisms levelled against them and the very real sense of circularity involved in a process of looking for features in the medieval period which you have already identified in advance as being just the ones needed for the transition to capitalist modernity.

It is with some pleasure that I, at least, turned to what I have identified as really a second book and that is Rodinson’s ideas about the economic state of the Muslim world at the time he was writing in the 1960s, and where it might reasonably be supposed to be heading as far as its further progress was concerned. Here his subject is definitely identified as that of ‘development versus underdevelopment’ which he defines as one of the ‘two or three major problems of our time’. As he rightly notes, the ‘whole third world’ was anxious to draw level. Just how this was to be achieved was being widely argued about in the Muslim part of it, with particular concern for the relationship between such key ideas as ‘socialism, capitalism, the nation, Islam’, all of which raised even more fundamental issues of the type that Rodinson himself was passionately interested in, to do with ‘the exact relations between economic activity, political activity, ideology and cultural tradition’.

Most of his thoughts on these large contemporary issues are contained in his fifth chapter entitled, ‘Islam and capitalism in the Muslim countries today’. What I particularly like about this section is that it contains a wonderful compendium of the ideas about development characteristic of a period when post-World War II global enthusiasm for planning, foreign aid, technical assistance and the like as a recipe for ‘catching up’ had just burst upon the Middle Eastern scene producing a wave of books by the men and women, most of whom Rodinson cites, who I, as a young graduate student, regarded as my teachers. For example: Charles Issawi, Doreen Warriner, Hassan Riad (before he became Samir Amin), Yusif Sayigh and A. J. Meyer – after whom my present Harvard Chair is named. This was a time when not much was known about the Middle East economies themselves, and the sky – for the planners and the experts and what were later called the ‘dev-men’ – still seemed the only limit. ‘From the needle to the rocket’, as one Cairo Arab Socialist slogan from the early 1960s put it, seemed to sum it all up.

Reading this chapter provides a wonderful flavour of that long-lost world, with its simple assumption that industrial progress stood at the heart of the development process and that this progress could be simply and accurately gauged, as Rodinson himself does, by tables showing the proportion of the population employed in factory industry. Optimism was further increased by the understanding that, as industrial techniques were almost entirely imported from the west, the countries of the non-European world had only to imitate them by stepping on to the escalator which was destined to carry their economies along the same path of industrial capitalism as Britain, France and America. For this, and other reasons, he has no truck with the idea of an alternative path being provided; the path that some Egyptian (as well as Russian and Indian) writers were calling ‘agricultural capitalism’. A formation which, if it really did exist, was, in his view, ‘incapable of transforming society in the direction of a capitalist socio-economic...