Marxism and the Muslim World

The author, born in 1915 in Marseille from Russian-Polish parents of Jewish background (murdered in Auschwitz), was a well-known French Marxist orientalist who lived in Syria and Lebanon from 1940-1947. This explains his notable books on Mohamed (1961), The Fascination of Islam (1980), Islam and Capitalism (1966), and The Arabs (1979), all available in English and German. The book under review presents a collection of essays originally published between 1958 and 1972. Before his death in Paris, in 2004, at the age of 89, the author was professor of Ethiopian (Amharic) language at the Parisian École Pratique des Hautes Études. As in the case of fellow Frenchmen like Jacques Berque and Claude Cahen, Rodinson’s major preoccupation, since 1961, had been Islam: not a love passion but a sociological hate-relationship, typical at his time for veteran members like him of the French Communist Party (since 1937). (Rodinson was even born into a Communist family which did not love Stalin but hated Hitler.) No wonder that only few essays in this book deal with Islam as a religion. For the author, having studied Ibn Khaldun, Islam is rather preoccupied with nationalism and communism which, at the author’s time, had been in the air in most Muslim countries. People like Walter Laqueur, in 1956, even saw the Arab world as a favourable breeding-ground for Communism.