Maxime Rodinson: Marxist, Orientalist, anti-Zionist, anti-Islamist
NB: A great scholar. See below for his views on Zionism, Islamofascism, Edward Said's Orientalism, etc. See below (and click here) for most posts on Rodinson. DS
The French Marxist
scholar Maxime Rodinson, whose Polish parents died in Auschwitz while he was
serving in the French Institute in Damascus, was born on May 22, 1915. Some
sources say Paris; others say Marseilles. A true iconoclast, he resigned from
the French Communist Party in 1958 in the name of anti-authoritarianism. He
opposed Zionism as imposing a false nationalism upon all Jews while forcing the
displacement of Palestinians from their homeland, though he learned both Hebrew
and Arabic. Yet he urged peaceful negotiations between Israelis and
Palestinians, and continually urged the Palestine Liberation Organization to
renounce violence, terrorism, and their hope of a military victory over Israel.
Rodinson was the first commentator to call Israel “a settler-colonial state,”
and also coined the phrase “Islamic fascism” [le fascisme islamique] to
describe the Iranian Revolution in 1979, taking Foucault to task for his
uncritical enthusiasm and support of Khomeini. In 1961 he wrote Muhammad,
a biography of the prophet of Islam that is still banned in parts of the Muslim
world.
On political Islam’s
potential duration, Rodinson wrote:
Islamic fundamentalism
is a temporary, transitory movement, but it can last another thirty or fifty
years — I don’t know how long. Where fundamentalism isn’t in power it will
continue to be an ideal, as long as the basic frustration and discontent
persist that lead people to take extreme positions. You need long experience
with clericalism to finally get fed up with it — look how much time it
took in Europe! Islamic fundamentalists will continue to dominate the period
for a long time to come.
On Zionism as a form
of nationalism, he wrote:
I am well aware that
the designation “nationalist” for the Zionist movement often gives rise to
protest on the part of Arab intellectuals. I have already come up against it.
This is because in the Arab world, for reasons which are evident, the term
“nationalism” has acquired a positive connotation, a sacred aureole. For the
Arabs, nationalism is by definition a feeling, a passion, a duty, a
praiseworthy (even admirable) movement. Zionism, being in their view something
which is in its very essence bad, a perverse undertaking, cannot be
nationalistic. It is a project of pure banditry, an operation planned by
Satanic manipulators which sweeps along the deceived masses or individuals
essentially just as evil.
In 1948, he became
director of the Muslim section of the National Library in Paris. Edward Said
in Orientalism (1978) praised Rodinson for his “extraordinary
achievements” as well as his “methodological self-consciousness.” For Said,
Rodinson was one of the exceptional few who proved “perfectly capable of freeing
themselves from the old ideological straitjacket” of the Orientalist
disciplines. In the endnotes of his book Europe and the Mystique of
Islam (first published in French in 1980), he gave his opinion of
Said’s Orientalism:
Edward Said’s Orientalism (New
York, 1978) had a great and unexpected success. There are many valuable ideas
in it. Its great merit, to my mind, was to shake the self-satisfaction of many
Orientalists, to appeal to them (with questionable success) to consider the
sources and the connections of their ideas, to cease to see them as a natural,
unprejudiced conclusion of the facts, studied without any presupposition. But,
as usual, his militant stand leads him repeatedly to make excessive statements.
This problem is accentuated because as a specialist of English and comparative
literature, he is inadequately versed in the practical work of the
Orientalists. It is too easy to choose, as he does, only English and French
Orientalists as a target. By doing so, he takes aim only at representatives of
huge colonial empires. But there was an Orientalism before the empires, and the
pioneers of Orientalism were often subjects of other European countries, some
without colonies.
Much too often, Said falls into the same traps that we old
Communist intellectuals fell into some forty years ago, as I will explain
below. The growth of Orientalism was linked to the colonial expansion of Europe
in a much more subtle and intrinsic way than he imagines. Moreover, his
nationalistic tendencies have prevented him from considering, among others, the
studies of Chinese or Indian civilization, which are ordinarily regarded as
part of the field of Orientalism. For him, the Orient is restricted to his East,
that is, the Middle East. Muslim countries outside the Arab world (after all,
four Muslims in five are not Arabs), and even Arab nations in the West receive
less than their due in his interpretation.
Rodinson's books, available for download here, include:
Rodinson's books, available for download here, include:
- Mohammad (1961)
- Islam
and Capitalism (1966)
- Israel:
A Colonial-Settler State? (1967)
- “On
Zionism and the Palestine Problem Today” (1975)
- “Islam
Resurgent?” (1979)
- “Khomeini
and the ‘Primacy of the Spiritual'” (February 1979)
- The
Arabs (1979)
- Europe
and the Mystique of Islam (1980)
- Marxism
and the Muslim World (1982)
- Cult,
Ghetto, and State: The Persistence of the Jewish Question (1984)
- “Mythology
of a Conqueror: On Saddam Hussein” (1991)
- “Critique
of Foucault on Iran” (1993)
- “Why
Palestine?”
- “On
Islamic ‘Fundamentalism’: An Interview with Gilbert Achcar” (2003)
see also
Book
review - Tehseen Thaver: Three More Questions about What is Islam?
What do we actually know about Mohammed? PATRICIA CRONE (2008)
What do we actually know about Mohammed? PATRICIA CRONE (2008)
The
religious persecution of Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd (1945-2010)/ Interview: My life
fighting intolerance/ Mahmoud Mohammed Taha & the Second Message of Islam
Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd's Legacy (Library of writings)
Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd's Legacy (Library of writings)
Mahmoud Mohammed Taha was
a Sudanese religious thinker and leader executed for apostasy at the age of
76 by the regime of Gaafar Nimeiry. (See his Court statement)
