Dilip Simeon's blog

by  Gilbert Achcar published in  MER233 http://www.merip.org/mer/mer233/maxime-rodinson-islamic-fundamentalism With the death of Maxime Rodinson at the age of 89 on May 23, 2004, one of the last great figures disappeared in an exceptional lineage of Western scholars of Islam --  including Régis Blachère, Claude Cahen and Jacques Berque, to mention only Rodinson’s fellow Frenchmen. Rodinson belonged to this group of writers who pioneered new approaches, reclaiming the field of Islamic studies and bringing it up to the level of other social sciences. These writers had largely freed themselves from the failings of colonial “Orientalism”; they sympathized with the cause of Muslim peoples struggling against Western domination. [1]  They had not (yet) been corrupted by the shameless media circus that has enfolded the “experts” in its embrace. Now “experts” have become privileged actors in the society of the spectacle as Islam, in the form of fundamentalism and terr...

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 “Isl...

February 2004 marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Iranian Revolution. From September 1978 to February 1979, in the course of a massive urban revolution with millions of participants, the Iranian people toppled the regime of Muhammad Reza Shah Pahlavi (1941-1979), which had pursued a highly authoritarian program of economic and cultural modernization. By late 1978, the Islamist faction led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had come to dominate the antiregime uprising, in which secular nationalists, democrats, and leftists also participated. The Islamists controlled the slogans and the organization of the protests, which meant that many secular women protesters were pressured into donning the veil ( chador ) as an expression of solidarity with the more traditional Iranian Muslims. By February 1979, the shah had left the country and Khomeini returned from exile to take power. The next month, he sponsored a national referendum that declared Iran an Islamic republic by an overwhel...

Maxime Rodinson (1915-2004) was one of the greatest Western scholars of Islam. 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.  His study of the Arab world was strongly influenced by Marxism, and he described himself as having been a communist for 20 years. This post carries the text of the interview given by him two weeks after the WTC attacks of 9/11 Rodinson was interviewed by Gilbert Achcar in 1986, who said of him: His relationship to Marx is furthermore the source of the great variety of themes and focuses that characterizes his writings. For this reason his work cannot be pigeonholed in the category of Islamic studies alone. His theoretical contributions, in permanent dialogue with a Marxian inspiration that he never renounced, in fact cover broader reaches of historical and sociological research than the Islamic world alone. The Arab-Isr...

During the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca, believers circumambulate the square ‘House of God’ called the Kaaba. It is said to have predated Islam, and to have been cleansed of idols by the Prophet Muhammad in January of 630, when the town of Mecca swung to his leadership by acclamation. There is some new archeological evidence for the Kaaba in the form of Arabic rock inscriptions in Western Arabia, photographs of which have been published on Twitter. I should underline that this evidence was put up on Twitter by Abdallah Muslih Al-Thumali and Mohammed Almaghthawi, respectively. All I’m doing is reading my Twitter feed and am grateful to these intrepid rock climbers who are bringing us this new evidence. The inscriptions have also been published: Sa’d bin Rashid, al-Suwaydirah : al-taraf qadiman, atharuha wa-nuqushuha al-Islamiyah, Riyadh, 2009. Belief in sacred sites like the Kaaba was widespread in that part of the world from ancient times. In the Hejaz and Transjordan, a sacred ...

IN 1972, during the restoration of the Great Mosque of Sana'a, in Yemen, laborers working in a loft between the structure's inner and outer roofs stumbled across a remarkable gravesite, although they did not realize it at the time. Their ignorance was excusable: mosques do not normally house graves, and this site contained no tombstones, no human remains, no funereal jewelry. It contained nothing more, in fact, than an unappealing mash of old parchment and paper documents—damaged books and individual pages of Arabic text, fused together by centuries of rain and dampness, gnawed into over the years by rats and insects. Intent on completing the task at hand, the laborers gathered up the manuscripts, pressed them into some twenty potato sacks, and set them aside on the staircase of one of the mosque's minarets, where they were locked away—and where they would probably have been forgotten once again, were it not for Qadhi Isma'il al-Akwa', then the president of the Yeme...

Dear friends, I am writing to tell you about the publication of my new book: A ROAD UNFORESEEN: WOMEN FIGHT THE ISLAMIC STATE   The official publication date is August 23 but it is already available online and should be in bookstores any minute. It is already at Book Culture in NY.  I have set up a website for the book  www.aroadunforeseen.com  and here are links to some pre-publication reviews and interviews: Alternet & Portside  http://www.alternet.org/books/changing-paradigm-women-national-liberation-revolution-21st-century Publishers Weekly   http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/authors/profiles/article/70804-the-good-fight-meredith-tax.html Lilith blog (you have to scroll down for this one)  http://lilith.org/blog/2016/ openDemocracy 5050  https://www.opendemocracy.net/5050/beatrix-campbell/who-are-they-these-revolutionary-Rojava-women I wrote this book because I think the subject is desperately...

The idiom “pot calling the kettle black” was perfectly illustrated by Islamic Iran’s outrage over the public executions of 47 people by Islamic Saudi Arabia on Jan. 2. As horrific and detestable as the Saudi actions that included the beheading of human rights and democracy activist Nimr el-Nimr were, it was laughable to watch Iran’s hypocritical self-righteousness in response. Since 1979, Iran has executed tens of thousands of political dissidents, most infamously its state-sponsored execution of at least 5,000 political prisoners across Iran in the summer of 1988. Decades later the Iranian Islamic regime still makes a public spectacle of hanging political prisoners in city squares, using cranes to magnify the image of men writhing as they die a slow death by strangulation. The fact Iran is the only Mideast country that carries out more executions than Saudi Arabia annually and globally is second only to China — was lost on Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who in...

NB: Terror attacks are acquiring increasing frequency. It is time for those of us who still idealise violence as a means or 'resistance', who see armed and self-proclaimed fighters for this or that 'sacred' cause as  avatars of Bhagat Singh or Che Guevara to think again. Look at these crazed and suicidal young persons, a 26 year-old Japanese man murders 19 disabled people in a care centre, a teenager slits the throat of an 85 year old French priest in church. Is it realistic to keep pointing fingers at the state while ignoring the role of civil society, and the numerous arguments we hear every day on behalf of vigilantism and militarism? And the impact of the continuing fascination with violent revolution that remains entrenched in 'radical' discourse of all hues from 'left' to 'right'? How do we understand this growing spiral of violence? How do we respond to it? The answers are difficult, but we can no longer avoid engagement with the norm...