Maxime Rodinson

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Maxime Rodinson (26 January 1915–23 May 2004) was a French Marxist historian, sociologist and orientalist. The son of a Russian-Polish Jewish clothing trader who died in Auschwitz with his wife, Rodinson studied oriental languages, and became professor of Ethiopian (Amharic) at EPHE (École Pratique des Hautes Études, France).

He joined the French Communist Party in 1937 for "moral reasons." He then turned away after the Stalinist drift of the party, from which he was excluded in 1958. He is the author of a rich body of work, including his well-known "Muhammad," a biography of the prophet of Islam.

Rodinson became well-known in France when he expressed a certain reticence about Israel, despite his own Jewish ancestry. He particularly criticized the settlement policies of the Jewish state. At the same time, some credit him with coining the term "Islamic fascism" (le fascisme islamique) in 1979, which he used to describe the Iranian revolution.

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[edit] Biography

[edit] Family

The parents of Maxime Rodinson were Russian-polish immigrants, who became members of the Communist Party. They arrived in France at the end of the 19th century as refugees from anti-Semitic pogroms in the Russian Empire. His father was a clothing trader, who set up a business making waterproof clothing in the Yiddish-speaking part of Paris, called the Pletzl, in the district of the Marais. They became port-of-call for the other Russian exiles, most of them revolutionaries hostile to the Tsarist regime. His father tried to unionise and organize educational and other services for the working-class Jewish community. In 1892, he helped to establish a Jewish working-class library, containing hundreds of works in Yiddish, Russian and French.

In 1920, the Rodinsons joined the Communist Party and as soon as France recognised Soviet Russia, in 1924, they applied for Soviet citizenship. Rodinson grew up in a fervently Stalinist "de-Judaized" and "anti-Zionist" family. Neither he nor his sister learned Yiddish. The family was poor so that Rodinson became an errand boy at the age of 13 after obtaining a primary school certificate. But he thrived and learned by borrowing books, obliging teachers, who didn't demand payment, and began to learn oriental languages at first on Saturday afternoons and in the evenings.

In 1932, he gained entry to the Ecole des Langues Orientales to prepare for a career as a diplomat-interpreter, thanks to the possibility for persons without academic qualifications to take the competitive entrance examination. He learned Arabic. Later he prepared a thesis in comparative Semitics, and learned Hebrew, which surprised his family. In 1937, he entered the National Council of Research, became a full-student of Islam and joined the same year the Communist Party.

During the Second World War, he was appointed to the French Institute of Damascus in 1940, where he extended his knowledge of Islam and escaped the persecution of Jews in occupied France. His parents perished in Auschwitz in 1943. He spent seven years in Lebanon (in Sidon and Beirut).

[edit] A professor of Oriental Languages and a Marxist without party

In 1948, he became a librarian at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, where he was put in charge with the Muslim section. In 1955, he was appointed director of studies at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, becoming a professor of classical Ethiopian four years later. He left the Communist Party but remained a Marxist in the same period (1958), accused of doing so to further his career. But his decision was based on his agnosticism, and he explained that being a party member was like following a religion and he wanted to renounce

"the narrow subordination of efforts at lucidity to the exigencies of mobilization, even for just causes."

He became well-known in the 1960s when he published "Muhammad" in 1961, a biography of the Prophet's life written in a sociological point of view, biography which is still banned in parts of the Arab world. Five years later, he published "Islam and Capitalism", a study of the economic decline of Muslims society. He was accused of being anti-Zionist for his stance in favor of Palestinian self-determination, during the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. He was awarded the 1995 Prize by the Rationalist Organisation.

[edit] The Palestinian Conflict

Few month before publishing his famous article, he took part to a meeting organised in the "Mutualité" in Paris for the Palestinian struggle. Published in June 1967 under the title "Israel, fait colonial" (Israel, a colonial fact) in Jean-Paul Sartre's journal, "les Temps Modernes", Rodinson's article made him known as a monger of the Palestinian cause. At the same time, he created the Groupe de Recherches et d'Actions pour la Palestine with his colleague Jacques Berque.

At that time, he observed that the Palestinian struggle was mainly the cause of anti-semitic right and Maoist fringe of the left. He called the Palestinians to take their case to liberal Europeans, warning of the danger of a religious lecture of the conflict which would tarnish the reputation of a just cause:

"in the ardor of the ideological struggle against Zionism, those Arabs most influenced by a Muslim religious orientation would seize upon the old religious and popular prejudices against the Jews in general"

His anti-Zionism was based on two main reproaches : pretending to impose to all Jews all over the world an identity and a nationalist ideology, and judaizing territories at the cost of expulsion and domination of the Palestinians.

His vision of the Palestinian conflict shifted from this radical view to a call for peaceful negotiations between Israeli Jews and Palestinians. Israel could not be regarded as a colonial-settler state but a national fact too. Israeli Jews had collective rights that the Palestinians had to honor:

"If there are two or more ethnic groups in the same country, and if the danger of the domination of one by the other is to be avoided, then both these groups must be represented as distinct communities at the political level, and each must be accorded the right to defend its interests and aspirations."

That is the reason why he disagreed with the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO), warning them against the illusion based on the Algerian FLN guerilla warfare which driven out French "colons". At the same time, he urged the Israelis to stop pretending to be part of Europe and accept being a part of the Middle East, then, Israelis have to learn to live with his neighbors, by reckoning the injustices made against the Palestinians and adopting a language of conciliation and compromise.

[edit] Studying Islam in a sociological point of view

Rodinson's work combined Sociological and Marxist theories, Marxism which helped him:

"opening my eyes and making me understand and say 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 and "probably in an unconscious fashion, [he] compared him to Stalin." This attempt, despite some mistakes, was a rationalist study which tried to explain the economical and social origins of Islam. In his further work was "Islam and Capitalism" (1966), title echoing to Max Weber's famous thesis regarding the development of Capitalism in Europe and the rise of Protestantism. He tried to go beyond 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, seing Islam as a neutral factor. Throughout all his later works on Islam, he will stress out the relation between the doctrines inspired by Muhammad and economical and social structures in the Muslim world.

[edit] Works by Maxime Rodinson

This list refers to the English editions.

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

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