Marxism and Islam: Revisiting Rodinson—and moving onward

With this CfP, we intend to start the preparations for a collective work (a journal special issue or an edited book) in the occasion of celebrating the 60th anniversary of great Marxist historian Maxime Rodinson’s groundbreaking work Islam et capitalisme, first published in French in 1966. The book itself was a frontal attack on Weberian historiography and the modernization theories prevalent in the previous decades. Equating human progress with capitalist industrialization with colonialist and class-blind biases, this anti-Marxist mainstream held that Islam as an organized religion was an obstacle to capitalist industrialization precisely because the organizing principles of the religion were formulations of some holy scripts forging a Muslim ethics ex-ante their application in real world. If Christianity reformed itself through the thoroughly-challenged Catholic dogma with Protestantism, which immediately yielded economic results because of a renewed ethics, Islam was never able to accomplish a parallel reform, which explained the backwardness of the Muslim world. Rodinson argued otherwise: the underdevelopment of the Muslim world was to be found not in the Muslim ethics, but in the unequal global capitalist relations—North and South, core and periphery, and industrial and non-industrial parts of the world. Even for Rodinson, Islam was born and later developed into a very vivid capitalistic sector based on long-distance trade before the advent of commercial capitalism in Europe.

Rodinson’s work concerned not only the history of Islam but also the future of Muslims. Many events in world history since the second half of the twentieth century, including the Iranian Revolution, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the 9/11 attacks, ISIS attacks in the name of Islam, the Danish cartoon crisis, the Charlie Hebdo attack and many more, continue to be discussed as evidence of the backwardness of Muslim-majority societies. The October 7 reignition of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and the resulting war in Gaza, leading to the tragic deaths of tens of thousands of Palestinians, is attributed predominantly to the radical Islamism of Hamas; however, there is a notable absence of attempts to provide a materialist integrative perspective that causally links this conflict to the inherent contradictions of capitalism, which shows that Rodinson’s work is still needed today. On the one hand, the precarity, poverty, and deepening class conflicts driven by neoliberal strategies have given rise to religious organizations, transforming them into solidarity networks. On the other hand, there are inferences that gender inequalities, rooted in the production and reproduction of human beings and the reproduction of labor power—fundamental conditions for the existence of the capitalist system—are “naturalized” in the Muslim world due to Islamic tenets. In order to produce a Marxist policy against these mainstream perspectives, a comprehensive analysis is needed.

This stream invites submissions that delve into the intersections of Marxism and Islam, exploring key debates within Marxist literature regarding the relationship between capitalism and Islam, emphasizing their rationality/irrationality. However, any submissions addressing issues arising from the context of Marxism and Islam are welcome.