Islam and Capitalism E-Book

Maxime Rodinson

• Herausgeber: Saqi Books
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Serie: Saqi Essentials
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 616

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2007

Beschreibung

Presents a rebuttal of the cultural reductionism of Max Weber and others who have tried to explain the politics and society of the Middle East by reference to some unchanging entity called 'Islam,' typically characterised as instinctively hostile to capitalism. This work looks at the facts, analysing economic texts with his customary common sense.

Leseprobe

ISLAM AND CAPITALISM

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ISLAM AND CAPITALISM

Translated from the French byBrian Pearce

Introduction byRoger Owen

ISBN 10: 0-86356-471-2

ISBN 13: 978-0-86356-471-0

First published as Islam et capitalisme in 1966 by Éditions du Seuil, Paris

copyright © Éditions du Seuil 1966 and 2007

This translation first published in 1974 by

Allen Lane, a Division of Penguin Books Ltd, London

Translation copyright © Penguin Books Ltd 1974 and 2007

Introduction © Roger Owen 2007

This edition published 2007 by Saqi Books

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

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Contents

Introduction, by Roger Owen

Foreword

1.   The Problem Stated

What Is Capitalism?

2.   What Islam Prescribes

The Qur’an and the Sunnah

An Ideal of Social Justice?

3.   Economic Practice in the Muslim World of the Middle Ages

The Capitalistic Sector

Feudalism or Asiatic Mode of Production?

A Just Society?

4.   The Influence of Muslim Ideology Generally in the Economic Field

The Ideology of the Qur’an

Post-Qur’anic Muslim Ideology

5.   Islam and Capitalism in the Muslim Countries Today

Origination from Within or from Without?

Influence of the Muslim Religion?

A Muslim Path for Capitalism?

6.   Conclusions and Prospects

Correlations and Priorities

Illusions and Mystifications

Islam and Socialism

Afterword

Notes and References

Index

Introduction

Roger Owen

Maxime Rodinson (1915–2004) described himself in life as many things, on one occasion as an ‘autodidact, doctor of letters and a specialist in several areas in the anthropology of the peoples of the Near East and of Semitic languages’; on another, as a specialist in Islam via the optic of sociology and the history of religions. However, when it comes to his authorship of Islam and Capitalism it is best to view him as that unusual combination of an Orientalist and someone who, after being a Marxist political activist in his youth, still retained not just an interest in those Marxist socio-historical hypotheses which he still believed to be ‘correct’, but also in the role of ideology and of certain ideological movements of the past, among which he included religious movements.

All this is probably enough to explain why Islam and Capitalism is, in fact, two books in one. The first four chapters consist of what most later commentators have regarded as a largely successful attempt to demonstrate that, far from discouraging economic development, ‘Islam provides an explicit legitimation of trade and commerce’. Written in a somewhat didactic, as well as often a combative fashion, it combines an erudite reading of a very large number of Arabic texts with the use of a comparative political economy framework by which Islam is treated as a religion like Christianity and Judaism, and the Muslim world as part of the larger, pre-industrial Asian world where what Rodinson calls ‘financial and commercial capitalism’ flourished until checked, first by the Crusades and the Mongol invasions and then by European economic and military advance, including a flood of commodities, beginning in the seventeenth century.

One gets the sense that he feels himself in a thicket of false ideas which, as he also explained in one autobiographical moment, he felt it his duty to confront, however controversial this might be. While it is difficult to reconstruct, at this distance in time, the challenges he felt he faced, they would seem to come from all quarters of the political and religious spectrum, as well as, in the case of what he takes to be certain mistaken ideas of Max Weber, from inside the citadel of social history itself. Others are most instantly recognizable, notably from the ever-present ‘popularizers, general economists and jurists who make play with a few impressive words of Arabic’ and from whose facile generalizations the lay reader has most definitely to be saved. Not that Rodinson appeared to believe such readers as gullible as they might appear today. Like all great educators he viewed ignorance as only a temporary state of mind which logic and good sense could always overcome.

This is all well and good as far as it goes. By and large his main argument echoes the findings, not just of Marx himself, but of all the many other economic historians who followed him in writing of how a flourishing Asian capitalist sector was threatened, when not actually wiped out, by the import of British and other manufactured goods. True, much of this conventional wisdom has been challenged in the last decades by later economic historians of the Ottoman Empire and, more importantly, of eighteenth century India who have been able to show that eastern manufacturers were much more resilient in the face of the European challenge than previously imagined. But the larger point can still obtain, namely, that further capitalist development in the east was made virtually impossible, not by religion but by the development of material forces specific to the west.

Nevertheless, as Bryan Turner and many other critics have pointed out, the value of such assertions is greatly diminished by Rodinson’s Orientalist framework in which both Islam and Capitalism are presented as largely timeless and undifferentiated categories, with examples drawn from all over the centuries and all over the never fully defined Muslim world. Like others whose intellectual training at institutions like the Langues Orientales in Paris was counter-acted to some extent by wide reading in political economy as well as practical political concerns stemming from many years spent in the Near East and North Africa, knowledge of the social sciences was able to emancipate him a little from some of the reductionism and a-historicist notions of his teachers, but not necessarily very far. And this in turn raises what is really the central issue of whether the questions he raises about the relationship between these two large, and undifferentiated entities is of any great intellectual interest either. As Turner once again points out, any inquiry which begins from the use of the notions of Islam and Capitalism must inevitably get itself bogged down to no particular purpose in ‘false problems’ raised by such other staples of Orientalist historiography, as the debates about the essential character of the Islamic city or the presence or absence of an urban bourgeoisie. To which we might add problems raised by that strange creature entirely of Rodinson’s own devising, the ‘Muslim world market’?

A last point concerns Rodinson’s method of identifying those characteristics of Islamic capitalism which, if they had been allowed to develop, had the potential of transforming themselves into the basis for a full-blown capitalist system. This involves the tricky business of comparing them with similar characteristics to be found in western Europe, characteristics which, as Weber and others have argued, provided the basis for Europe’s singular industrial progress. But are Rodinson’s Islamic versions of the European original really the same? Given the imprecise nature of the categories used – a set of very simplified versions of what he calls financial and commercial capitalism – it is difficult to tell. However, in the light of what we now know of the essential role of legal systems, institutions and markets in supporting such systems, it does not seem reasonable to suppose that he is comparing like with like. Nor can we be sure that Weber and company were correct in identifying just what the magic combination was in the first place, given the criticisms levelled against them and the very real sense of circularity involved in a process of looking for features in the medieval period which you have already identified in advance as being just the ones needed for the transition to capitalist modernity.

It is with some pleasure that I, at least, turned to what I have identified as really a second book and that is Rodinson’s ideas about the economic state of the Muslim world at the time he was writing in the 1960s, and where it might reasonably be supposed to be heading as far as its further progress was concerned. Here his subject is definitely identified as that of ‘development versus underdevelopment’ which he defines as one of the ‘two or three major problems of our time’. As he rightly notes, the ‘whole third world’ was anxious to draw level. Just how this was to be achieved was being widely argued about in the Muslim part of it, with particular concern for the relationship between such key ideas as ‘socialism, capitalism, the nation, Islam’, all of which raised even more fundamental issues of the type that Rodinson himself was passionately interested in, to do with ‘the exact relations between economic activity, political activity, ideology and cultural tradition’.

Most of his thoughts on these large contemporary issues are contained in his fifth chapter entitled, ‘Islam and capitalism in the Muslim countries today’. What I particularly like about this section is that it contains a wonderful compendium of the ideas about development characteristic of a period when post-World War II global enthusiasm for planning, foreign aid, technical assistance and the like as a recipe for ‘catching up’ had just burst upon the Middle Eastern scene producing a wave of books by the men and women, most of whom Rodinson cites, who I, as a young graduate student, regarded as my teachers. For example: Charles Issawi, Doreen Warriner, Hassan Riad (before he became Samir Amin), Yusif Sayigh and A. J. Meyer – after whom my present Harvard Chair is named. This was a time when not much was known about the Middle East economies themselves, and the sky – for the planners and the experts and what were later called the ‘dev-men’ – still seemed the only limit. ‘From the needle to the rocket’, as one Cairo Arab Socialist slogan from the early 1960s put it, seemed to sum it all up.

Reading this chapter provides a wonderful flavour of that long-lost world, with its simple assumption that industrial progress stood at the heart of the development process and that this progress could be simply and accurately gauged, as Rodinson himself does, by tables showing the proportion of the population employed in factory industry. Optimism was further increased by the understanding that, as industrial techniques were almost entirely imported from the west, the countries of the non-European world had only to imitate them by stepping on to the escalator which was destined to carry their economies along the same path of industrial capitalism as Britain, France and America. For this, and other reasons, he has no truck with the idea of an alternative path being provided; the path that some Egyptian (as well as Russian and Indian) writers were calling ‘agricultural capitalism’. A formation which, if it really did exist, was, in his view, ‘incapable of transforming society in the direction of a capitalist socio-economic formation’.

What remained to be decided was exactly how and under what auspices this drive for development should be organized and promoted. In presenting his own thoughts on the matter Rodinson appears as much of an activist as a scholar with clear, if once again enormously over-simplified, views about the rival merits of the only two models he sees on offer, with the leading role being taken either by the state or the private sector. Not surprisingly, he favours the state. Just as inevitably he immediately rules out of court what some in the Middle East were then putting forward as a natural third way, a hybrid they termed ‘Islamic socialism’.

Here again, he goes to great lengths to prove that the success or failure of either model will have nothing to do with religion. Interestingly, this involves finding a few more dragons to dispatch. For example, the notion that there is any necessary relationship between what Islamic law has to say about property rights and the application of the law, which, as he correctly observes, has been ‘infinitely varied as between different times and places’. Nevertheless, on this as on many other occasions he pushes his argument just a little too far. ‘In reality’, he writes, ‘it seems that that the Muslim law of property has never prevented a factory from being installed or capital being made to fructify, by any capitalist’! (My italics.) ‘Never’ is a very big word to apply to any human activity, as we know. And, anyway, how can Rodinson, or anyone else for that matter, prove such a large negative?

Finally, let me address the question of which of the two models he thinks the Muslim world will choose. Here, after a somewhat tortuous process of reasoning, he comes to the conclusion that, given the importance the newly independent states attach to the aspirations of the masses, it will be what he terms the ‘statist’ way that will come out on top. This he ascribes, not just to the poor mobilizing power of capitalist ideologies in a third world context but, more provocatively, to the poor mobilizing power of Islam for economic ends as well. For someone on the left writing in the mid-1960s, this was indeed the conventional wisdom. However, for someone reading the book for the first time now it will seem rather quaint. As all observers of the contemporary Arab Middle East will know quite well, it is Rodinson’s statism that has degenerated into a kind of crony-capitalism in most parts of the Arab Middle East, as a result of recent programs of liberal reforms, and Islam that has shown a much greater power to mobilize the masses behind social ends than any of its secular rivals.

Why re-publish a book which is so very much of its own era, one written before the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, the publication of Edward Said’s attack on Orientalism, the Iranian revolution, and many other major events which have ensured that Rodinson’s subject matter is now approached in quite new ways? But perhaps that’s the point. In spite of everything it remains a historical document of great value. In its pages we can see a powerful mind wrestling with some of the largest questions which concerned, and still concern, not just the peoples of the Middle East but also those who wish to understand their economies, their societies and their ideologies, and to chart their progress. Just as important, the analysis is conducted in a spirit of what Rodinson himself calls a universalist-humanist ideology, perhaps a rarer position now than it was in the 1960s, but one which, in my opinion, provides the only proper viewpoint for persons seeking to understand and to speak for cultures other than their own.

Harvard UniversityOctober 2006

Foreword

This book, by a sociologist specializing in Islamic studies, is written with the high ambition to be of service to intellectuals in the countries that belong to the Muslim faith and civilization, by helping them to understand their situation. It is not that I presume myself superior, by virtue of ‘being European’, to the best among them in learning or intelligence. I lay claim to no advantage of that sort. It is merely that circumstances have enabled me to escape sooner than them from certain social impediments that obstruct their understanding of their own problems. I have had the good fortune to be given free access to the acquisition of a knowledge of their past that is clear of myths, and I have sought to rid myself of the myths that are hindrances to understanding their present. It must be added that I am in a position to speak out and say what they are often obliged to keep to themselves. This is a freedom that has to be paid for, like all freedoms, but the price, in my case, is not excessive; whereas they, generally speaking, have to pay a great deal more for it.

My book is also intended to help European readers, similarly. I do not subscribe to the mystique of the Third World, now so widespread in Left circles, and do not beat my breast daily in despair at not having been born in the Congo or somewhere like that. Nevertheless, the problems of the Third World are indeed of major significance, and my studies and concerns during the last thirty years and more have given me special knowledge of an important region of the Third World which shares the problems common to the latter but also possesses problems peculiar to itself. I put before the reader the ideas that the study and reflection I have undertaken have left with me. It is for him to judge and dispose of them as he sees fit: no one has a key to fit all locks.

Of what use can a foreword be? It can endeavour to introduce a book as a whole, explaining how the author has approached his subject, in order, so far as is possible, to prevent misunderstandings. What authors, and even people in general, are most commonly blamed for is not having done something they never set out to do.

This book is neither a textbook of the economic history of the Muslim world nor a popular outline of what might have been such a textbook. Incidentally, I regret that no such textbook or outline is available.1 On particular points which seem to me of fundamental importance, I have indeed summarized what historical studies have now established, to the best of my knowledge. But I have not sought to deal with the subject in general. In other words, what will be found here is not, in the main, a description, whether complete or incomplete, of the facts in all their many-sided diversity. The references I provide will enable, where the need arises, those who may wish to inform themselves on these details to look up the books and articles that deal with them.

My purpose has been to write a theoretical study; what does this mean? I start from the facts which have been established by scientific research and of which I have tried to keep myself informed, so far as possible, through making use of my knowledge of languages and the greater or lesser familiarity I have with the techniques of Oriental studies, history and sociology. Above all I have tried to draw conclusions on the plane of general problems, more precisely on the plane of certain general problems that have appeared to me as being especially important. Where does the Muslim world (in the different phases of its history) belong in the general typology of systems of production and distribution of goods? Do the answers that can be given to this question, the phenomena observed in this field, enable us to understand better the evolution that may take place within these systems, and from one of them to another? Or the factors in this development, or these developments? Or the relations between the economic facts and the other aspects of the total culture of a given society, in particular the ideological aspects, and most particularly, religion?

These large problems can be regarded as belonging to the domain of the philosophy of history or to that of sociology. This question of nomenclature seems to me of little interest. What is essential is that the problems exist.

It is clear, too, that these problems possess topical significance, just because they are general in character. Pace the specialists, they are significant politically. This does not mean that solving them necessarily depends on a certain political attitude or activity, nor that whoever deals with them has perforce to submit himself to taking a particular standpoint. It was a great misfortune for scientific activity (then called philosophy) that it was for so long the handmaid of theology. The misfortune would be no less if it were now to be turned into the handmaid of political ideology, which has taken the place of theology. Attempts to do this (in which I myself have participated) have turned out badly for scientific work and even for politics too. There is no need to dwell on it: the facts are plain enough.

An enlightened political outlook should merely take account of whatever conclusions research may lead to where these problems are concerned. It is even to its interest that this research should be as independent as possible. Furthermore, any sociopolitical ideology needs to be constructed exclusively from sound materials. Political leaders and activists, citizens who seek to find their way in the labyrinth of facts and ideas, often adopt – as the basis for their decisions – ideas, attitudes and conceptions that are lamentably inaccurate. This is to a large extent inevitable; in great part it is also due, however, to the failure of those who know and who could do more to communicate what they know. The specialists who smile or grimace at the myths that are widely accepted by the public (concerning matters in their special field, since they themselves belong to ‘the public’ in relation to everything else) ought to appreciate that they are not always free from responsibility for these infatuations.

I am well aware that often it is a matter of ideas whose strength lies in some emotional source and which cannot be shaken by any argument, experience, or information. But this is never more than partly true, and the introduction of a little lucid and well-informed consciousness into an ideological magma is still a task to which it is worth applying oneself, and not so utterly hopeless that one can feel exempt from undertaking it when one has the means to do so.

I know, too, that the educator himself greatly needs to be educated, that he is never so free as he supposes of preconceptions that determine the direction taken by his deductions. Here too, however, the power exercised by the adverse force is not so complete as ideologists imagine. It is possible to attain a certain degree of objectivity. It is inexcusable to use the pretext that complete objectivity is an unattainable ideal in order to submit willingly to an equally complete ideological control over one’s thinking. This is like deliberately jumping into a river so as to avoid getting wet.

My book is, then, of a theoretical character. Consequently, it is polemical. The conclusions at which I have arrived do indeed conflict with views that are very widely held. I have done all I can to avoid letting strictness on the plane of concepts lead me into writing anything hurtful to individuals. Perhaps I have not always succeeded in this. War has its own laws, which apply even to the battle of ideas, and one is always led into going a little too far. It is hard to wage a polemic against someone without seeming to despise him. Nevertheless, I am too firmly convinced of the determinism that dominates men’s thoughts and actions to be, at bottom, contemptuous of them. At all events, I give notice of this to my opponents and to my readers.

I have in particular attacked myths that are highly current among the Muslim public. Undoubtedly, many people in the Muslim world will on this account accuse me of spiteful hidden motives of a racialist or colonialist order. The political attitudes I have adopted provide, I think, an adequate reply to any such charges. It is behind complaisance towards accepted ideas that contempt and calculation hide themselves; besides, I have dealt no less roughly with some very European myths.

To attempt to unite, as I have, exact knowledge of the essential facts with a certain capacity for generalization presents a basic difficulty that the public does not always appreciate. I do not know whether or not I have coped more or less satisfactorily with this difficulty. Books of this kind struggle amid dilemmas that are hard to resolve and that specialists frequently decide cannot be overcome. The latter resign themselves, either in desperation or quite happily, to writing only for a narrow readership which is already well enough informed on the problems in their field. I have tried to avoid writing a book of the type that specialists rightly regret to see so widely read, consisting of rash theorizing on the basis of facts drawn from too small a part of the field that the theory seeks to cover, or of no less audacious deduction of particular judgements from general conceptions (whether the latter are valid or not) without regard to the actual facts – not to mention that irresponsible philosophico-literary chatter which these same specialists denounce with equal justification and which they see flourishing so frequently in the bastard genre of the essay. However, the wide prevalence of these types of general dissertation does not imply, as specialists often think (or appear to think), that attempts to generalize can be dispensed with, or that such attempts are always premature and constitute a mere waste of time in pursuit of ends that are intrinsically unattainable. The general public, specialists in other fields, and even practical workers in the sphere of social activity have need of syntheses, even if these are inevitably only provisional. If the experts do not provide such syntheses, these people will turn to less qualified authorities, and the results will be lamentable – indeed, they are already bad enough. Moreover, the advance of learning itself requires that attempts be made at well-thought-out surveys of work in progress.

On their part, those who like generalizations have their – often justified – complaints. They have the right to insist that whoever plunges into these dangerous attempts shall possess at least some notion of the development of general ideas, of the way of approaching problems that modern thought has worked out, and of the major problematics to which reference needs to be made. The great difficulty is, precisely, that of keeping up to date, broadly at any rate, without losing contact with specialized research. This is a practical difficulty and in trying to avoid succumbing to it I have sought to meet a challenge – presuming too much, perhaps, upon my talents and my capacity for work. All I can say is that I have made this attempt honestly and without trickery.

Finally, the public interested in these matters has a right not to find itself subjected to an unnecessary display of erudition. I have therefore used in the course of my argument only those facts that are strictly necessary for my purposes. The notes (to which the reader is free not to refer) are there simply to provide those who object to what I say with the possibility of checking and examining my statements on the basis of my sources, and to help those who may wish to obtain further information on some point that I have not been able to deal with fully. In some cases the notes also include brief discussions on matters of secondary interest that would have overloaded the main argument.

One question remains, on which I ought, it seems to me, to offer some explanation here. The present essay is intended and affirmed to be Marxist in orientation. This does not mean, as many will suppose, that I have subordinated my research to dogmas of doubtful validity and suspect origins, but only that I have tried to think out the problems arising from my study in the light of some very general socio-historical hypotheses that seem to me to give direction to a whole field of study where scientific exploration is only beginning, and which I consider have so far been confirmed by the concrete knowledge we have obtained. I do not bring forward in support of them any argument that is not drawn from facts or from reasoning of the kind that is normal in scientific research, and I am ready to abandon them if facts or scientific reasoning show me that they are futile. Furthermore, I deny that one can get very far along the path of generalization without broad hypotheses of this kind. Those who claim to be able to do without them end up with an unintelligible accumulation of facts; or, more frequently, employ, without being conscious of them, different hypotheses, which seem to me to be much less solidly based, in order to construct their own often highly subtle systems of categories.

A little more needs, nevertheless, to be said on this point. Anti-Marxists will be sure in advance that this book contains attitudes of a kind that they denounce (sometimes rightly) but which are in fact not to be found in it. The Marxists, marxisants, semi-Marxists and pseudo-Marxists, on the other hand, who are so plentiful in the Third World and in the European Left, will be disappointed at not finding in it attitudes that they are used to regarding as inseparable from the very concept of Marxism.

There are a score, a hundred, nay, a thousand varieties of Marxism. Marx said many things, and it is easy to find in his work, just as in the Bible, something to provide support for any idea whatever: ‘The devil himself can cite Scripture for his purpose.’ I make no claim to impose as the only correct one my own understanding of the Marxist orientation, as I have been accused of doing by a distinguished writer; and I hold no authority to excommunicate anybody, as another no less distinguished writer has blamed me for doing. I am myself the one excommunicated. I desire only to assert the right to define my own line of thought. I am even ready to proclaim that Marx would not completely agree with this line.

My Marxism is not institutionalized Marxism. The latter is certainly not arrêté, to employ Sartre’s expression, except in a sense. Important work is being carried on in its light (or in its shadow) in the Communist countries and even elsewhere – in France, for example. It will be seen that I have made use of some of this work in my book. But a set of taboos stands in the way of a free approach to the great (and sometimes even small) problems on which the only answer permitted is that which is laid down in dogma. Or, at least, one has to observe so many precautions regarding both form and content that the flight of one’s thought is heavily fettered thereby. Many powerful minds in the Communist countries inwardly escape from these fetters by means of the ‘double-think’ that is traditional in countries where a state ideology prevails. I have not seen the need, in France, to subject myself to this method, which is always equivocal and which brings with it, whatever anyone may say, more or less disastrous consequences for the free play of ideas. The advantage of seeing my book praised, or even merely quoted, in some journal or other has not seemed to me to be worth the price of this compromise.

I understand, often respect, and sometimes admire my former comrades who have considered that devotion to a cause, attachment to a group, or loyalty to an allegiance of their youth, must take precedence over the free expression of their thought, without their always seeing that the restrictions on expression that they accept often result in fettering the development of their thought. I have eventually decided that, as far as I personally am concerned, what is at stake does not justify the sacrifice.

This book does not belong, either, to the category I call pragmatic Marxism, which embraces institutionalized Marxism but is wider than that. In this category I include the many types of Marxist ideology which, concentrating on tasks of social action that, though various, are always of capital importance in the eyes of those who hold these views, subordinate to the tasks in question all theoretical and intellectual activity in general. This does not mean that I deny the usefulness of some of these tasks. While, however, the smallness of the groups that incarnate these ideologies (apart from the Communist organizations, which belong to the category previously discussed), often saves them from showing the disagreeable characteristics of institutionalized Marxism – in particular the massive weight of dogma, the ‘official’ mentality of the cadres that lay down the law on intellectual matters, the display of a policy of strength that is both repulsive to sincere minds and attractive to those who respect strength wherever it is to be found – they nevertheless contain within themselves an infantile, perhaps foetal, form of this same development. Inevitably they tend to reproduce its features. In some cases I value their activity, and I am not without hope of rendering service to it on some limited points, in endeavouring, for my own part, to engage in militancy, in radical activism. I do not, however, intend to adhere to the utopian aspirations to which this tendency almost inevitably gives rise, nor to subordinate my scientific work to the purposes of these groups.

The connection between truth and practice is a serious and complex question to which Marxists have hitherto replied a little too lightly in favour of political practice. I do not claim to be able to solve this problem in three sentences. I merely believe that I have noted that the search for truth has frequently been hindered through being tied up too directly with political action, and that this has occurred even in the best of cases. What can be said of the worst? Eventually, moreover, in the long run, it is to the advantage even of politicians if an activity carried on parallel to their own is exclusively concerned with discovering truth. A narrowly pragmatic and polemical conception of things usually gives rise to illusions, and illusions in the end prove fatal.

Finally, the Marxism that influences me is not the philosophical Marxism now in fashion, especially in France. Let there be no misunderstanding here. I am not a positivist as a matter of principle. I am convinced of the usefulness, the necessity, the fundamental and inescapable nature of philosophical reflection. Nor am I blind to the implicit philosophical presuppositions that are hidden in every piece of research, even if this be in intention objective in the highest degree. It is more than obvious, in particular, that Marx’s scientific procedure was guided by the philosophical decisions from which he began. All the same, there remains a very large area of the field of learning that can and must be explored with these philosophical presuppositions provisionally suspended, and in accordance with methods that can be approved (in principle, at least) by all investigators, however different their philosophical viewpoints may be, within a given culture. This is the field of science in which so philosophical a thinker as Sartre acknowledges that the positivist procedure is the one to follow.

Now, whatever some Marxists may say, there is a problematic peculiar to the humane sciences, or to the social sciences, or to sociology in the broadest sense, whatever name one may give to this field. It is in this field that Marx established the presence of certain laws, made certain discoveries, put forward certain hypotheses which are, properly speaking, independent of his philosophical attitude and on which thinkers of very divergent philosophical schools can agree. This is the field in which I take my stand in the present work. It is harmful (and I think experience confirms my view here) to the philosopher, even the Marxist philosopher, to enter into this field of research, as he often does, without troubling to acquaint himself with the concepts, methods and problematic that are special to it.

To deduce directly from a general philosophical thesis, even if this be a correct one, consequences relating to the special problems of sociology or history, without going through the mediation of the laws or constants that are distinctively socio-historical, without taking account of the mass of empirical data or partial generalizations accumulated by researchers, and without using the special methods they have worked out, may occasionally enable someone to achieve brilliant and thought-provoking insights. Usually, however, it leads only to discoveries that are banal, insubstantial or even absurd. I recall an apocryphal story told me in Poland about a great Western philosopher arriving in Warsaw and questioning with curiosity a local intellectual: ‘You are in a socialist country. Do you still feel alienated?’

Though there are many reasons for admiring Marx, I put this one first and foremost. Originally a philosopher, he realized that before he could put forward well-founded propositions on social evolution he must devote a lifetime of study to mastering political economy, social history and what today we call sociology, or the humane sciences. And this he did.

I do not believe in the unity of Marxism. Among Marxist ideas I distinguish inter alia between a philosophical approach, some sociological propositions, and an ideological inspiration. There is, of course, a certain connection between them in Marx’s thought and even in the nature of things. But from the standpoint of methodology they can be dissociated. I will here put on one side the philosophical approach, while acknowledging the difficulties it contributes to my conception of a non-utopian radical activism. This means, indeed, tending, in contrast to Marx, to contemplate an ideal that is not necessarily something demanded by reality.

Here I base myself exclusively, or almost exclusively, on the great sociological or socio-historical theses worked out by Marx, which seem to me to be solidly established and acceptable to all thinkers on the scientific plane. This does not mean denying the ideological obstacles that have stood in the way of their general acceptance, and which still stand in their way. There were also ideological obstacles to acceptance of the law of how bodies fall. It is enough, however, to observe the extent to which these theses are nowadays currently accepted in circles most thoroughly opposed to Marxist ideology and philosophy in order to appreciate what a strong scientific foundation they possess. True, they are still contested (my book will show numerous examples of this), not only among ideologists but also among scholars. Nevertheless, the latter, at least (even those who are most hostile to these theses on the theoretical plane), have been compelled to swallow a big dose of Marxist theses, the origin of which they have sometimes forgotten. Ordinary scholars who take no interest in theory usually work on the basis of general ideas which were first put forward by Marxism and were then vigorously combated, but which have become the common property of science.

I apply the term ‘Marxist ideology’ to the ideological ensemble grouped around the values that were brought to the fore by Marx and by Marxist tradition, and which have been exalted even by those Marxists who most cynically trampled upon them in practice. Actually there is nothing specifically Marxist about them. They are the universalistic values that were already put forward by the liberal-humanitarian ideology (to employ Mannheim’s terminology) of the eighteenth century. They are derived from a long moral tradition – philosophical and, in part, religious. I remain consciously faithful to them. Ought this to be taken into consideration in a book that is intended to be a scientific work? Yes, in so far as the book fights against conceptions that, in challenging scientific facts, are inspired by hostile ideologies, with the intention of attacking the values that Marxism exalts. This applies, for example, and above all, to the ideology that ascribes absolute supremacy to ‘national’ values, or ‘communal’ ones (when what is meant is religious communities).

This is why it is still meaningful to proclaim oneself a Marxist on the plane of socio-historical studies. This view is challenged by good historians and good sociologists who think that all the valid elements in the Marxist theses have been incorporated in science in general. That is true to a large extent, as has already been said. But also, in many sectors of the humane sciences, those most favourable to the development of irresponsible philosophico-literary chatter, in the sector of generalization (where poorly-equipped researchers easily tend to rely on bad philosophy; or else, as Engels well put it, while wishing not to concern themselves with philosophy at all, automatically secrete bad philosophy); and, finally, in the sectors that are directly linked with the preoccupations of the conflicting ideologies, an anti-scientific, and thereby anti-Marxist, tendency is continually reappearing. So long as this goes on making itself felt – and that, I fear, will be for a long time yet – there will be justification for proclaiming oneself a Marxist in this field.

I have been helped by many friends with whom I have discussed the problems brought up in this book. I can only thank them collectively. They are too numerous for me to list, and to make a selection among them would misrepresent the matter. They are well aware how grateful I am to them, as I am also to those who have helped me bring this book into existence – most particularly my wife, and also Jean Lacouture, who was the first to suggest that I expand a score of lines I had written on this subject as a contribution to a colloquium, to the dimensions of an article – which in turn grew into a book. I set forth the substance of it in a series of lectures at the Faculty of Arts in Algiers in March 1965, and the subsequent discussions also proved very helpful to me.

I, better than anyone else, realize the shortcomings of this work – so ambitious in its aim. I am too well aware of the gaps in my knowledge to enjoy that peace of mind that ignorance confers on so many authors of presumptuous essays. My excuse is that there were things that needed to be said and that I saw nobody saying them to the public interested in the matter, both in an accessible way and on the basis of an adequately sound and extensive documentation. Others, I hope, will do better than I. May I at least, in the words of a Finnish folk-song, have succeeded in blazing ‘a fresh trail for more illustrious singers to follow, men richer in songs, from among the young people now growing up, in the rising generation’.

ONE

The Problem Stated

One thing is now clear to us all: the problem of the underdeveloped countries, of the growing contrast between the prosperous and sated world of the industrialized communities and the hungry universe in which the remainder of mankind struggles for life, is one of the two or three major problems of our time. In discussing it, a mass of other crucial questions arise in turn. The whole of this Third World, as it is called, is obsessed by the desire to draw level as soon as possible, in some respects at least, with the industrialized world in one or other of its two forms, or in a mixture of both. What does this really imply? How far is it necessary to go in the process of drawing level in order to achieve the enviable prosperity of the industrialized countries? Must one go so far as to sacrifice values that are specially cherished, those that constitute the particularity, the individuality, the identity of the peoples concerned? And what if these values (or some of them at least) are precisely the factor responsible for the backwardness that is now so obvious?

The problem has been widely argued about, with the heat and feeling that are aroused only by something that is of really vital importance to everyone. This is especially true of that very considerable section of the underdeveloped countries that make up the Muslim world – or to be precise, the world where for the last few centuries the Muslim religion has been predominant (for one cannot be too precise with regard to this matter: it is the unity of this world on every level that is just what is in question). Throughout these countries the discussion concentrates around certain key ideas: economic development, socialism, capitalism, the nation, Islam – how are these different concepts to be related together? Politics in the most immediate, practical and everyday meaning of the word demands that this question be clarified and answers found. Rulers act, ideologists and politicians put forward programmes in accordance with the answers (whether implicit or explicit, carefully thought out or inspired by violent feelings, theoretical or pragmatic) that they give to this question.

Moreover, in considering this matter one soon becomes involved in problems that transcend the present period and that draw one into discussions of a more theoretical and fundamental character. What are the connections, the exact relations, between economic activity; political activity; ideology (whether religious or otherwise); and cultural tradition? Here we find theories in conflict: philosophers, sociologists, scholars enter the game, advancing their views which are no doubt partly inspired by the facts that they study (or are supposed to study!) but which yet owe something to the passions, interests and aspirations of the circles in which they live, the ways of thinking handed down to them by their predecessors, and sometimes (more often than is thought) to sheer desire to shine in some salon, lecture-theatre or meeting-hall. Yet it is possible to discover here the same general tendencies that have always conflicted with each other in connection with our understanding of the phenomena of human society.

This book, which is intended to contribute to elucidating these problems, considers both the phenomena of the present time and the great fundamental issues. Although I have approached these from one particular angle only, I have realized in the course of writing that – all the same – everything was being called in question.

Capitalism and Islam: here was a problem that had been discussed by Muslims and by Orientalists, by economists and by historians in Europe. The debate was far from lacking in a basis. The Muslims, moved either by piety or nationalism (or both), were concerned to show that nothing in their religious tradition was opposed to the adoption of modern and progressive economic methods,1 or else to show that this tradition tended to favour economic and social justice.2 Some European scholars who are sympathetic towards Islam also uphold one or other of these views.3 Others who are, on the contrary, hostile to Islam (and who are backed by a horde of publicists who know nothing whatsoever about the subject), endeavour to show that this religion, by forbidding those who hold it to engage in any progressive economic initiative, dooms them to stagnation4 – or else (a recent variant of the same theory) fatally predisposes them to a satanic alliance with Communism, itself intrinsically evil.5 The conclusion to be drawn is that these (Muslim) peoples must be vigorously combated, in the interest of the progress of civilization in general. All these views, however they may contradict each other, are based, it should be observed, upon the same implicit presupposition. They assume that the men of a given epoch and a given region, that whole societies give strict obedience to a previously formed doctrine, which has taken shape independently of them; that they follow its precepts (and soak themselves in its spirit) without these undergoing any essential transformation, and without these men adapting them to their conditions of life and the attendant modes of thought. This presupposition, of which the supporters of these views are usually not even aware, seems to me to distort the whole problematic of this discussion. Nevertheless I shall examine their ideas without taking account of this basic objection, since not everyone will agree to it.

Only a few serious writers,6 mostly inspired by Marxism, have looked at the problem in a manner that is both impartial and also in conformity with a sounder sociological idea of the relations between ideological doctrines and social realities.7 Why, in fact, did capitalism triumph in modern times in Europe, and not in the Muslim countries (among others)? But also – why has European capitalism been able to penetrate the Muslim world so easily? In the past and in the present, has Islam, or at least, the cultural tradition of the Muslim countries, favoured (or does it favour?) capitalism, or socialism, or a backward economy of the ‘feudal’ type? Or does it urge those who are influenced by it in a quite different direction, a new economic system specific to Islam?

What Is Capitalism?

It may seem odd that most of those who have dealt with the problem of capitalism (and they are legion) have omitted to stop and define the concept they were employing. Actually, this is odd only for those who have a naïve notion about scholarship and scholars. One of the favourite procedures of present-day obscurantism consists in playing upon the vagueness in which the concepts employed have deliberately been allowed to remain. Against this tendency we need to get back to the eighteenth century’s insistence – which is indeed a requirement for any scientific work worthy of the name – upon always defining the words one uses and using them only in the meaning thus defined.

It must be plainly understood that the term ‘capitalism’ has been used in two different senses. More precisely, it has been used in a wide variety of senses which can be grouped in two different semantic fields; a great deal of the argument that has gone on, for example, about whether or not classical antiquity experienced capitalism, can be reduced to a confusion between these two groups of meanings.

On the one hand, the term ‘capitalism’ has been used to signify certain economic institutions taken in isolation, or a combination of several of these; or else a state of mind that may accompany and inspire operations carried on within the framework of these institutions. In all such cases the writers who used the concept in this way did not consider that it necessarily applied to a society as a whole. Capitalist institutions or a capitalist mentality can coexist with institutions or a mentality of a different type within one and the same society. They can exist as ‘minorities’ in such a society. Among these institutions and mental characteristics that are, at least partially, capitalist in type have been mentioned: private ownership of the means of production, free enterprise, striving-for-profit as the chief motive force in economic activity, production for the market, money economy, the mechanism of competition, rationality in the conduct of an enterprise, and so on.

On the other hand, the description ‘capitalist’ has been given to a society, taken as a whole, in which institutions or a mentality defined as capitalist are predominant. Thus, in particular, this description has been applied to Western European society (with its American extensions) since a date which varies from writer to writer – the beginning of the nineteenth century, the sixteenth century, etc. – and sometimes to other societies as well, such as the Roman Empire at a certain period.8

It is obviously difficult to discuss a problem such as the one being considered here when the concept that is first and foremost in question is subject to so many divergent definitions – if one wants to take all these definitions into account. Contrariwise, it would be too easy to adopt one particular definition, as so many dogmatic Marxists have done, and settle the matter on the basis of this definition. One may prove, for instance, that a certain society is not capitalist in this sense. But that will not convince in the least those who hold to another definition of capitalism. Moreover, it must be appreciated (as the dogmatic Marxists in question do not appreciate) that no definition is in itself more ‘scientific’ than another. In any scientific discussion anyone is free to choose the definition he prefers, provided this is logically coherent and he sticks to it throughout the discussion. Choice between definitions is a matter chiefly important for teaching purposes, or in relation to the greater or lesser convenience of certain definitions in argument and research. It is therefore preferable to employ definitions that demarcate concepts that are useful in analysing phenomena in depth.

A choice has to be made. I have chosen definitions that belong to the framework of Marxist economic and sociological thought. A further distinction is called for, however. Marx and the Marxists have used the terms ‘capitalism’ and ‘capitalist’ more coherently than many non-Marxist writers. Nevertheless, it is also true that they have applied these terms both to particular economic institutions and to the society of modern Europe where these institutions have developed to an especially high degree. It is thus possible to distinguish between uses of these terms in different (although closely connected) senses in Marxist writings. The distinction was implicit between the concepts to which they were applied, but it is of some importance in a discussion of this sort to separate them quite sharply.9 I have adopted, in order to distinguish between these concepts, the terminology of the Polish sociologist Julian Hochfeld, who has, I think, gone further than anyone else up to now towards achieving precision in these matters.10 Here, then, are some of the notions between which I shall distinguish.

On the one hand, capitalism is a ‘mode of production’ in the strict sense of the word, that is, an economic model in accordance with which production can be carried on in an ‘enterprise’ (in the widest sense of this term). An owner of means of production pays a wage to free workers in order that the latter may, using the aforesaid means of production, produce commodities which the owner will sell for his own profit. He is an ‘industrial capitalist’.11

In the second place, it is possible to talk of a capitalist ‘sector’ in the economic system of a given society, in order to indicate all the enterprises in which, in this society, the capitalist mode of production is operative; this was the usage in Soviet Russia in the period of the New Economic Policy.12

Finally, there is a capitalist ‘socio-economic formation’. This is what one usually has in mind when speaking of capitalism; it is the formation in which we are living. It is marked by a particular ‘economic system’ in which the capitalist sector occupies a predominant place, and by an ideological and institutional superstructure corresponding to this.

However, these definitions leave open an important question in a field which, inter alia, we are going to study here. Marx explains, in Volume III of Capital, that ‘not commerce alone, but also merchant’s capital, is older than the capitalist mode of production [in this context to be understood as meaning “the capitalist socio-economic formation”], is, in fact, historically the oldest free state of existence of capital [die historisch älteste freie Existenzweise des Kapitals]’.13 ‘In all previous modes of production [i.e., in all pre-capitalist socio-economic formations] … merchant’s capital appears to perform the function par excellence of capital.’14 Further on, he adds to this, usurer’s capital, or financial capital: ‘Interest-bearing capital, or, as we may call it in its antiquated form, usurer’s capital, belongs together with its twin brother, merchant’s capital, to the antediluvian forms of capital, which long precede the capitalist mode of production [i.e. the capitalist socio-economic formation] and are to be found in the most diverse economic formations of society [in den verschiedensten ökonomischen Gesellschaftsformationen].’15 These are at least forms of that pre-capitalist commercial capital and usurer’s capital which theoreticians like Max Weber regard as ‘a capitalism of various forms’. Marx, like Weber and like Sombart, considers that the capitalist ‘socio-economic formation’, to speak like one of them, or modern capitalism, to use the language of the others, was born out of the late-medieval European forms of commercial capital and financial capital. At first sight, we seem to find similar forms of capital in the Muslim world of the Middle Ages. It will be important for us to establish first of all whether these forms really are essentially similar to those that were known to medieval Europe, for, if this is so, it will have been proved that Islam is not in itself an obstacle to the initial stages of an evolution that resulted in Europe in the capitalist socio-economic formation (or, if the expression be preferred, modern capitalism). Naturally, if the answer is affirmative, the question must then arise: why were these initial stages not followed by the same development as occurred in Europe, and was Islam responsible for this? So as to facilitate the discussion, I propose to call ‘capitalistic’ the whole of the sector covered by merchant capital and financial capital in these pre-capitalist societies. This is not in fact a capitalist sector in the sense in which such a sector existed in Russia under the N.E.P. That capitalist sector embraced a substantial number of small and medium-sized enterprises in which the capitalist mode of production in the strict sense was operative, where ‘production-capital’16 fructified by using the labour-power of free workers. Only the power of the Soviet state prevented this capital from developing to the point where it would have controlled all industrial production. Commercial capital and financial capital were not at all predominant in this sector, whereas in the Middle Ages this was indeed their role, production-capital being then reduced to a very limited function.

The existence of a ‘capitalistic’ sector like this, in particular, the ‘existence and development to a certain level’ of commercial capital are, according to Marx, the necessary condition (but not at all the sufficient condition, as he emphasizes) for the development of the capitalist socio-economic formation.17 On this point it is probable that all economists would agree, whatever their differences on terminology and whatever their disagreement with Marx on the nature of the supplementary conditions that made possible in Europe the transition to the capitalist socio-economic formation. It is therefore necessary to check whether this sector existed in the Muslim world in the Middle Ages, and if so whether it had an extent and a structure comparable to those that made possible in Europe the subsequent development of the capitalist socio-economic formation.

A problem of the greatest importance arises here. Before the coming of the capitalist socio-economic formation, can all cases of lending money at interest, and of trade (in the widest sense: every exchange of goods), be regarded as being such as to constitute a ‘capitalistic’ sector, that is, a sector on the basis of which, certain other conditions being given, a capitalist socio-economic formation might, perhaps, be able to develop? Marx tells us that the existence and development of merchant capital to a certain level are conditions necessary for such a development:

(1) as premises for the concentration of money wealth, and (2) because the capitalist mode of production [i.e. the capitalist socio-economic formation] presupposes production for trade, selling on a large scale, and not to the individual customer, hence also a merchant who does not buy to satisfy his personal wants but concentrates the purchases of many buyers in his one purchase. On the other hand, all development of merchant’s capital tends to give production more and more the character of production for exchange-value and to turn products more and more into commodities.18