Islam and Capitalism (Saqi Essentials)

Islam and Capitalism is a learned, engaging 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 characterized as instinctively hostile to capitalism. Maxime Rodinson looks at the facts, analyzing economic texts with his customary common sense, to show that Muslims never had any problem making money.

Maxime Rodinson was a French Marxist historian, sociologist, and a professor at the renowned École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris.

Maxine Rodinson studied Semitic languages, ethnography, and sociology at the Sorbonne. He later became a professor of Middle Eastern Ethnology and Old South Arabian Languages at the Sorbonne. He is the author of Israel and the Arabs, Mohammed, Marxism and the Muslim World, and Islam and Capitalism, which won the Isaac Deutscher Memorial Prize for 1974.