Obituary: Maxime Rodinson

by

Aziz Al-Azmeh

Maxime Rodinson died in Paris on 23 May, aged 89. He will be remembered in fondness and admiration in the Arab World and beyond for his forthrightness, his support for the Palestinian people and his not uncritical support for the Arabs and their causes, his iconoclastic Marxism, and for his scholarship which produced a bibliography of some 800 items.

He was born in Marseilles into a Communist family of Polish extraction. He started active life as an errand-boy when he was 13 years of age, and joined the French Communist party in 1937. In 1932 meanwhile, aged 17, he gained entry to the École des Langues Orientales in Paris after a competitive examination of the kind that only the French educational system can devise, and eventually became proficient in some 30 languages and dialects. His formal career itinerary started in 1940, when he became a pensionnaire at the French Institute of Arab studies in Damascus, where many Arabists were and are still trained, and upon his return to France in 1948 he was put in charge of the Arabic collection at the National Library. In 1955 he was appointed to a teaching position at the École Pratique des Hautes Etudes, becoming professor of Ethiopian in 1959, a position he held until his retirement. He received many academic honours, including the order of Chevallier de la Légion d'Honneur, and being named a corresponding fellow of the British Academy.

Maxime Rodinson's erudition was massive, and he was truly a polymath. He was able to handle with a remarkable competence and lightness of touch topics ranging from ancient south Arabian inscriptions and various topics in Semitic philology, to magical rites and rituals in Gondar, on to medieval Arabic cookery, economic life under the Caliphate, the history of orientalism, theoretical questions relating to the theory of ideology, and Arab nationalism in the twentieth century.

Perhaps the best known of Rodinson's academic works outside specialist circles are his biography of Muhammad, Islam and Capitalism, and Europe and the mystique of Islam. Though he left the French Communist Party in 1958, he was always a Marxist, and a Marxist of a variety that keeps alive the legacy of Karl Marx. His was a Marxism that eschewed the worst aspects of the Marxist legacy without dissipating what is perennial in Marx and what is undeniable even to his iddeological and political enemies, namely a specific manner of reading history, including the history of the present.

Marxism to Rodinson was not only productive of a progressive public outlook, but also a guide to the analysis of relations between economy, society and ideology. Thus his interpretations of the life of Muhammad and of economic life in the Arab Middle Ages was one in which what mattered were the practices Muslims rather than the religion of Islam, contrary to the obsession with theology and religion among orientalist scholars, who seem to see in all aspects of "Islamic history" an outgrowth of religious traditions and impulses, and whom he studied and criticised with great learning, rigour and understanding, albeit not with sympathy. What mattered to him were social and economic forces, without thereby ignoring the incidence and relative weight of religious representations and passions. Yet religion was to him not a self-explanatory force, but one which needed historical explanation.

This academic iconoclast married a strong taste for social-scientific theory with the capacity for handling precise detail in great quantity. His iconoclastic disposition went beyond the world of the academy to that of politics, in which he became a prominent commentator on and critic of the shibboleths of the international liberal consensus, not least with regard to the Arab-Israeli dispute. He made his mark in this regard in the famous article "Israel: Fait Colonial" he published in Jean-Paul Sartre's Les Temps Modernes in 1967, followed by more than one book on the Palestine question.

He had no problem with qualifying Israel as a colonial settler state, a notion he pioneered, and which gained much ground, until driven aside to the margins by Arab weakness and US hegemonism. Rodinson, the child of parents who perished in Auschwitz, did not hesitate to qualify Zionism as "a virus in the Jewish body", views which were received with abject violence among Zionist circles. But being a man of clear mind and of unbending intellectual, political and moral integrity, he realised that Zionism was trying to impose upon world jewry an extraterritorial nationalism, all the while judaising Arab territories conquered, and expelling their population

In a way, his attitude to Zionism as a political ideology parallels conceptually his studies of the role of religion in medieval societies. It revolves around a rejection of judeocentrism, and of islamocentrism, in the conception of society and of politics, and indeed of history, a rejection at once intellectual and scientific, and visceral, powered by an unflinchingly progressive attirude and an unbending secularism.

He will be remembered for all this, and will long be cherished by Arabs. It is the Arabs' own failing not to have dared to publish the translation of his life of Muhammad, which has been languishing in the translator's bottom drawer for two decades. It is also their failing that they celebrate him only for his positions on the Arab-Israeli conflict, and do not pay much attention to the broader rational and moral grounds on which he constructed his historical analysis of their history and their present, in which regard he was supportive, but never complaisant.