The Foundations of Islam

[Zederbaum]

Esteemed comrades,

I am looking for a good work on the origins of Islam.

What I am not looking for
I don’t want a litany of the basic facts (Mohammed did this, Abu Bakr did that). I am familiar as I want to be with those.

I don’t want a recitation of why Islam is inherently backward a la Frank Gaffney and the dimmer wing of the neo-conservatives.

I don’t want a hagiographic account of Islam which spends half its time justifying Islam’s various peculiarities or one that simply treats its doctrines as if there is a reasonable chance of them being literally true.

What I am looking for
I would like a social history based on historical materialism. Something along the lines of Kautsky’s The Foundations of Christianity. Applied historical materialism if you like.

That book takes a long and broad view of the epoch, looking at everything from economic fundamentals, e.g. how the peasant economy was displaced by an aristocracy reliant on war and slave labour which in turn raised technical barriers and caused political exhaustion thereby preventing further social evolution, to how these long-term processes received ideological expression through intense social alienation and a turning away from engagement with this world in favour of salvation in the hereafter.

I am not sure if such a work is as applicable to Islam, which is pretty much a recapitulated version of Judaism and early non-Trinitarian Christianity that managed to hit the jackpot in terms of achieving an imperial level of power quite early on.

Thus its very status as a particularly successful variant of Abrahamianism may signify nothing more than that the fortunes of aristocratic empires are prone to catastrophic fluctuation. On the other hand, it may, as with the rise of Christianity, signify an important ideological expression of fundamental economic and social developments.

That is what I would like to know.

If the book was written in fairly clear English, with a lucid argument that a moderately well read Irish peasant can cope with, such as with Kautsky’s translations, I would be be grateful. I could do without having to wade through a Perry Anderson level of prose only to find myself at the end none the wiser as to thrust of his thesis.

[Rafiq]

You can start with a wiki article on the soviet historians on islam

[Aurora]

That's quite a specialized subject i've never heard of a book on the subject, i did a quick marxists.org search and came across this http://www.marxists.org/archive/roy/1939/historical-role-islam/index.htm perhaps it can be of some use?
In my ignorance i had never heard of the author M.N Roy, interesting fellow, founded the CP's of Mexico and India, on the presidium of the Comintern for 8 years.
Anyways i hope you find what your looking for.

[Lenina Rosenweg]

A Short History of Islam Karen Armstrong is good as is her bio of Muhammed

http://www.amazon.com/Muhammad-Biography-Prophet-Karen-Armstrong/dp/1842126083

http://www.amazon.com/Islam-History-Modern-Library-Chronicles/dp/081296618X

She seems to use a historical materialist perspective and her books got good reviews of leftist blogs.She;s an ex-Catholic nun who writes books on the history of religion, emphasizing the material conditions of the societies which produced them.

[Amandla]

Heh I specifically joined to answer this question as I'm an anarchist and have been raised a Muslim.
Karen Armstrong is good but pretty hippyish, as is the man I'm about to suggest Barnaby Rogerson.

The difference is Rogerson tends to tell the full story of the oral traditions but he talks about the poetry and the beauty of the language. He was a tour guide in the region of the Levant and came in touch with the oral traditions and wrote his books after much research.

His best work is his second book on the Sunni/Shia schism but both of these books are pretty cheap, not too long, informative and form a two part telling of the Prophet's life, the begininngs of Islam and the early death of its initial system through corruption and a quest for imperialism.

Armstrong looks purely at Muhammad but Rogerson places Islam into a broader context in the region...still they have definitely spent some time around a fire smoking some weed chatting religion.

I would really like to see something that takes this further and so that we see Islamic Imperialism reflected in depth through the lens of historical materialism.

I hope you're writing something I may be able to purchase someday.

[Zederbaum]

Thanks for the suggestions. The MN Roy book looks a bit more along the lines of what I am looking for, although it’s still seems bit thin. Insofar as I can tell from their reviews on Amazon, the other two look to be fairly conventional historical narratives. I will check them out in the library though.

I did a quick search on Amazon and the results were not encouraging, mostly either Muslim critiques of Marxism rather than the other way round or War-on-terror propaganda pieces. I am beginning to think that socialism is being routed on all fronts if we can’t even manage to outgun ideologies from past eras.

In any case, the search has prompted me to think what is that I am looking for when I mentioned that I was interested in a historical materialist analysis. The answer, I guess, is that historical materialism is a not so much straight up history as historical interpretation. It’s not so hard to find an account of any given period, but it is often very hard to get an intelligent overview, especially ones that depart from received wisdom.


I hope you're writing something I may be able to purchase someday

Nope! Since I don’t come from an Islamic background I don’t have the automatic or tacit, knowledge, which would make such a task much, much easier. It would take me decades to get up to speed. Writing such an ambitious work of interpretation demands a command of the material, i.e. the minutiae of early Islam, the economic and social conditions of the era and an in-depth familiarity with historical materialism itself.

I’m interested enough to read a book on the subject, not audacious enough to write one :)