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Political Economy as a Paradigm for the Study of Islamic History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 January 2009

Peter Gran
Peter Gran
Affiliation:
Temple UniversityPhiladelphia, PA.
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Extract

Two frameworks of interpretation of history and society have long struggled with each other in the West and in the Islamic world: one is the modernization theory of the American type, aligned at times with the older orientalism, the other is some form of political economy. In the 1970s, the theory of political economy made a belated arrival in American intellectual life and still has scarcely the prestige it has in France, Germany, Italy, or the Islamic countries.

Type
Research Article
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 11 , Issue 4 , July 1980 , pp. 511 - 526
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1980

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References

NOTES

Author's note: I would like to thank Rifaat Abou el-Haj for his critical reading of this text, and Teresa Joseph, and Daniel Goodwin.Google Scholar

1 Gibbs, Lee W. and Stevenson, W. Taylor, Myth and the Crisis of Historical Consciousness (Missoula, Mont.: American Academy of Religion, 1975);Google ScholarWhite, Hayden, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978)Google Scholar: see Laroui's, AbdallahThe Crisis of the Arab Intellectual (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974) pp. 24ff., chap. 4, for a critique of the Palestinian historian Qustantin Zurayk, and linearism.Google Scholar

2 Said, Edward, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978);Google ScholarTurner, Bryan, Marx and the End of Orientalism (London, 1978).Google Scholar

3 al-Tahtāwi, Rifāah, Muhammad: Nihāyat al-ījaz fi sīrat sātkin al-Hijāz ed. AbüZayd, Fārūq (3 vols.; Cairo, 1967).Google Scholar

4 This applies to quite recent works in neo-Marxism as well. Anderson, Perry (Lineages of the Absolutist State [London: NLB, 1974], pp. 360–96, 462–549), while dismissing the Asiatic Mode of Production as theory, and calling for further research, presents the “house of Islam” in largely idealist categories. The Ottoman dynamic was a combination of “ghazi spirit and old Islamic principles” (p. 363); Ottoman imperial expansion was a product of a military ideology and not economic forces (cf. comments in the text on Duby's theory). By missing the commercial and industrial basis, Anderson finds a ‘permanent gulf between juridical theory and legal practice in classical islam (p. 498). Anderson here is quoting Schacht. Like Schacht he brings out a landlord view of the peasant, the mysteries of the Islamic city (a city that lacks municipal autonomy) and other artifices which one would not expect in a Marxist book on any other subject. Turkey is viewed as being characterized by military rigidity, ideological zealotry, and commercial lethargy” (p. 517), also India and Persia. In sum, this is a work in Marxist orientalism, most of it is devoted to the rise of the West.Google Scholar

5 The analysis of Ms. Cynthia Flannery, UCLA.Google Scholar

6 Amin, Samir: Unequal Development (New York: Monthly Review, 1976);Google ScholarAccumulation on a World Scale (New York: Monthly Review, 1974);Google ScholarArab Nation (New York: Monthly Review, 1978).Google Scholar

7 This schema was applied previously on a very limited scale to the subject of Islamic medicine, “Overview of Arab Medical Systems,” Social Science and Medicine 13B (1980), 339–349.Google Scholar

8 The idea of a nomad-centered history of ‘Abd al-' Azīz al-Dürī appears to have influenced a recent work, Hasan, Nāji, The Role of the Arab Tribes in the East during the Period of the Urnmayads, 40–132 A. H. (Baghdad: Baghdad University, 1978).Google Scholar

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