What Marxism Can Teach Us About the History of Islam

The article is available in four languages.

This should be a guide to anyone who wants to study religion in general and Islam in particular.

1. “The impossibility of writing the history of a religion as an autonomous entity without considering the economic, social and political dynamics at work.

2. The relative autonomy of religion vis-à-vis social issues. In other words, ideology translates into its own language the contradictions that run through society.

3. There is not one Islam, transcendent, ahistorical, but several very different Islams, transformed by the historical conditions in which they flourished; these Islams are ideologies, it would therefore be methodologically erroneous and politically ineffectual or even dangerous to regard it as the main motor of economic phenomena.”

4. The politicisation of Islam and the development of Islamic fundamentalism are the fateful results of the subjugation of Muslim countries by the capitalist powers of Europe. This subjugation impeded secularisation and favoured the instrumentation of religion by the modernising elites, convinced as they were of the need to appropriate the language of religion in dealing with the ignorant masses, or by the religious parties, convinced of the efficacy of religion as a tool for the transformation of society.

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