Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

An interview with Gilbert Achcar Pandemic and oil crisis could make second Arab spring return with a vengeance Related The seasons after the Arab spring

An Interview with Gilbert Achcar

Rodinson "mobilised Ouzegane’s point of being less concerned about whether Muslim dogmas were true or false, than with seeing Islam principally as a social and political instrument... Rodinson considered Islam as neither a good nor a bad ideology a priori, but rather insisted on the need to produce analyses of the religion that account for its social conditions in which it developed. As he wrote at the beginning of the his book  De Pythagore à Lénine , ‘the best way to comprehend nothing of a phenomenon is to isolate it, and to consider it, from either the interior or the exterior, as if it is the only one of its type." The Thinker and the Militant

Left-wing Perspectives on Political Islam (Free subscription may be required to access the article)