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“... biography of the Prophet of Islam was written by a left-wing French Jewish intellectual in 1961. Maxime Rodinson’s Life of Muhammad was a formative influence on my generation. It seemed to be the first real attempt to come to terms with a culture that could not be understood through sacred texts or works of exegesis alone. ...”

“... Egypt in 1798. Is the history of Islam and the West, then, merely a record of battles and bigotry? Maxime Rodinson’s Europe and the Mystique of Islam makes clear that the relationship has been much subtler. By chronicling, succinctly and elegantly, the West’s changing images of Islam, Rodinson – one of the leading ...”

“... to a delivery of Czech arms. Only a handful of writers – notably the Arabist Jacques Berque, and Maxime Rodinson, a Marxist Jewish scholar of Islam who had lost much of his family in the camps – were even aware of the Palestinian catastrophe. Most people found it hard to distinguish Arab opposition to Israel from anti-Jewish hostility. The often ...”

“... religious traditions, Islam is in many respects the one most open to modernity. Certainly, as Maxime Rodinson has demonstrated, Islam has long been favourable to economic activity. Those who saw in Khomeini a Gandhian who wanted to take Iran back to the spinning-wheel were always mistaken. However, it is important to remember that almost any broad ...”

“... While he praised the work of Orientalist scholars, including Louis Massignon, Jacques Berque and Maxime Rodinson, he also sometimes implied that the entire tradition of Orientalist scholarship was a corrupted form of power-knowledge. But then what distinguished an eminent figure like Berque from Lewis or from a vulgar propagandist such as Daniel ...”

“... or what in a later context would be called ‘ethnic cleansing’. In 1973, the French Marxist Maxime Rodinson’s book Israel: A Colonial Settler State? required a question-mark in its title that Segev and Shepherd would probably remove. In what he referred to as ‘an obvious diagnosis’, Rodinson took Israeli ...”