Max Weber and Islam

Wolfgang Schluchter

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351289825
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Teología y religión
• Categoría: Teología islámica

Max Weber and Islam is a major effort by Islamic-studies specialists to reexamine and appraise Max Weber's perspectives on Islam and its historical development. Eight specialists on Islam and two sociologists explore many dimensions of Weber's comments on Islam, along with Weber's conceptual framework. The volume's introduction links the discussions to contemporary issues and debates.

Wolfgang Schluchter reconstructs Weber's conceptual apparatus as it applies to Islam and its historical development. In subsequent chapters, Islamic specialists consider such major topics as the developmental history of Islam, Islamic fundamentalism, Islamic reform, Islamic law and capitalism, secularization in Islam, as well as the value of attempting to apply Weber's concept of sects to Islam. While some authors find flaws in Weber's factual knowledge of Islam, they also find considerable merit in the kinds of questions Weber raised.

Contributors to the volume include highly respected contemporary international scholars of Islam: Ira Lapidus, Nehemia Levtzion, Richard M. Eaton, Peter Hardy, Rudolph Peters, Barbara Metcalf, Francis Robinson, Patricia Crone, Michael Cook, and S.N. Eisenstadt. Toby Huff's introduction not only knits the thematics of the separate essays together but adds its own stresses while engaging the contributors in dialogue and debate about fundamental issues. This acute collective analysis establishes a new benchmark for understanding Weber and Islam. This book also provides an up-to-date overview of the developmental history of many aspects of Islam. A major reappraisal of the entire span of Max Weber's sociological thought on Islam, this book will appeal to a wide range of scholars and laymen interested in the Islamic world. It will be of particular interest to sociologists specializing in religion and Middle East area specialists.

1

Hindrances to Modernity: Max Weber on Islam

Wolfgang Schluchter

Industrialization was not impeded by Islam as the religion of individuals… but by the religiously conditioned structure of the Islamic state formation, its officialdom, and its implementation of law.

—Max Weber, Economy and Society

The Fate of Weber’s Study of Islam

While working on his comparative and developmental analyses of the major religions, on their relations to the nonreligious—especially the economic and political orders and powers—Max Weber also took up Islam. It is one of the six major religions that interested him most.¹ As in the case of these other religions, he was especially attracted to its inception and early development: the “birth” of Islam in Mecca and Yathrib (later Medina), its “heroic age” during the rule of the early caliphs (632–61) and the Umayyads (661–750), and its “maturation” during the period of the Abbasids (750–1258), generally regarded as the golden age of Islam. This coming-of-age is reflected in the canonization of the crucial religious sources, the consolidation of the most significant orthodox and heterodox movements, and the establishment of religious stratification between the masses and the virtuosi. It also found expression in a lessening of the dynamism characteristic of its initial drive toward world conquest and in a subsequent religious, and, above all political, polycentrism that stands in contrast to the originally unifying, national-Arabic movements. Of course, none of this is intended to deny the fact that important secondary movements followed in the wake of these primary ones. On the contrary, Weber clearly recognizes the effect of such secondary movements of “empire-building” power in the Ottoman and Mogul periods, without which Islam would be unimaginable. However, his comments remain rather scanty here, which, at least with regard to Indian Islam, is somewhat surprising given his thorough analysis of Hinduism and Buddhism. Admittedly, even in the case of early Arabic Islam, there exists no coherent text that could serve as the basis of interpretation. Before attempting such an interpretation, I think it is appropriate to say a few words about the fate of Weber’s study of Islam, a study that certainly would have included not only Arabic and Persian, but also Turkish and Indian Islam.

Weber’s interest in non-Christian religions and in the civilizations (Kulturkreise) influenced by them² appears to have intensified around 1910. It was presumably awakened earlier, not least of all in Eranos, the Heidelberg circle on religion in which interdisciplinary scholarship was writ large.³ Religious scholarship of the time favored comparative studies of religion,⁴ and Weber was a strong adherent of this approach.⁵ Moreover, 1910 appears to be the beginning of a new phase in his work. In 1909, he had published his large and comprehensive study The Agrarian Sociology of Ancient Civilizations (Agrarver-hältnisse im Altertum) (Weber 1924a, 1976) and completed publication of the series of essays “Psychophysics of Industrial Labor” (“Psychophysik der industriellen Arbeit”) (Weber 1995). With the “Anticritical Last Word” (“Antikritisches Schlußwort”) (Weber 1978d, 1978a), which appeared in 1910, he closed the debate in the wake of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Weber 1921, vol. 1; 1958b).⁶ The new phase was marked by a return to the sociology of religion (already implicit in the two countercritiques of Rachfahl) and by the planning and execution of the large-scale “Handbook on Political Economy” (“Handbuch der politischen Oekonomie,” later “The Outline of Social Economics” [“Grundriss der Sozialökonomik”]). This is also confirmed by Marianne Weber in her biography (Marianne Weber 1926). There she wrote, in view of the conclusion of the essays on “Psychophysics,” the last part of which appeared on September 30, 1909:

Now that all of this has been cleared up, Weber is returning to his studies in universal sociology, and in a twofold manner. He wants to continue the essays in the sociology of religion and is at the same time preparing, in response to the prompting of his publisher, Paul Siebeck, a major collective work: “The Outline of Social Economics.” He is designing its plan, recruiting its coauthors, and has allotted to himself, in addition to the organizational work, the most important contributions. The writings in the sociology of religion draw in part from the same sources as this new work and are being brought along hand in hand with it.⁷

Apparently, in this new phase Weber initially follows the lead given by his previous findings. Agrarian Sociology contains an economic theory of the ancient world, a sort of economic and political sociology of ancient Mediterranean-European civilization and its development. It can be viewed as a preliminary stage to Weber’s later sociology of economics and domination.⁸ In the “Anticritical Last Word,” Weber formulated the “truly most urgent questions”⁹ for a sociology of religion:

1. The investigation of the different effects of the Calvinist, Baptist, and Pietist ethics on methodical conduct.

2. The investigation “of the beginnings of similar developments in the Middle Ages and in early Christianity.”

3. The investigation of the economic side of the process or, in later formulations, the investigation of the other side of the causal chain—after the investigation of the conditioning of economic mentality by religion now the investigation of the conditioning of religion by the economy, especially by class constellations.¹⁰

This undertaking amounted to a sociology of the bourgeoisie (Bürgertum), a depiction of the elective affinities between bourgeois class constellations and religiously conditioned modes of conduct, affinities provided not only but certainly “most consistently by ascetic Protestantism.”¹¹

If the conclusion of Agrarian Sociology is read in conjunction with these programmatic statements, it appears that in this new phase Weber intended to clarify above all the historical preconditions of modern capitalism. These included both the “subjective” and the “objective,” the motivational and the institutional ones.¹² This new phase also included the analysis of obstruction, indifference, or reinforcement among these preconditions.¹³ This required the reconstruction of Occidental development from a necessarily one-sided viewpoint, based on a theoretical relation to values. It also required a comparative perspective, especially with regard to Judaism and Islam, because both contributed to this development.

Admittedly, Weber gave no indication of such an intention in his “Anticritical Last Word.” He did, however, make plain his desire to show, by elaborating further upon the Protestant Ethic and Agrarian Sociology, to which preconditions modern capitalist development—in the interplay between form and spirit, subjective and objective, motivational and institutional factors—owes its existence. It is worth noting the parameters of Weber’s solution in 1910, as formulated in the closing passages of the “Anticritical Last Word.” Weber first distances himself from any purely technological explanation of modern and indeed of any capitalist development. His purpose, however, is not merely to reject monocausal approaches, but to reject as well those multicausal approaches that take only one side of the causal chain into account. He writes:

The capitalism of antiquity evolved without technical advances and in fact occurred simultaneously with the cessation of such advances. The technical progress of the Continental Middle Ages was surely of no little importance in creating the possibility for the development of modern capitalism, but certainly it constituted no decisive stimulus for development. Objective factors such as certain aspects of climate, which influence conduct and labor costs, count among the most significant pre-requisites, along with the inland culture that shaped the political-social organization of medieval society and therefore the medieval city, particularly the continental city and its bourgeoisie. (See my previously cited article in the Handwörterbuch der Staatswissenschaften.) In addition, new forms of productive organization in, for example, cottage industries, were specific economic influences; although not entirely alien to ancient culture, they displayed a unique structure, diffusion, and importance. The great process of development that lies between the highly unstable late medieval developments toward capitalism and the mechanization of technology, which is so decisive for capitalism in its present form, culminated in the creation of certain objective political and economic prerequisites that are so important for the emergence of the latter. It culminated particularly in the creation and diffusion of the rationalist and antitraditionalist spirit and the whole mentality that absorbed it. Major insights into this phenomenon may be furnished by the history of modern science and its recent practical relation to the economy and by the history of the modern conduct of life and its practical meaning for the economy.¹⁴

The developmental history of political and economic organization, and also of science and conduct, must be written in such a way that the writer does not hastily degrade one into a mere function or consequence of the other.¹⁵ It needs to be written with a view to the qualitative transformations that occurred in antiquity, in the Middle Ages, and in the period between the late Middle Ages and modernity. This reconstruction of Western development, especially of capitalism, must be carried out not only in terms of a specific viewpoint; it must be “dissolved” into a series of partial developments that have to be continuously and repeatedly interrelated. This calls for a value-related, ideal-typical developmental construct as a prerequisite for the realization of this project. Indeed, Weber does not object to developmental constructions as such, but only to those that operate with models of complete and all-inclusive stages based on normative criteria that are then reified. That he subsequently repeatedly raised the question of why rational industrial capitalism arose only in the West, and that he responded to it with the constellation of conditions that existed only here, does not imply that other constellations could not also have produced such a result or that other civilizations that later followed the path to industrial capitalism had to pass through the same “stages” into which one can “dissect” Western development. For Weber, universal history dissolves into a plurality of developmental histories in and between civilizations.¹⁶ However, this plurality does not imply that the dimensions one chooses for their reconstruction are arbitrary. The recourse to organizational forms, especially to economic ones, is never sufficient,¹⁷ for these are only some of the important elements shaping conduct. Other important elements are normatively based conceptions of duty. They are, at least in precapitalist times, embedded in religious world views and ethics. Therefore, one needs to take into account not only economic but also cultural, especially religious, forces if one aims to reconstruct Western and non-Western developmental histories.¹⁸

It quickly becomes clear that this new phase of work coincides with a qualitative transformation of Weber’s approach.¹⁹ He made a discovery, and it too is documented in Marianne Weber’s biography. Although its dating is unclear, its nature is not. It is the insight that the development of modern scientific rationalism demonstrates connections not only with economic but also with aesthetic developments, especially with the Western development of music.²⁰ Marianne Weber provided the following description:

The times hurl abuse at rationalism and many artists in particular consider it an inhibition of their creative powers. For this reason this discovery [of the connection between scientific and aesthetic development] especially excites Weber. He has now also planned a sociology of art, and sometime around 1910 undertook as a first attempt in the midst of his other studies, the investigation of the rational and sociological foundations of music. It led him into the most remote areas of ethnology and into the most difficult investigations of tonal arithmetic [Tonarithmetik] and symbolism. Nevertheless, as soon as this part was provisionally established, he forced himself to return to those wri...