Maxime Rodinson

However this may be, what is essential, from the sociological point of view, is that Islam, like every other ideological movement, created on the one hand a new community which endows its members with a distinct identity and, on the other hand, a specific ideology, a cluster of ideas which project an ideal society. The community in question, Islam, may believe that in certain periods of its existence and in some sectors, it has truly realized this ideal. This is what the sociologist Karl Mannheim calls an ideology in the restricted sense. In other periods and in other sectors, the community has determined that the ideal is yet to be constructed. This Mannheim calls a utopia, without necessarily implying, as the usual meaning of the word would have it, that the ideal is unrealizable. The question of the possibility of realization is left open, and remains subject to the individual judgement.

and critical analysis has not advanced since the two remarkable works of W. Montgomery Watt, to which I make frequent reference.

I aimed to write a book that was a narrative account but also an interpretation. The interpretative aspect was of utmost importance to me. I drew on the partial explanations that had already been put forward. I made an effort at times to criticize, refine, or add to them; but above all, I tried to bring them all together, to place them within a wider context, so as to arrive at an explanatory synthesis

the growth and evolution of what I have called ideological movements.

There are constants—one might even say laws—that govern this type of movements. They have their basis, at least at a particular stage of development, in

the nature of human societies, and beyond that, in the character of human nature itself.

Besides, is there not an advantage to be gained when we consider the great problems to which I have just alluded in their human incarnation instead of in the rarefied air of abstract conceptual analysis

The oldest texts we possess on the biography of the Prophet were written at least 125 years after Muḥammad’s death. That is roughly the distance that separates us from the 1850s.

It should be said at the outset that all the data we summon up to illustrate our account are subject to doubt. I have often used such phrases as ‘it would seem,’ ‘it is said that . . .’ ‘according to later accounts,’ and the like. Perhaps I ought to have used them even more often. In this, incidentally, I am merely following the example of the Arab chroniclers, who would quote a long list of contradictory traditions and sagely conclude: But God knows more than we do.

pre-critical period