Table Of Content39 KULTUR, RECHT UND POLITIK IN MUSLIMISCHEN GESELLSCHAFTEN
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Béatrice Hendrich (ed.)
Muslims and Capitalism
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ISBN 978-3-95650-463-1
Muslims and Capitalism –
An Uneasy Relationship?
Edited by
Béatrice Hendrich
KULTUR, RECHT UND
POLITIK IN MUSLIMISCHEN
GESELLSCHAFTEN
Herausgegeben von
Thomas Bauer, Stephan Conermann, Sabine Damir-Geilsdorf,
Gudrun Krämer, Anke von Kügelgen, Eva Orthmann,
Anja Pistor-Hatam, Irene Schneider, Reinhard Schulze
Band 39
ERGON VERLAG
Muslims and Capitalism –
An Uneasy Relationship?
Edited by
Béatrice Hendrich
ERGON VERLAG
Gedruckt mit freundlicher Unterstützung der Fritz Thyssen Stiftung, Köln
Umschlaga bbildung:
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ISSN 1863-9801
Table of Contents
Béatrice Hendrich
Introduction:
Exalting the Past, Rebelling against the Present,
and Struggling for a (Better) Future? ............................................................. 7
Part One: The Past and the Future
Mouez Khalfaoui
Primary Islamic Texts on Land, Water, and Capital Ownership ................ 23
Anas Malik
Beyond State and Market:
Institutional Diversity and Polycentricity in Islamic Contexts .................. 33
Part Two: Marxism, Anti-Capitalism, Islam
Manfred Sing
The Tempestuous Affair between Marxism and Islam:
Attraction, Hostility, and Accommodation since 1917 ............................. 51
Leandros Fischer
Left-wing Perspectives on Political Islam:
A Mapping Attempt .................................................................................. 103
Katajun Amirpur
Iranian Godfathers of Islamic Socialism –
“It is the Marxists Who Have Learned It from Islam” ............................. 121
Bayram Koca
The Emergence of Anti-Capitalist Muslims in Turkey:
“God, Bread, Freedom” ............................................................................. 135
Tahir Kamran
Ubaidullah Sindhi as a Revolutionary:
A Study of Socialist Activism in Deobandi Islam .................................... 151
Part Three: Social Justice and Anti-Capitalism
Sabine Damir-Geilsdorf
“… So That It May Not Circulate Solely between
the Wealthy among You.”
The Critique of Capitalism and the Vision of a “Balanced Society”
(mujtamaʿ mutawāzin) in the Writings of Sayyid Quṭb (1906–1966) ....... 173
6 TABLE OF CONTENTS
Elisheva Machlis
A Shiite Economic Model.
From Bāqir al-Ṣadr to Contemporary Iraq ............................................... 191
Fabio Vicini
Between Islamism and Human Rights.
Mazlumder as a Third Way within Turkish Islamism? .............................. 207
Béatrice Hendrich
A Sufi Martyr and Harbinger of Anti-Capitalism.
Şeyh Bedreddin as an Emblematic Figure in ‘Progressive’
Publications................................................................................................ 223
Part Four: Different Ways to Non-Capitalism
Hans Visser
The Lure of Gold and Silver Dinars and Dirhams
for the 21st Century .................................................................................. 249
Anthony T. Fiscella
Three Images of Anti-authoritarian Socialism
within Islamic Contexts:
Isabelle Eberhardt/Mahmoud Essadi, Muammar Qaddafi’s
Green Book, and Heba Raouf Ezzat ........................................................... 271
Michelangelo Guida
Turkish Islamists’ Enthusiasm for Versace:
Islamism between Rejection and Adoption of the West .......................... 295
The Authors ............................................................................................... 313
Introduction:
Exalting the Past, Rebelling against the Present,
and Struggling for a (Better) Future?
A Critical Approach towards Capitalist Modes of
Production and Government by Islamically-Oriented
Movements
Béatrice Hendrich
What is the relation between Islam and Capitalism? Is there any at all? Evi-
dently, these very questions already contain pitfalls: In order to answer
them in a conclusive manner, a fixed definition of ‘Islam’ and ‘Capitalism’
would be necessary as a first step. Obviously, those definitions could only
be provided in the form of essentialist statements.
However, every now and then individuals and movements, academics
and activists, endeavor to find an answer to these questions. In the 1960s,
Maxime Rodinson published his Islam et Capitalisme (Rodinson 1966).
Rodinson argued that the absence of a capitalist development in the Islamic
world was a direct result of colonial exploitation and the structures of un-
derdevelopment based thereupon. The main objectives of Rodinson’s book
were a critical analysis of Max Weber’s Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist
des Kapitalismus (1904) and of Marxist tenets regarding the reasons for eco-
nomic (under-)development. It is telling that Rodinson based his work on
an examination of outright Western concepts and authors. It tells us about
the state of Oriental Studies in the 1960s—Rodinson was an Orientalist—,
and it tells us about the related perspective taken even by a scholar who
aimed to deconstruct “the argument attributed to Weber that the Islamic
ethic is too antipathetic to rationality to have permitted the indigenous de-
velopment of capitalism”1 and whose attitudes towards the Islamic world
were basically positive. Rodinson quotes from the Quran and hadiths, and
every now and then he refers to Muslim scholars, although what really mat-
ters to him are Marx and Weber. As a matter of fact, when Islam et Capital-
isme was published, ‘Alī Sharī‘atī (1933–1977) was only starting to become
famous. But what about earlier Muslim reformers such as the Egyptian Say-
yid Quṭb (1906–1966) and H. Oemar Said Tjokroaminoto (1882–1934) in
Indonesia, or Muslim-socialist movements and parties in the early Soviet
1 Leonard Binder, “Islam and Capitalism. By Maxime Rodinson and Brian Pearce”,
American Journal of Sociology 87: 2 (1981), 492–495, 493.
8 BÉATRICE HENDRICH
Union or colonial India? Rodinson himself mentions Quṭb in the “After-
word”, added to the book’s first American edition in 1973; the very mode
of the paragraph is however rather belittleling. Nor does it express further
interest in Quṭb and the likes:
I might have discussed more extensively the many contemporary Muslim writers
who have taken up … the theme of the applicability of the ‘social’ principles of
Islam to present-day society and to the ideal community. These writers are nu-
merous, to be sure, but their arguments are always the same as those advanced by
the two or three writers whom I did mention and criticize. In view of the influ-
ence he had, and the important … role played by his life and his death, I might
have analysed the work of the ideologist of the Muslim Brotherhood, Sayyid
Qutb, whom Nasser hanged for conspiracy in 1966.2
In the summer of 2013, in Turkey a movement called Anti-capitalist Mus-
lims (Antikapitalist Müslümanlar, AKM) obtained a sudden and unexpected
popularity. Without a doubt, this sudden popularity was to a broad extent
the result of the technical means of modern mass communication. The
AKM’s slogans, together with a particular visual appearance and an exten-
sive use of social media, aroused the curiosity of the audience within and
beyond the Turkish borders. What is more important, however, is that their
slogans and behavior obviously corresponded to the needs and expectations
of those who had long since been asking and searching for a third way in
(developing) Muslim countries in general, and in Turkey in particular.
The summer of 2013 was the time of the, as it would later be called, Gezi
Resistance. The initial cause of the conflict was the planned destruction of
the Gezi Park in one of the historical centers of Istanbul, in Taksim, as part
an urban renewal plan. Environmental activists started sit-ins and other
forms of protest at the end of May with the aim to save the trees. Disin-
clined to discuss a compromise, the local government took violent measures
against the protesters, thus transforming a demonstration into a pluralistic
movement which then spread nationwide. During June 2013, Turkey experi-
enced new forms of dialogue and social solidarity among the protesters and
their sympathizers, but the toll exacted for this short period of hope was
heavy, with seven people dead and hundreds affected by teargas or more se-
riously injured.3 Although the Anti-capitalist Muslims had not initiated the
resistance, once they had set up their tents and banners in the protest camp,
they turned into important actors in the resistance as they added, in every
sense, an unexpected color to what had started as an urban, middle-class
eco-protest. With their key slogan “Property belongs to God” (Mülk Al-
lah’ındır) they easily entrenched themselves in the protest against the brutal
2 Maxime Rodinson, Islam and Capitalism, New York: Random House 1973, 237–238.
3 Leyla Önal, “Gezi Park and EuroMaidan: Social Movements at the Borders”, The Eu-
ropean Journal of Social Science Research 29: 1 (2016), 16–40, 21–22.
