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Bandali Al-Jawzi's Min Tārīkh Al-Harakāt al-Fikriyyat Fi'l-Islām: The First Marxist Interpretation of Islam

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 January 2009

Tamara Sonn
Tamara Sonn
Affiliation:
School of ReligionUniversity of Lowa
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Extract

Bandali al-Jawzi (1871–1943) has been regaining popularity recently, particularly among his native Palestinians and Muslim nationalists of his adopted home, the Soviet Union. In 1977, for instance, the Union of Palestinian Journalists and Writers, in cooperation with the Oriental Institute of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, commemorated Jawzi as an outstanding Palestinian author. At that time a collection of various of his articles on the Arabic language and history was published in Beirut, as well as an edition of his only book, Min Tārīkh al-Harakāt al-Fikriyyat fi'l-Islām (The History of Intellectual Movements in Islam), first published in 1928. It is this recent exposure which was to take its rightful place in Islamic intellectual history.

Type
Articles
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 17 , Issue 1 , February 1985 , pp. 89 - 107
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1985

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References

1 There are, of course, those who would dispute that this approach is essentially Marxist. For purposes of the present article, I am adopting Maxime Rodinson's description: “All we [Marxists] are rejecting here is the idea that the mission of the Prophet was an unexpected miracle in the evolution of Arab society of the time.” See Rodinson, M., Marxism and the Muslim World, Matthews, Jean, trans. (New York and London, 1981), p. 36.Google Scholar

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57 Ikhwan al-Safa', Rasā'il Ikhwān al-Safā', Nasr, Seyyed Hossein, trans., in Isma'ili Contribulions to Islamic Culture (Tehran, 1977), PP. 33 ff.Google Scholar

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59 Ibid., p. 40.

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63 This is not to deny the passing comments of some others, such as Ibn Hazm (Friedlander, I., “The Heterodoxies of the Shī'a,” JAOS, 28 [1907]: 37 and 29 [1908]: 19–20),Google Scholar and Hawqal, Ibn (Al-Masālik wa'l-Mamālik, deGoeje, M., ed. [Leiden, 1873], p. 210).Google ScholarCf. Palacios, Asin, Abenmasarra y su Escuela (Madrid, 1914), pp. 99–103.Google Scholar

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