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Islamic History as World History: Marshall Hodgson, ‘The Venture of Islam’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 January 2009

Edmund Burke III
Edmund Burke III
Affiliation:
University of California, Santa Cruz
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Extract

At a time when orientalism is under attack both from within and without the profession, the publication of Marshall G. S. Hodgson's three-volume work, The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization1 is an event of major importance. So rich is its subject, so complex and ambitious its analytic scheme and serious its moral purpose that it is difficult in brief compass to give an idea of the book. In the following pages, I discuss those aspects of the work that seem to me most important for an understanding of its achievement and significance. In the end, I shall argue, The Venture of Islam must be seen as the most ambitious and successful effort to salvage the orientalist tradition to date.

Type
Articles
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 10 , Issue 2 , May 1979 , pp. 241 - 264
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1979

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References

1 Hodgson, Marshall G. S., The Venture of Islam Conscience and History in a World Civilization (3 vols.; Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1974), Vol. 1, The Classical Age of Islam; Vol. 2, The Expansion of Islam in the Middle Periods; and Vol. 3, The Gunpowder Empires and Modern Times.Google Scholar

2 Hodgson's footnotes are one of the delights of the work and are not be overlooked. They collectively provide a systematic settling of accounts with the field, and a fertile list of topics for future research.Google Scholar

3 I am thinking especially of Febvre's, LucienCombats pour l'histoire (Paris, 1953), portions of which have been published in English as A New Kind of History (New York, 1973). Hodgson's effort differs from that of the Annales historians, of course, in that he focused upon the study of civilizations (understood chiefly in terms of the high cultural artifacts of the major literary traditions), while they emphasized social and economic history. It is in the spirit of the two, and the concern with methodology, that they resemble one another.Google Scholar

4 Bellow, Saul, To Jerusalem and Back: A Personal Account (New York: Macmillan, 1976), pp. 105–109.Google Scholar

5 See the Preface by Smith for an account of the state of the manuscript on Hodgson's death, and the nature of his editorial assistance. In general, Smith was scrupulous to avoid changes that went beyond the stylistic. The published version of the work is thus substantially as Hodgson left it.Google Scholar

6 The reader was a companion to a History of Islamic Civilization published in 1958 in an offset edition. This gave way to a first edition of The Venture of Islam (in two volumes) in 1961, also in offset, intended for students at The University of Chicago.Google Scholar

7 McNeill, William, The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community (Chicago:The University of Chicago Press, 1964).Google Scholar

8 See his review of The Venture of Islam, in Journal of Near Eastern Studies, 37, I (1978), 53–62.Google Scholar

9 Massignon, Louis, ‘Salman Pak et les prémices spirituelles de l'Islam iranien’ Société des Etudes Iraniens, 7 (1934).Google Scholar

10 The Venture of Islam, I, 379 n.6.Google Scholar

11 Woolman, John, The Journal, and Other Writings (New York and London, 1952).Google Scholar

12 Hodgson, Marshall, ‘Hemispheric Inter-regional History as an Approach to World History,’ Journal of World History, 1, 3 (1954), 715–723.Google Scholar

13 See also Hodgson's, ‘The Inter-relations of Societies in History,’ Comparative Studies in Society and History,5 (1963), 227–250; and ‘The Great Western Transmutation,’ Chicago Today, n.v. (1967), 40–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

14 Among others, see Tibawi, A. L., ‘English Speaking Orientalists: A Critique of Their Approach to Islam and to Arab Nationalism,’ Muslim World, 53, 3–4 (1963), 185–204, 298–313;Google ScholarAbdel-Malek, Anouar, ‘L'Orientalisme en crise,’ Diogène, 24 (1963), 109–142;Google ScholarLaroui, Abdullah, L'Idéologie arabe contemporaine (Paris, 1967)Google Scholar and La crise des intellectuels arabes: traditionalisme ou historicisme? (Paris, 1974).Google Scholar See also Hourani, Albert, ‘Islam and the Philosophers of History,’ Middle Eastern Studies, 3 (1967), 206–268CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Said, Edward, Orientalism (New York: Atheneum, 1978).Google Scholar

15 The Venture of Islam, I, 26–30.Google Scholar

16 Ibid., p. 27.

17 Ibid., III, 176–200. Cf. also his ‘The Great Western Transmutation.’

18 The Venture of Islam, III, 198.Google Scholar

19 Ibid., p. 200.

20 Ibid., p. 202.

21 Ibid., p. 203.

22 Frank, André Gunder, Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America (New York, 1969);Google ScholarAmin, Samir, Le developpement inégal (Paris, 1973);Google Scholar and Wailerstein, Immanuel, The Modern World System, Vol. I, Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York and London,1974).Google Scholar

23 The Venture of Islam, III, 186.Google Scholar

24 That is, the concept of technicialism is keyed to the requirements of a cultural history. It is largely congruent with classical modernization theory of the early 1960s in Hodgson's usage, and indeed the later term for him denotes the political and economic aspects of the Western Transmutation. While a form of ‘modernizationism,’ Hodgson's efforts to situate the process in a world context and in terms of the relationship between Europe and the rest of the world make him an interesting transitional figure. Had he lived to complete the revisions of Book Six, I suspect that his ambivalences toward modernization theory would have become even more manifest.Google Scholar

25 See Adams, Robert McC., The Evolution of Urban Society (Chicago, 1966),Google Scholar and Tringham, Ruth, ‘The Concept of “Civilization” in European Archeology,’ in Sabloff, Jeremy A. and Lamberg-Karlovsky, C. C., eds., The Rise and Fall of Civilizations (Menlo Park, 1974), for recent discussions of the use of the term.Google Scholar

26 The Venture of Islam, I, 91.Google Scholar

27 See Hodgon's, essay, ‘The Unity of Later Islamic History,’ Journal of World History, 5 (1960), 879–914, for a discussion of the problem of unity.Google Scholar

28 The Venture of Islam, III, 204.Google Scholar

29 Hodgson, Marshall G. S., ‘The Role of Islam in World History,’ International Journal of Middle East Studies, 1, 1 (1970), 99–123.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

30 For example, virtually all of the literature on the social and economic history of Turkey, Iran, and the Arab East has appeared since Book Six was written. While the bibliography includes such classics as Albert Hourani's Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age and Bernard Lewis's The Emergence of Modern Turkey, it is unclear from reading the text that Hodgson was able to make much use even of these works. Of theoretical literature, such works as Barrington Moore, Jr.'s Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy and Eric Wolf's Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century, not to speak of the entire critical literature on modernization theories, have appeared since Book Six was written. There are worlds of thought and experience which separate the early 1960s, when this section was being written, from our own.Google Scholar