Maxime Rodinson was an independent Marxist scholar and expert on the Middle East who sympathized with the Palestinian cause. When he wrote this book, the Six Days War of 1967 had just ended, with Israel gobbling up the territory of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, territories they occupy to this day. One major war and two intifadas later, the Palestinian people have refused to give up their fight against the Zionist state. Rodinson’s book is still essential reading if you want to understand why Palestinians and other Arab peoples hate the government of Israel. The book does a great job of showing why Israel is essentially a result of colonialism--even with its unique features. And it is especially good at anticipating and answering counter-arguments to this position. This makes it an excellent weapon in the debates over this subject today, as the U.S. is preparing to launch a war with Iraq, which will bring the Palestinian question to the center of world politics.

The author is from a Jewish family and taught in the Middle East for seven years. He responds to critics who called him "schizophrenic" by pointing out that "belief in the infallibility of one's own 'ethnic' group is a frequent phenomenon in the history of human groups. It is called racism." Further, he explains how "European supremacy had planted in the minds of even the most deprived of those who shared in it the idea that any territory outside Europe was open to European occupation."

Growing up in the middle of the US, not knowing anyone Jewish, my introduction to Zionism was the heroic portrayal in "Exodus." I found Rodinson's account of the arguments offered for the creation of the state of Israel eye-opening. It can help others who got pro-imperialist education like mine to understand the demand of the Palestinian people for a democratic, secular state of Palestine that would offer equal rights to all who live and work there.

Zionism and the Israeli state have always been at the service of Empires ( first the British one and then the Yanqui-U.S. one ) ; this book lays out the facts of this history. Until 1979 Israel was part of a twin set of gigantic military platforms for the Yanki empire,along with Iran.Its alliance with the real 'axis of evil' in Washington D.C.and the brutal repression used by Israel to try to humiliate the Palestinians as a people is making Israel a death trap for the Jewish people.Maxime Rodinson , using the tools of science Marxism provides, explains in this dynamite book how the settler state- and racist - nature of the Zionist project could only lead to perpetual war.Sept. 11 proved that the Yanqui Empire is making the USA a death trap for workers and farmers here--the result of ITS humiliations of nations around the world. That fact makes this book doubly necessary for fighters for fundamental social change to read today.

This is a book that a devout Muslim, if he bothered to read it, would rail against, because it treats the founder of Islam as nothing more than a mortal, although a very complicated one. I read it during the years I lived in Morocco and I found it an invaluable tool for understanding Islam from the inside, and also understanding how Muslims view people of other religions. I don't think it is the most balanced account of the prophet's life you'll find, but it's one of the best researched ones and it doesn't pull any punches.

I've owned this book for more than 20 years. It has always been useful in understanding Muhammed and Islam from a scientfic Marxist view. For fun, I would recommend reading the book together with the passages on Muhammed in Rhushdie's Satanic verses.

I detest the condescension that some people have about Muhammed and this book. Unlike Christ or the Jewish Prophets and most other founds of religions, Muhammed was a person who lived in recorded history, left a mark by real records of his life, and had a recorded life and achievemensts even before he became a religious leader. We know little about him, but almost all of that is known from real history, not hagiagraphy.

Christians are only lucky that no such book exists about Christ, because Christ--if he existed--left much less of a real trace in records than Muhammed. Christians also benefit from the rigorous censorship and recrafting the Christian texts received when Christianity was transformed from being an underground religion of the oppressed and socially alienated, to the religion of the Roman state and ruling class.

Rodison is not a pro imperialist, but a Marxist who defends the Arab revolution against imperialism. He is an objective scholar. If you aren't ready for the theoritical complexity and terse theory of Islam and Capital, please investigate his Israel, A settler colonial state. Recent reader reviews here on Amazon have pointed out how this book written decades ago accurately predicts the present future of Zionist crimes and Palestinian resistance!

I've actually read the italian version of this book (edited by Einaudi). I found it incredibly interesting to help to understand how a religion and culture is born. The author is atheist, and I think that it is a good precondition for the book's objectivity.

I cannot promote this book more. Rodinson explores the prophet's life from birth to death, in an un-biased, open-minded manner. Translation: she explores everything, the unsavory moments, to the acts of ultimate courage and commitment.

If you are looking for an opinionated but fair-minded sketch of the prophet Mohammed in the context of his times, by a historian who is not out to portray his subject as the devil incarnate, but is still gamely willing to relate events and interpret them in a straightforward way that might lose him his head in some countries -- this could be the book for you. This book is lively, surprisingly balanced for a work by a Marxist, keeps the tangents short and sweet, and strikes me as generally judicious history. I don't share the author's materialism, and sometimes his attitude strikes me as a bit patronizing and cynical. But the story is well-told and insightful. And even when the author may be (in my view) wrong, his error usually consists of useful insights that are spread too thin.

Politicians, the media, and academics have been diligently trying to persuade us, of late, that Islam is a religion of peace. The terrorists are "traitors to their faith," which is "good and peaceful."

Mr. Rodinson does not set out specifically to tear down this viewpoint. He does warn, in his straightforward way, that "Muslims have every right not to read the book or to aquaint themselves with the ideas of a non-Muslim, but if they do so, they must expect to find things put forward there which are blasphemous to them." But later he notes disapprovingly of Christian critics that "the accounts given of (Mohammed) by his disciples were taken and twisted to make a hideous portrait of a cruel and lascivious individual, steeped in every kind of viciousness and crime. . . " This comment comes towards the end of the book. He seemed not to have noticed that in the previous 200 pages, he had painted a very similar portrait. It appears, strangely enough, that the facts themselves may have something to do with the "image." But read the book for yourself, and tell me if Mohammed was a good man or bad.

author, Jesus and the Religions of Man

What a blast from the past! -- they don't write them like this anymore. Originally published in French in 1966, French Arabic-speaking Marxist takes on all comers (most prominently Max Weber) on the topic of Islam and capitalism. Tendentious, polemical, caustic: it brightened up my afternoon. The "About the author" blurb says that Rodinson spent seven years teaching high school in Lebanon -- I'd bet those kids came out bent. I'd love to see Rodinson and Samuel Huntington locked in a room. An intellectual steel cage death match. Probably could sell tickets and broadcast it on CSPAN (even I don't think that they're quite ready of pay-for-view). What did you say about clash of civilizations? Hats off to translator Brian Pearce.