Maxine Rodinson is a Marxist thinker-scholar, historian, sociologist and orientalist whose book “Mohammed” has remained one of the definitive works on a critical evaluation of Prophet Mohammed from a Marxist/Materialist point of view. Here is what Duncum Black Macdonald, a fellow thinker comments on his work on the Prophet – He describes Muhammad was a patient of epilepsy, Hysteria or Schizophrenia. He writes; “We find these ecstasies and sensory phenomena in a very similar form among persons suffering from recognized mental conditions such as hysteria, schizophernia and uncontrolled verbalization”.
About the Author
Maxine Rodinson was a Marxist historian, sociologist and orientalist. He was the son of a Russian-Polish clothing trader and his wife who both died in the Auschwitz concentration camp. After studying oriental languages, he became a professor of Ethiopian (Amharic) at EPHE (École Pratique des Hautes Études, France). He was the author of a rich body of work, including the book Muhammad, a biography of the prophet of Islam. Rodinson joined the French Communist Party in 1937 for “moral reasons”, but later turned away after the party’s Stalinist drift. He was expelled from the party in 1958. Some credit him with coining the term “Islamic fascism” (le fascisme islamique) in 1979, which he used to describe the Iranian revolution.
