Islam, capitalism and the Weber theses
2010; Wiley; Volume: 61; Issue: s1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1111/j.1468-4446.2009.01243.x
ISSN1468-4446
Autores Tópico(s)Race, History, and American Society
ResumoOver the last half century a substantial tradition of Weberian scholarship has developed in Europe which is focused on elaborate analyses of Weber's exploration of the relationship between religion and capitalism. Naturally, this scholarship has involved examinations of Weber's basic contrast between the European tradition of Puritan asceticism and the mystical ethics of Asian religions. One consequence of this dominant sociological tradition has been a relative neglect of Weber's treatment of Islam.1 Although Weber died before completing his sociology of religion with a full study of Islam, his comments on early Islam and his more elaborate inquiry into Islamic law are sufficiently interesting to warrant more close inspection than they have hitherto received. As a prophetic, egalitarian, salvation religion with close derivation from Judaism and Christianity, Islam is a significant test of Weber's thesis on asceticism and rational economic activity. Before turning to Weber's argument that Islam was not a salvation religion, it will be useful to clarify the kaleidoscopic interpretations which exist concerning Weber's analysis of religion and capitalism. In this study of Weber on Islam, there are three related arguments which need to be distinguished at the outset. The first line of argument is that one can detect at least four different Weberian theses about the connection between religious beliefs and capitalism; these four theses cannot be successfully reconciled in one coherent Weberian theory about the secular significance of religious doctrines. Hence any attempt to consider Islam as a test case of Weber's sociology must be a complex process. My contention is that at least three of Weber's theses are either false or trivial. The fourth thesis, which examines the consequences of patrimonial domination, can be employed as a plausible explanation of some Islamic developments. My second argument is that, apart from factual mistakes about Islam, Weber stressed the wrong question about Islam. His main concern was to explain the absence of rational capitalism outside Europe, but the real sociological issue is to explain the transition of Islam from a monetary economy to an agricultural, military regime. Although Weber's analysis of Islam was not particularly successful, it is ironic that when Muslim reformers came to explain the decay of Islam, they employed implicitly Weberian arguments. It would, however, be naïve to accept this situation as proof of the validity of Weber's Protestant Ethic thesis. Considerable differences of opinion among sociologists have arisen over the interpretation of Weber's Protestant Ethic thesis. These disagreements could emerge either through gross misunderstanding of Weber's sociology or because Weber's sociology itself contains different theses which are not necessarily consistent. While there certainly has been misconception, it can also be shown that a number of distinct theories emerge from Weber's sociology.2 The temptation is always to read consistency into a sociologist, particularly a great sociologist, when one is concerned with the history of ideas.3 There are a number of ways by which one could bring out these different arguments which Weber entertained, often simultaneously. Here it will be fruitful to refer to Alisdair Maclntyre's argument in ‘A Mistake about Causality in the Social Sciences’ where he observed that, in attempting to demonstrate the relation between beliefs and actions, sociologists have often started with a strong thesis and ended with a compromise. The strong thesis is that beliefs are secondary (Marx and Pareto) or that beliefs are independent (Weber). Most sociologists finish by eating their own words; thus, in Maclntyre's view, Weber slips into ‘facile interactionism’ in which beliefs cause actions and vice versa. This framework can be used to illustrate four different arguments in Weber's sociology of religion. The first interpretation of the Protestant Ethic thesis (PE) is that it entails an idealistic theory of values. The second thesis (PEi) is that it is an argument about the necessary and sufficient conditions for the emergence of capitalism. The Weber thesis (W) takes a wider view of Weber's sociology of civilizations, stressing the importance of the concept of ‘understanding’ in Weber's philosophy of science. Finally, the second Weber thesis (Wi) underlines the continuity between Marx and Weber by showing that Weber continuously draws attention to the ways in which beliefs are shaped by their socio–economic contexts. Weber showed that Islamic institutions were incompatible with capitalism because they had been dominated by a long history of patrimonialism. Islamic beliefs were certainly influential but still secondary to patrimonial conditioning. Unfortunately, this thesis was also held alongside other interpretations of Islamic history which make Weber's theoretical position unstable. Economic and social historians were probably the first to treat the Protestant Ethic as a strong theory in which Calvinist beliefs caused modern capitalism. H.M. Robertson, for example, attempted to refute what he regarded as Weber's psychologism by showing that capitalism arose from ‘material conditions’, not from ‘some religious impulse’ (Robertson (1935: xiii). More recently, H.R. Trevor-Roper asserted that Weber and Werner Sombart had reversed Marx's materialism (Trevor-Roper 1967: 4). In attempting to win support for this particular thesis (PE), Syed Alatas claimed that Talcott Parsons, Pitrim Sorokin and Reinhard Bendix have all treated the Protestant Ethic thesis as an idealistic theory (Alatas 1963). Although one can show that Weber thought that ideas were often causally significant, the main problem with this interpretation (PE) is that Weber himself denied that he held such a theory about Calvinism. In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, he insisted that the theory that capitalism was the creation of the Reformation would be ‘a foolish and doctrinaire thesis’ (Weber 1965a: 91). Evidence also comes from Weber's associates at Heidelberg that he was annoyed by ‘idealistic’ interpretations of the Protestant Ethic thesis.4 Sociologists who wish to reject the PE interpretation have normally claimed that the first essay on the Protestant Ethic was merely an early, trial monograph. In this perspective (PEi), asceticism is a necessary and sufficient condition of rational capitalism, but asceticism needs to be placed with a number of other key variables.5 Hence, sociologists have turned, for example, to Weber's General Economic History in which we find that the pre-requisites of modern capitalism include capitalist modes of ownership, free labour, rational law and free market movements. It is sometimes argued in addition that Weber had a general scheme to set up an experimental test of PEi by cross-cultural comparison. Thus Parsons has noted that Weber, turning from the method of agreement to the method of difference, embarked on an ambitious series of comparative studies all directed to the question, why did modern rational bourgeois capitalism appear as a dominant phenomenon only in the modern West? (Parsons 1949: 512) While this interpretation (PEi) of Weber does more justice to Weber's sociology considered as a whole than with a simple ‘idealist’ perspective (PE), it contains at least two difficulties. Firstly, it tends to assume that Weber accepted J.S. Mill's methodology and consequently understates Weber's verstehende sociology. Secondly, it assumes that the Protestant Ethic thesis is continuous and central in Weber's later sociology. The issues raised, however, in Ancient Judaism, The Religion of China and The Religion of India concerning bureaucracy, patrimonialism and village organization are far wider than the restricted theme of the Protestant Ethic thesis. In some respects, the problem of asceticism as an aspect of radical social change is tangential to Weber's analysis of Asian society.6 Sociologists who hold that Weber's main concern was to explore historical connections of values and meaning have rejected the view that Weber attempted, by cross-cultural comparison, to demonstrate the causal primacy of values. Rather than seeking any over-simplified causal chain, Weber was concerned, according to this view (W), to elaborate complex ‘affinities’ or ‘congruencies’ between social meanings. For example, Peter Berger argued that Weber's first concern was with ‘elective affinity’ (Wahlverwandtschaft), namely with the ways in which ‘certain ideas and certain social processes “seek each other out” in history’ (Berger 1963: 950). Similarly, Ferdinand Kolegar has criticized those commentators who treat Weber's theory of capitalism and Protestantism as a simple causal account of economic development. For Kolegar, Weber attempted to demonstrate the ‘mutual reinforcement’ between economic and religious ethics (Kolegar 1964: 362). Weber is said to hold not a positivist or Humean view of causality; rather Weber sought to explain actions by grasping their subjective meaning. Clearly, this view (W) does give legitimate weight to Weber's own methodological position but this emphasis on ‘elective affinity’ rather than ‘empirical cause’ does run into three problems. It assumes a very debatable issue, namely that Weber followed consistently his own methodological guidelines. Weber's ‘interpretative explanation’ (verstehende Erklärung) involves the philological interpretation of actor's concepts and terms. Yet Weber never faced the problem of whether a complex meaning system such as ‘Islam’ can be unambiguously treated as a ‘religion’. Uncovering the multiplicity of meanings encased in the term ‘Islam’ is part of the sociologist's fundamental task.7 A further difficulty with explanations in terms of subjective meaning is that they rarely get beyond plausible descriptions of subjective states without relating these meanings to their social structural settings (cf. Rex 1971). Finally, by giving priority to meaningful causality over empirical causality, this interpretation (W) finds it difficult to rescue Weber from the charge of ‘facile interactionism’. It could be argued that Weber avoided these problems by showing, in specific examples, how social groups acted as carriers of values and beliefs and how ‘elective affinities’ developed between the socio–economic basis of carrier groups and particular constellations of beliefs. However, such an interpretation of ‘elective affinity’ comes very close to a Marxist view that beliefs are socially constructed in terms of dominant economic interests. The fourth view of Weber (Wi) often starts by refuting the facile notion that Weber was arguing with ‘the ghost of Marx’. For example, Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills claimed that Weber's task was partly to complement Marx's economic materialism ‘by a political and military materialism’ (Gerth and Wright Mills 1961: 47). They also suggested that, as Weber became more embittered by German politics, he gave increasing prominence to ‘material’ factors. A consideration of Weber's public lecture at Freiburg in 1896 on ancient civilization shows, however, a consistant Marxist undercurrent in Weber's sociology (Weber 1950). Similarly, Norman Birnbaum has argued that Weber contributed a sophisticated sociology of motives to Marx's analysis of interests and ideologies (Birnbaum 1953). While contemporary reappraisals of Marx's Paris manuscripts and Grundrisse have enormously complicated our conception of the relationship between Marx and Weber, Weber's view of motive remains an important issue.8 Recently Paul Walton has suggested that Weber's sociology enables us to study the possession by particular actors or groups of vocabularies, phrases or outlooks, which, far from being rationalizations or mystifications of interests, act as motive forces for action itself. (Walton 1971: 391) Walton's statement follows C. Wright Mills' theory that groups exercise social control, linguistically, by imputing good or bad motives to actions (Wright Mills 1940). Mills pointed out that his approach was compatible with Weber's definition of a motive as ‘a complex of subjective meaning’ (Weber 1966: 98). The theory of motive implicit in Weber and elaborated by Mills is not incompatible with a Marxist treatment of ideas and ideology. There is no contradiction in saying that vocabularies of motive determine social actions, but these vocabularies are locked within specific socio–economic contexts. Indeed, Mills was at pains to point out that certain social settings exclude certain types of motive. In secular settings, a religious vocabulary of motives is either inappropriate or unavailable. It would not be difficult to imagine a situation in which traditional religious languages for describing and influencing social activities became obsolete with the decline in social power of religious élites. Like Weber, Marx thought that the religious culture of feudalism was wholly irrelevant under capitalist conditions: new motives appropriate to capitalist social relations would evolve without an atheistic campaign (cf. Lobkowicz 1964). It is not difficult to interpret Weber's analysis of ascetic motives in precisely these terms. Weber himself claimed that it was necessary to investigate how ascetic motives were shaped by ‘the totality of social conditions, especially economic’ (Weber 1966: 183). The fourth Weber thesis (Wi) thus asserts that to explain actions we need to understand the subjective meaning of social actions, but the languages which are available for describing and explaining actions are determined by socio–economic settings. Weber started by recognizing that Meccan Islam was a monotheistic religion based on ethical prophecy which rejected magic. Given that Allah was all powerful and omniscient, and man predestined, asceticism could have emerged as a solution to a potential ‘salvation anxiety’. Weber argued that asceticism was blocked by two important social groups: the warrior group which was the main social carrier of Islam and the Sufi brotherhoods which developed a mystical religiosity. In adapting Muhammad's monotheistic Qur'an to the socio–economic interests of a warrior life-style, the quest for salvation was reinterpreted through the notion of jihad (holy war) to the quest for land. Islam was turned into a ‘national Arabic warrior religion’. The concept of inner salvation never fully developed and adherence to the outward rituals of the community became more significant than inward conversion: Ancient Islam contented itself with confessions of loyalty to god and to the prophet, together with a few practical and ritual primary commandments, as the basis of membership. (Weber 1965b: 72) Weber concluded that despite Islam's origins in Jewish–Christian monotheism, ‘Islam was never really a religion of salvation’ (1965b: 263). The warrior group turned the religious quest into a territorial adventure and Islamic asceticism was basically the rigour and simplicity of a military caste. Islam did, however, develop a genuine salvation path with ultimately religious goals, but this quest was mystical and other-worldly. Weber regarded Sufism as a mass religiosity which enabled Islam to reach its conquered subjects through their indigenous symbolism and ritual. Sufi mysticism thus introduced magical, orgiastic elements into Islam and watered down its monotheism. The combination of a warrior religiosity with mystical acceptance of the world produced all the characteristics of a distinctively feudal spirit; the obviously unquestioned acceptance of slavery, serfdom and polygamy . . . the great simplicity of religious requirements and the even greater simplicity of the modest ethical requirements. (1965b: 264) Given this religious ethic, Islam could not provide the social leverage whereby the Muslim Middle East could be lifted out of feudal stagnation. At this level of argument it would be all too easy to interpret Weber as postulating that Islam did not produce capitalism because it had a culture incompatible with the spirit of capitalism (PE thesis). Alternatively, one could conclude that Weber is claiming (W thesis) that there was an elective affinity between the needs of a warrior group and the militaristic values which developed from pristine Islam. Weber's argument was, in fact, far more complex and when Weber turned to an analysis of Islamic law it appears that his argument was constructed in terms of a string of pre-requisites which are necessary for capitalist development (PEi thesis). At the centre of Weber's sociology of law is a distinction between arbitrary, ad hoc lawmaking and legal judgments which are derived logically from general laws. In the case of substantive, irrational law, law makers do not follow general principles, but judge each case according to purely arbitrary factors. The paradigmatic case of such law, in Weber's view, was that of the qadi who judges each case on personal, particularistic grounds. The law resulting from qadi decisions lacks generality and stability. However, Islam did possess a universal legal code, despite different legal schools, in the form of the Shari'a (Holy Law) which Weber categorized as substantive, rational law. Law of this kind follows principles which are derived from sacred revelation, ideology or a belief system imposed by conquest. The norms of the Shari'a were ‘extra legal’ in the sense of being derived ultimately from prophecy and divine revelation. Whereas qadi justice was unstable, sacred justice was inherently inflexible and could not be readily extended systematically to meet new cases and situations. After the first three centuries of Islam, the Shari'a was treated as complete and hence there emerged a hiatus between theory and practice which was bridged by hiyal (legal devices): innovations had to be supported either by a fetwa, which could almost always be obtained in a particular case, sometimes in good faith and sometimes through trickery, or by the disputatious casuistry of the several competing orthodox schools. (Rheinstein 1964: 241)9 Therefore, Islam lacked a necessary condition for capitalist development, namely a systematic formal law tradition (PEi thesis). The standard sociological interpretation of Weber on law is that he held a strong thesis (PEi) that rational formal law is a necessary prerequisite of rational capitalism and, as a result, crude economic explanations of capitalism are inadequate. Despite the explicit strong thesis (PEi), Weber admitted that, in the case of English judge-made law, the absence of a gapless system of law had not held back the progress of English capitalism. In England, the courts of justice of the peace resembled ‘khadi-justice to an extent unknown on the Continent’. Weber went on to observe that ‘adjudication by honoratores’ on continental lines may thus well stand in the way of the interests of the bourgeois classes and it may indeed be said that England achieved capitalistic supremacy among the nations not because but rather in spite of its judicial system. (Rheinstein 1964: 230–1) English capitalism did not suffer in this way for two reasons, in Weber's view. Lawyers and entrepreneurs were drawn from the same social class and shared common interests; as a professional body, lawyers enjoyed considerable political autonomy. Weber appears, therefore, to have argued that it was not the content of law but the social context and institutionalization of law which was crucial for capitalist contractual relations. Similarly, the instability of qadi justice and the inflexibility of the Shari'a are products of patrimonial rulership rather than irreducible facts about Islamic culture. A close reading of Weber suggests this final interpretation (Wi thesis). While occidental bourgeois strata preferred formal rational law, oriental patrimonial rulers ‘are better served’ by substantive qadi justice which represents ‘the likelihood of absolute arbitrariness and subjective instability’ (Rheinstein 1964: 229). Viewing Weber's treatment of law in this light takes us to a final interpretation of Weber's analysis of Islam. This final thesis (Wi) seems to be that Islam did not generate capitalist industrialization because for centuries the Muslim homelands had been dominated by a system of patrimonial bureaucracy controlled by foreign troops. It is the patrimonial economic and political structure which explains the absence of a capitalist spirit, of rational law and of independent cities. Furthermore, while Weber's dominant theoretical problem seems to be that of explaining the absence of capitalism outside Europe, Weber does appreciate that one major issue in Islamic history is to explain the relative stagnation of the economy between the twelfth and nineteenth centuries. Weber attempted to suggest an explanation in terms of the problems of financing patrimonial troops: The feudalization of the economy was facilitated when the Seljuk troops and Mamelukes were assigned the tax yield of land and subjects; eventually land was transferred to them as service holdings. . . . The extraordinary legal insecurity of the taxpaying population vis-à-vis the arbitrariness of the troops to whom their tax capacity was mortgaged could paralyse commerce and hence the money economy; indeed, since the period of the Seljuks [ca. 1050–1150] the Oriental market economy declined or stagnated. (Weber 1968: 1016) The decline of the money economy was accompanied by increasing arbitrariness in law, land rights, property and civic relations. Weber summarized these political conditions under the term ‘sultanism’ which described purely arbitrary decisions of a patrimonial ruler. Since property holding became uncertain, the urban merchants invested in wakfs (family trusts consecrated to pious works) which were comparatively safe from interference. These investments encouraged an extensive immobilization of capital which corresponded fully to the spirit of the ancient economy which used accumulated wealth as a source of rent, not as acquisitive capital. (Weber 1968: 1097) Since towns were merely army camps for patrimonial troops and since patrimonial interference discouraged investments in trade and craft industry, a bourgeois life-style and ethic did not develop in Islam. Thus, Weber concluded that the prebendal feudalism of imperial Islam is inherently contemptuous of bourgeois-commercial utilitarianism and considers it as sordid greediness and as the life force specifically hostile to it. (1968: 1106) According to this thesis (Wi), Islamic values and motives certainly influenced the way in which Muslims behaved in their economic, political and social activities, but we can only understand why these values and motives were present by studying the socio–economic conditions (patrimonial dominance and prebendal feudalism) which determined Islamic history. Weber's theory that the ‘feudal ethic’ of Islam was the result of Islam being dependent on a warrior stratum as its social carrier (PE or W) is factually wrong. Islam was primarily urban, commercial and literate. Mecca was strategically placed on the trade routes between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean; Muhammad's own tribe, the Quraysh, had achieved a dominant political position based on their commercial strength in the region. The Prophet himself had been employed on the caravans which brought Byzantine commodities to the Meccan market. The Qur'an itself is steeped in a commercial terminology.10 There has been a continuous conflict in Islam between the dominant urban piety and the values of the desert, but this conflict was also economic. Desert tribes threatened the trade routes and extracted taxation from merchants. Islam provided a culture which was capable of uniting Bedouins and urban merchants within a single community. Islam was thus as much a triumph of town over desert as Arab over Persian and Christian. Weber's description of Islamic law was far more valid and accurate. Most scholars have recognized that the Shari'a was an ideal law which allowed a gap to grow between ideal and practice.11 The gap could only be filled by the most complex institutions and legal devices. The problem, then, lies not so much with Weber's description of Islamic law but with how that account will fit into his explanation of Islamic social backwardness. It is not easy to insert this view of Islamic law into a theory that rational law is a necessary condition for capitalist development (PEi thesis). Weber has already shown that English capitalism developed despite its judge-made legal system so that formal rational law may help capitalist development, but it cannot be a necessary condition. Furthermore, a number of scholars have concluded that the rigidity of Islamic law and its prohibition of usury never really interfered with commerce.12 The main problem in commercial life was the threat that patrimonial rulers would seize property and goods to pay off their troops. There does, therefore, seem to be empirical support for Weber's final thesis (Wi) that the decline of Islam's money economy is to be explained in terms of its patrimonial structure. While there have been many different explanations of Islamic decline in terms of international trade, demographic crises and even climate, there is a widely held theory that the failure of the ruling institutions of Islam was closely connected with problems of military finance.13 There is an old Oriental maxim which says that a ruler can have no power without soldiers, no soldiers without money, no money without the well-being of his subjects, and no popular well-being without justice. (Inalcik 1964: 43) By ‘justice’, the Ottoman jurists meant that the sultanate should maintain a balance between the two halves of society, between askeri (military, civil service and ulema) and reaya (Muslim and non-Muslim tax-payers). It was the inability of the sultanate to insure that each social stratum fulfilled its special functions, the inability to satisfy justice, which weakened the fabric of Islamic society, particularly under Ottoman rule. Ultimately justice was dependent on successful warfare and a powerful sultanate. Warfare provided booty and land by which the sultanate could reward and pay off retainers. Without new land, tax-farming and bribery became major means of political influence and reward. Without a powerful sultanate, the complex bureaucratic machinery of the Ottoman state lacked direction and purpose. Failure to extend Islam, the withdrawal of the sultan from public life and the increasing inefficiency of the military were interrelated aspects of social decline. When the Ottoman empire reached its territorial limits in 1570, the state in search of revenue to pay off the standing army was forced to let imperial fiefs to tax-farmers. The sipahi (land-owning cavalry) went into decline because of the growing use of firearms, but also because when a sipahi died without heir, his lands were appropriated by the Treasury and let out for tax-farming. With the decline of the sipahi, the peasantry were at the mercy of the growing class of avaricious multezims (tax-farmers). As the sipahi, peasantry and merchants declined with the failure of the ruling institutions, local magnates (Ayan) and small dynasts (Derebeyis) arose to terrorize the provinces. As a political entity, Islam was unable to prevent nationalist movements in the Balkans, unable to exclude European colonists and unable to develop its own industry and trade.14 These developments in Islam were explained by Weber in terms of the contradictions and imbalances of ‘sultanism’ as a political system (Wi thesis). There are a number of theses in Weber's sociology which give different explanations of social, especially capitalist, development. I have suggested that only the final thesis which explains the decline of Islamic society in terms of certain military–economic contradictions (Wi) has the support of modern research. The other three theses (PE, PEi and W) suffer from damaging theoretical ambiguity and circularity or they are factually false. It is ironic, therefore, that when Muslim reformers came to explain for themselves the apparent failures of Islamic civilization, they used implicitly Weberian arguments, especiallytheories of individual ascetic motivation (theses PE and PEi) rather than structural explanations (Wi). The colonial expansion of Europe created an acute problem of theodicy: if Islam is the true religion, how are infidels so successful in this world? The Muslim answer to this issue has been shared by the most diverse reformist movements, namely Christians are strong because they are not really Christian; Muslims are weak because they are not really Muslim. (Hourani 1962: 129) In order to become ‘really Muslim’, it is necessary to rid Islam of foreign accretions and to discover original, pure Islam, which is seen to be completely compatible with the modern, scientific world. Pure Islam is based on an ascetic, activist, this-worldly ethic. The enemy of both pure Islam and modern society is a set of attitudes – fatalism, passivity, mysticism – which was introduced into Islam by the Sufis, Berber marabouts and related groups. Criticism of Sufism has been, of course, a persistent aspect of orthodox Islam over the centuries, but there is a new emphasis in the contemporary rejection of Sufi mysticism, namely that it is a drain on economic resources and is incompatible with asceticism and activism. Expenditure on tombs and festivals has been widely criticized, particularly in North Africa. Active involvement in this world thus became a major theme of Islamic reform directed against Sufi quietism. A favourite Koranic text of the reformer Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1839–97) was ‘Verily, God does not change the state of a people until they have changed themselves inwardly’ (cf. Keddie 1968). Similarly, Rashid Rida asserted that the first principle of Islam was ‘positive effort’. There are, therefore, certain interesting parallels between Weber's account of Protestantism (PE and PEi) and basic themes of Islamic reform. Pure Islam and Puritanism sought in the basic scriptures of their religion an ethic which would be free from mystical, ritualistic accretions. The result was a set of norms prescribing asceticism, activism and responsibility. Yet, the connection between Puritan asceticism in Europe and Islamic modernism in the Middle East is superficial and derivative. Probably the most significant difference is the social context in which Islamic ‘puritanism’ is located. Islamic reform was a response, often apologetic, to an external military and cultural threat; it was an attempt to answer a feeling of inferiority and frustration resulting from Western colonialism. Despite the existence of pre-colonial Islamic ‘puritanism’ (Wahhabism, Hanbalitism), Islamic reform in the modern period was not so much an autonomous development as an attempt to legitimate the social consequences of an exogenous capitalism. Basic Islamic terms were conveniently translated into European ones without much respect for etymology: Ibn Khaldun's umran gradually turned into Guizot's ‘civilization’, the maslaha of the Maliki jurists and Ibn Taymiyya into the ‘utility’ of John Stuart Mill, the ijma of Islamic jurisprudence into the ‘public opinion’ of democratic theory . . . (Hourani 1962: 344)15 The ‘Protestant Ethic’ of Islam was second-hand and it was such because the leaders of Islamic modernism were either educated by Europeans or accepted European traditions. Weber's Protestant Ethic theory (theses PE and PEi) came to fit Islamic modernization simply because Muslims came to accept a European view of how to achieve capitalist development. Reformers like al-Afghani, Muhammad Abduh and Rashid Rida accepted the view, especially as expressed by M. Guizot (General History of Civilization in Europe), that social progress in Europe had followed the Protestant Reformation. It is no surprise that al-Afghani saw himself as the Luther of Islam. In this inquiry into Weber's view of Islam, I have attempted to show that we can plausibly perceive four different theses in Weber's sociology of civilizations. On the basis of contemporary research and theoretical discussion, three theses can be dismissed as either false or theoretically weak. The fourth thesis is that Islam declined and was eventually forced into economic dependence on Europe because it could not solve an inherent weakness in what Weber called ‘sultanism’. In this final perspective, Islamic beliefs are still treated as influential, but the presence of these beliefs rather than some other beliefs is explained by the social and economic structure of patrimonialism. When Muslim reformers came to understand their own economic decline, they often employed theories of ascetic motivation, but this fact cannot be taken as evidence that asceticism is a necessary aspect of capitalist development. The ideology of hard work in modern Islam was very largely a colonial importation.
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