Max Weber and Islam, Pt.

 2
Posted on July 20, 2009 by Shaw| 1 Comment

In this series of posts, I give an overview of what the founder of

sociology of religion, Max Weber, thought about Islam. Importantly, it will become clear that
although Weber never wrote a book on Islam, his thought on the subject still influences us
today. Amazing. Post 1 introduced Weber and the Protestant Ethic. Part 2 addressed why it is
difficult to discern what Weber thought about Islam as well as the question, “Does Islam
inhibit capitalistic development?”. Part 3 addresses the main critique of Weber’s thought on
Islam: cultural essentialism.

INTRODUCTION TO WEBER

Max Weber (21 April 1864–14 June 1920) was a profoundly influential German sociologist.
He is regarded as the father of the sociology of religion. His most famous work is The
Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (which has a nice Wikipedia overview).

The impact of Weberian argument on the field of sociology of religion cannot be understated;
in fact, they produced “one of the most heated and prolonged intellectual controversies of the
century” (Bouma, 141).  Thousands of pages have been written analyzing Weber’s most
famous thesis — that of the relationship between the development of capitalism and the
Protestant Ethic (PE) — through a multitude of intellectual angles.  In fact, Weber’s thesis
spawned a new brand of scholar, the “Protestant Ethic researcher” (Bouma, 142).  There have
been multitudes of studies applying the PE theory to different cases, such as comparing North
American Protestants and Catholics (see Bouma, 1973, for a review of these studies).

While Weber himself did not write relatively much on Islam, his PE theory as well as his
minimal writings on Islam have impacted tremendously Western ideas about Islam.  Through
the late sixties, Weber’s theories were a “pivotal conditioning force… behind each effort to
make sense of ‘modern Islam’ and its alleged ‘failure’” (Salvatore, 1996: 457).  This question
of “what went wrong” has haunted Middle East scholars in both the Occident and the Orient, 
no matter how valid the question is in itself. This is likely the question that Weber also
struggled with as he thought through his theories on religion and the development of
capitalism.  “Why”, he must have asked, “are there no viable examples of capitalist societies
in the nineteenth century Muslim world?”  Weber’s thought on Islam and the development (or
lack of) capitalism in the Muslim world is the topic of this literature review.

THE PROTESTANT ETHIC

The PE argument is based on four attributes of Calvinism: the doctrine of the calling, the
doctrine of predestination, strong asceticism, and the doctrine of sanctification (Bouma, 142-
143, originally framed the PE thesis in this way).  First, the call of God is upon all to work for
His glory; in fact, this is the chief end of humanity, “to glorify God and enjoy Him forever” as
the Westminster Catechism states.  By this, “secular” work was given a divine purpose.  Also,
this doctrine led to a high value on excellence and honesty in the workplace.  The second
doctrine is that of predestination.  Whereas the Catholic church has long held that salvation
was based on fulfillment of the church’s commands as well as the sacrament, Calvinistic
soteriology argued that God, and only God, chooses those whom He will save and those who
He will damn.  Thus, God predestines whom He wills. With Calvinism, therefore, came a
fundamental change in the way in which people viewed the connection between religion and
money.  Since humanity does not know for sure who is ‘elect’ and who is not, they can only
presume upon Biblical promises.  Thus, individuals who adhered to Calvinism were called to
confirm their election via success in their worldly pursuits.  This led people to began to see
the value of “secular” work.  Occupational success became a proxy of one’s Divine election. 
Third, the Calvinist Protestant society pursued worldly success with puritan passion, or what
Weber calls, ascetic rationalism. Even the poor were able, via their ascetic lifestyles, to amass
capital and enter the market.  Lastly, the doctrine of sanctification led believers to hyper
rationalized lives as they believed that throughout their lives God was sanctifying them to be
complete and perfect bearers of His image.  Therefore, all of life should be ordered and
pursued with the sincerest rationality.  In summary, therefore, Weber hypothesized a causal
connection of some sorts  between Calvinistic Protestant society and the development of
capitalism.

BLOG SERIES BIBLIOGRAPHY

Collins, Randall. 2001. Book Review, Max Weber and Islam, Journal for the Scientific Study
of Religion. V. 40, N. 2, pp. 344-345.

Huff, Toby E., and Wolfgang Schluchter. 1999. Max Weber & Islam. New Brunswick, NJ:
Transaction.

Kaelber, L. 1996. “Weber’s Lacuna: Medieval Religion and the Roots of Rationalization”.
Journal of the History of Ideas. 57 (3): 465-486.

Martensson, U. 2007. “The Power of Subject: Weber, Foucault and Islam”. Critique-Saint
Paul. 16 (2): 97-136.

Matin-Asgari, Afshin. 2004. “Islamic studies and the spirit of Max Weber: a critique of
cultural essentialism”. Critique: Critical Middle Eastern Studies. 13 (3): 293-312.

Melkote, Srinivas R., and H. Leslie Steeves. 2001. Communication for development in the
Third World: theory and practice for empowerment. New Delhi: Sage Publications.

Said, Edward W. 2003. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books.

Salvatore, A. 1996. “Beyond Orientalism? Max Weber and the Displacements of
“Essentialism” in the Study of Islam”. Arabica. 43 (3): 457-485.

Seidman, Steven. 1984. “The Main Aims and Thematic Structures of Max Weber’s
Sociology”. The Canadian Journal of Sociology, V. 9, N. 4, pp. 381-404.

Sukidi. 2006. “Max Weber’s remarks on Islam: The Protestant Ethic among Muslim
puritans”. Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations. 17 (2): 195-205.

Turner, Bryan S. 1974. “Islam, Capitalism, and the Weber Theses”. The British Journal of
Sociology. Vol. 25, No. 2. pp. 230-243.

WHY UNDERSTANDING WEBER AND ISLAM IS DIFFICULT

The difficulty in studying Weber’s thought on Islam is that, first, his references to Islam are
scattered and confusing at best; second, he died before finishing his sociology of religion
which would have included a full treatment of Islam; third, frankly, it is difficult to untwine
Weberian thought into congruent, simple arguments; fourth, connecting Weber’s Protestant
Ethic thesis to Weber’s thought on Islam is all the more difficult considering there are
significant differences of opinion among scholars in their interpretation of Weber’s Protestant
Ethic thesis!

DOES ISLAM INHIBIT CAPITALISTIC DEVELOPMENT?

In his article, “Islam, Capitalism, and the Weber Thesis”, Bryan Turner argues that Weber
presented four different PE theses.  First, the PE is an idealistic theory of values.  Second, it is
“an argument about the necessary and sufficient conditions for the emergence of capitalism”
(1974: 231).  Third, it seeks merely to understand the capitalist (or non-capitalist)
development of different societies. It is important to note here that others have felt that Weber
desired to go beyond merely the study of western rational capitalism to understand the
uniqueness of Western culture and Western science (Salvatore, 1996: 467).  Fourth, the PE
thesis supports the idea that socio-economic contexts shape beliefs and economic
development.  Turner argues that the fourth of these is the only one which is both theoretically
strong as well as historical viable; the lack of Islamic capitalist development is due to the fact
that Islamic society has a long history of the domination of patrimonialism (1974: 231). 
Turner agrees with this last thesis that, “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.” (1974: 238).

The issue at hand in Turner’s analysis of Weber’s thought is whether the context of the
development of Islam led to the absence of capitalism in Islamic society or whether this
absence is due to something inherent in ‘Islam’ itself.  Turner argues that Weber thought that
the idea here is not that Islam lacked the sufficient conditions for the development of
capitalism, but that the dominance of the warrior mentality, mystical Sufism, and a qadi based
justice system, actually inhibited the development of capitalism (1974: 234ff.).  It was
patrimonialism in which imbibed the development of Islam that inhibited the development of
capitalism.  As Turner puts it, “It is the patrimonial economic and political structure which
explains the absence of a capitalist spirit, or rational law and of independent cities” (1974:
237).

Also relevant is whether in Islamic society there is asceticism concomitant to the rational
asceticism that Weber argued was found in Calvinistic society.  In short, Weber argued that
two social groups inhibited this rational asceticism in early Islamic society: the warrior tribe
and the Sufi brotherhood (Turner, 1974: 234).  The warrior reframed the issue of salvation
from the right of Providence to choose the elect to an issue of a warrior life-style where the
warrior attained salvation through jihad (Turner, 1974: 235).  Sufi mysticism “watered down”
Islamic monotheism as well as salvific themes with Islamic practice. Thus, Weber argued that
‘Islam was never really a religion of salvation’ (Turner, 1974: 235).  This conclusion cuts to
the core of the PE thesis as Islam ‘could not provide the social leverage whereby the Muslim
Middle East could be lifted out of feudal stagnation’ (Turner, 1974: 235).

That Weber needed the Orient to help him understand the Occident is consistent with
Salvatore’s argument that “the intellectual distinction always needs an external Other in order
to construct a framework of universal reference.  In the Western case, the view of the Islamic
Orient, its ‘orientalization,’ was crucial for defining the Western path of modernity” (1996:
458).  It is no surprise that Edward Said was critical of Weber for casting ‘types’ between the
Occident and Orient which ended up being “an ‘outside’ confirmation of many of the
canonical theses held by Orientalists, whose economic ideas never extended beyond asserting
the Oriental’s fundamental incapacity for trade, commerce, and economic rationality” (2003:
259).

Modern scholars that come to Weber’s defense are few and far between.  For instance, only
two authors within one collection of essays come to the defense of Weber, namely, Hull and
Schluchter, the editors of the volume (Collins, 2001: 344-345).  Another scholar, Niles
Hansen comes to Weber’s defense in pointing out Weber’s stated data weaknesses, arguing
that Weber was always merely interested in the “motivational forces behind the appearance of
modern rational capitalism in the Occident and its failure to emerge in other cultural contexts”
(464), and in asking the question of whether Weber’s theories are necessarily bound to the
one specific dogma of Calvinism.  In Hansen’s view, Weber was more concerned with the
social and economic actions that a dogma encouraged rather than the dogma itself.

CULTURAL ESSENTIALISM

The major critique of Weber’s thought on Islam is his cultural essentialism. Salvatore’s point
of origin in his work is that essentialism has been the major way in which the West has
cognitively domesticated the Islamic Orient.  Ultimately, Salvatore hopes to defend the
critique of Orientalism on the grounds of essentialism and show that essentialism is a
“fundamental constraint of cross cultural cognizance” (1996: 457), which has plagued
Islam/West relations.  Salvatore seeks to reconstruct the twentieth century trajectory of
essentialism especially as it concerns Weberian applications to make sense of “what went
wrong’ in the Muslim world.  He argues that Weber’s essentialism was a product of the
Orientalist German scholars from whom he learned about Islam (1996: 461).

Another scholar which criticizes Weber’s essentialism is Matin-Asgari.  In his work, “Islamic
Studies and the Spirit of Max Weber: A Critique of Cultural Essentialism,” (2004) an article
which Martensson calls “brilliant” (2007: 97), Matin-Asgari examines the work of Marshal
Hodgson, Clifford Geertz, and Ernest Gellner and argues that their cultural essentialism is
rooted in the works of Max Weber.  This is an ambitious thesis indeed, but one that shows the
lasting influence and importance of Weber’s thought on development, capitalism, and Islam. 
He argues that these scholars see fundamentalist Islam as the natural development of Islam. 
Ulrika Martensson (2007) follows up Matin-Asgaris work and goes deeper into the
relationship between Weber and Foucault regarding their ideas on truth and power as well as
Weber’s epistemological presuppositions of ‘culturalism’.