A NOTE ON RODINSON’S MOHAMMED

Bryan S. Turner Lecturer in Sociology, University of Aberdeen

Muhammad, the Prophet of Islam, has been a perennial problem of both European scholarship and polemic. By starting with the assumption that the Qur’ln is either false or not prophetic, scholars frequently find them- selves accusing Muhammad either of insincerity or of epilepsy. Voltaire gave classical expression to the first viewpoint: Muhammad was sane but insincere. The Qur’an was created by Muhammad to raise the Arabs above their low level of social and intellectual development:

Apres avoir bien connu le caractere de ses concitoyens, leur ignorance, leur credulite, et leur disposition a l’enthousiasme, il vit qu’il pouvait s’eriger en prophete. l

A similar explanation of Muhammad was adopted by Gibbon, who, while rejecting the notion that the Prophet was mentally disturbed, asserted :

Of his last years ambition was the ruling passion; and a politician will suspect that he secretly smiled (the victorious imposter!) at the enthusiasm of his youth, and the credulity of his proselytes.2

The alternative view is that Muhammad was sincere but deranged. For Weil, Sprenger and Nbldeke, the explanation of Muhammad’s behaviour was to be found in epilepsy, hysteria or uncontrolled emotion.3 There are obvious problems with both types of accusation. There is little evidence for Muhammad’s imputed fraudulence. Similarly, it is difficult to account for Muhammad’s success both as statesman and military leader if he is held to be an epileptic. Despite the unquestioned development in scholar- ship in the twentieth century regarding the life and times of the Prophet, the problem of adequate interpretation remains. Because the issue of the validity of the Qur’an as a prophetic revelation cannot be lightly swept aside, traditional axes of interpretation-sincerity and mental illness- tend to recur. Any new biography of the Prophet will have to be assessed in terms of its ability to transcend these traditional approaches.

With the translation of Maxime Rodinson’s Mahomet into English,* it is pertinent to examine whether Rodinson has provided a satisfactory framework of interpretation. In writing this biography, Rodinson has two aims in view: to write a ‘book that is readable’ and to provide an analysis of known facts within the perspective of Marxism and Freudian psycho- logy. I am convinced that Rodinson has been utterly successful in his

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first objective. The author has a pellucid style and the narrative is at once captivating and erudite. My doubts centre solely on the Marxist-Freudian interpretation. The problem is that Rodinson is not Marxist enough, while his Freudian psychology ends up merely as a redescription of traditional approaches. I shall start by examining Rodinson’s Freudian account of Muhammad and then deploy Marxism to argue that the categories by which we attempt to understand other religions are all too frequently culturally relative.

Rod&on begins by admitting that he is an atheist, but denies that his own philosophical views preclude a sympathetic understanding of Muhammad the man. Yet, this is a crucial difficulty. It must be the case that Rodinson, as an atheist, believes that the crucial claims made by the Qur’&r are false. His problem thus becomes one of explaining how Muhammad held false beliefs without either insincerity or epilepsy. The answer to these difficulties is, according to Rodinson, to be found in the Freudian concept of ‘the unconscious’. Muhammad sincerely believed that his recitation came from a divine source, but

sincerity is no proof that these messages really came from where they are claimed to come.6

In his use of this terminology Rodinson seems to fall into an ambiguity, outlined by Alasdair MacIntyre, between ‘unconsciously (adverb) and ‘the unconscious’ (noun). 6 While Rodinson wants to claim, as it were, a topographical source of the Qur’Bn in Muhammad’s unconscious (noun), he in fact shows that Muhammad created the Qur’Hn unconsciously (adverb). The Qur’in was created unconsciously on the basis of Judaic- Christian source material which, presumably, Muhammad had ‘for- gotten’ :

what Muhammad saw and heard may have been the supernatural beings described to him by the Jews and Christians with whom he talked. It is understandable that, in the words that came to him, elements of hi actual experience, the stuff of his thoughts, dreams and meditations, and memories of discussions that he had heard should have re-emerged, chopped, changed and transposed, with an appearance of immediate reality . . .’

By arguing that Muhammad created the suras of the Qur’Sn by un- consciously recreating ‘memories of discussions’, Rodinson rejects some traditional views only to end up by saying that Muhammad was sincere but mistaken.

Although Rodinson often slips between ‘the unconscious’ and ‘un- consciously’, he in fact wants to utilize the former. An attempt is made to describe the contents of Muhammad’s ‘unconscious’ by reference to the Prophet’s unhappy experiences as an orphan, sexually unsatisfying marriage with Khadija and circumstances in adult life. Despite the inten- tion to offer a Freudian account, Rodinson appears to be dealing with a

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pre-Freudian, neurological perspective. Muhammad is seen as a specific psycho-physiological type. Further,

Muhammad’s psycho-physiological constitution was basically of the kind found in many mystics. s

Given the difficulties in Muhammad’s social environment-so adeptly analysed by W. Montgomery Watt-Muhammad’s psycho-physiological problems found an outlet in certain extreme forms of religious behaviour. Rodinson argues that, where certam individuals cannot ‘adjust to the roles which society expects of them’, society creates ‘exceptional roles’:

This often takes the form of making those with a particular kind of abnormality responsible for contacts with the supernatural world, the world of gods and spirits.a

Apart from the implicit~ostfactum nature of this explanation (Muhammad thought he had supernatural contacts; Arab society allocated roles for this purpose; therefore Muhammad occupied such a role), there is a difficulty with this interpretation which is inherent in role theory. Was it the case that Muhammad was abnormal or was the role of k&in (soothsayer) abnormal or both? We might argue that in our society, people who cannot adjust to normal social roles become sociologists, but we would want other evidence to argue that they (or their social role ?) are also abnormal. The problem is in part one of circularity, because it may be that Rodinson is simply claiming as a nominal definition that ‘abnormal’ means ‘responsible for supernatural encounters’. What Rodinson does not show, and probably cannot, is that seventh-century Arabs would have agreed to such a definition.

Whatever Rodinson may mean by ‘exceptional roles’, he wants to claim that Muhammad was psychologically and physiologically abnormal. By the latter, Rodinson must be referring to traditional descriptions of the Prophet’s large head, peculiar walk, and excessive perspiration. It is this attempt to correlate a special physical type with a social (prophetic) activity which is the least successful aspect of Rodinson’s account. In the nineteenth century, the criminologist Cesare Lombroso argued that there was a definite ‘criminal type’ who was a physical degenerate with large forehead and gorilla stance. I am not accusing Rod&on of holding the theory that physical degenerates are either criminals or prophets. The important thing is that we expect criminals to look physically aggressive because we have developed special criminal stereotypes. I would suggest that we have a range of religious stereotypes by which we categorize people as ‘evangelical’, ‘mystical’ or ‘prophetic’. Our own stereotypes of social abnormality are simply irrelevant in seventh-century Hejaz.

It is Rodinson’s failure to examine whether our concepts, theories and stereotypes have any meaning in other cultures which leads one to believe that the Marxism which Rodinson professes is minimal. Even a minimal Marxism would claim that common-sense theories of social behaviour are social products designed to explain specific social events. While

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I do not want to claim that Freudianism is restricted to explanations of the problems of Viennese bourgeoisie; Freudian explanations are probably most efficient in the case of monogamous, patriarchal societies. Rodinson starts by assuming what is to be demonstrated; that Freudian theories will fit a social structure with institutions of polygamy and concubinage. Similarly, theories of mystical events developed to account for Christian phenomena are not likely to apply to Muhammad, at least not auto- matically. Yet when Rodinson comes to consider Muhammad’s ‘intel- lectual revelation’, he refers to St. Teresa of Avila’s mysticism. Catholic theories of mysticism elaborated in the sixteenth century are not im- mediately plausible as explanations of Muhammad’s experiences in seventh-century Mecca.

In an attempt to render a sympathetic account of Muhammad as a sincere man, Rodinson successfully extricates himself from many tradi- tional prejudices, but in so doing he commits us to the view that Muham- mad was mistaken and pathological. My conclusion is that a biography of the Prophet which sets him within the social and cultural context of Islam, not of Europe, has still to be written.

NOTES

I. F. M. A. de Voltaire, Essai SW 1e.s Moeurs, Paris, 1963, vol. I, p. 256. 2. Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Emfiire (ed. William Smith), London,

1887, vol. VI, p. 264. 3. For a brief note on the ‘epileptic theory’, cf. W. Montgomery Watt, Bell’s Introduction

to the Qur’cin, Edinburgh, 1970, ch. 2. 4. Maxime Rodinson, Mohammed (tr. Anne Carter), Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, I 97 I

L3.50. 5. Ibid., p. 77. 6. A. C. MacIntyre, The Unconscious; A Conceptual Study, London, 1958, ch. 3. 7. Rodinson, op. cit., p. 77. 8. Ibid., p. 56. g. Ibid., p. 57.