Revisiting Weber and Islam

When I published ‘Islam, capitalism and the Weber thesis’ in the BJS in 1974 (Turner 2010 [1974a]), there was relatively little written about Weber’s comparative sociology of religion and even less about his fragmented commentary on Islam. At the time the principal exception was probably Maxime Rodinson’s Islam and Capitalism (1978 [1966]) which had first appeared in France in 1966.Weber had not of course produced a full length study of Islam to match his research on the religions of South Asia and China (Weber 1951 and 1958a). I had come to study this aspect of Weber’s sociology following a series of lectures on comparative religion at the University of Leeds by Professor Trevor Ling whose approach to the historical sociology of religious institutions inspired me to study Islam within a similar framework (Ling 1968). My BJS article therefore laid the foundations for a much more ample treatment of the issues in myWeber and Islam (Turner 1974) which appeared in the same year and which was generously reviewed by Ernest Gellner (1975) in Population Studies. One might say that these early steps in fact laid the foundation of my subsequent academic career.There has unsurprisingly been in the intervening three and a half decades a steady stream of commentary on both Weber’s sociology of religion and his observations on Islam, but despite the sustained criticism his sociological approach has not been radically surpassed in comparative sociological studies of religion.This assertion is fully justified in the light of such outstanding contemporary publications employing Weber’s conceptual framework as Stephen Sharot’s A Comparative Sociology of World Religions (2001).