Maxime Rodinson

However this may be, what is essential, from the sociological point of view, is that Islam, like every other ideological movement, created on the one hand a new community which endows its members with a distinct identity and, on the other hand, a specific ideology, a cluster of ideas which project an ideal society. The community in question, Islam, may believe that in certain periods of its existence and in some sectors, it has truly realized this ideal. This is what the sociologist Karl Mannheim calls an ideology in the restricted sense. In other periods and in other sectors, the community has determined that the ideal is yet to be constructed. This Mannheim calls a utopia, without necessarily implying, as the usual meaning of the word would have it, that the ideal is unrealizable. The question of the possibility of realization is left open, and remains subject to the individual judgement.

and critical analysis has not advanced since the two remarkable works of W. Montgomery Watt, to which I make frequent reference.

I aimed to write a book that was a narrative account but also an interpretation. The interpretative aspect was of utmost importance to me. I drew on the partial explanations that had already been put forward. I made an effort at times to criticize, refine, or add to them; but above all, I tried to bring them all together, to place them within a wider context, so as to arrive at an explanatory synthesis