This article evaluates Max Weber’s overall analysis of Islam. Despite his efforts to be objective, Weber’s analysis was entrenched within a similar Orientalist discursive framework present among other Western scholars who studied non-Western traditions during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. After a review of the existing literature on Weber’s understanding of Islam and its relation to capitalism, this article critically explores other aspects of Weber’s conclusions about Islam that are equally problematic. Weber glosses over many centuries of variegated (...) Islamic cultural history to provide a universalist account of the Islamic civilisation that reduces it to a general meta-discourse. He regularly ignores many of the more localised, regional Islamic cultural traditions altogether. As a result, Weber fails to meaningfully account for the many nuances and idiosyncrasies constitutive of the broader Islamic tradition. This article argues that Weber’s account of Islam shows a great deal of confusion and misunderstanding on his part. (shrink)

The study of the creation of a technical language within an existing natural language reveals to us both the internal and external dynamics of this complex phenomenon. The history of Arabic lexical definitions of different disciplines in the historical Islamic civilization provides us with a wealth of information on how these processes take place at each level of development. In this article while we will be highlighting on the history of Arabic intellectual lexical definitions we will focus on the development (...) of the disciplines that constitute the Arabic philosophical technical languages i.e. Kalām and falsafah. In each discipline we closely followed the three conventional phases of development i.e. emergence, progression and stability. It should be remarked that though there are distinctive features of each phase, yet there are equally overlaps among these phases. This study brought to our attention the significant place of al-Taʿrifat of al-Jurjānī as the most sophisticated dictionary of sciences in the historical Islamic civilization. (shrink)