Maxime Rodinson was one of the foremost international specialists on the Middle East, the Arab world, and Islam, with a worldwide reputation among scholars in this field. Born in Paris in 1915, he died in Marseille at the age of eighty-nine in 2004.

The French historian left behind a bibliography of more than a thousand works, including some twenty books, six of which have been translated into English, and several collections of essays. His chosen subjects ranged from seventh-century Arabia all the way to the states and movements of the modern Middle East.

That intellectual legacy is of particular importance to the Left today because Rodinson sought to explain the key political and social developments in Arab societies with the help of Marxist concepts, applied in a creative and undogmatic spirit.