Marxist scholars interpreted early Islam as a political and economic movement.

Evidence

In 1961, he produced a biography of Muhammad, of which he later wrote as follows: ‘Probably in an unconscious fashion I compared him to Stalin.’ Rodinson produced an atheistic, positivist life of Muhammad, that placed him within the changing mercantile economy of the Quraysh tribe in Mecca. Islam was presented as resembling a political party more than it did a spiritual movement. The later Shi’ite Isma’ili movement was presented as a kind of early precursor of the Communist International. — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 459

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth pursuing: how much did Marxist framing genuinely illuminate seventh-century Mecca’s economics versus importing Stalin-era categories?

Related

• Soviet historiography explained Islam as bourgeois class ideology (similarity 0.78)