No abstract

In a famous issue of Times Literary Supplement (TLS) focusing on the state of historical scholarship, Moses Finley called for "Unfreezing the Classics" through "serious history" and lamented that, "Less than a generation ago the profound disagreement between Hugh Last and (now Sir) Ronald Syme about Augustus was. .. serious. But today? While our colleagues engage in polemics over the Tudor Revolution in government, the rise of gentry, the roots of Industrial Revolution or the causes of the First World War, what excites us to debate?" 1 Less than a generation later, the field of classical scholarship had been so transformed that Keith Hopkins, one of Finley's successors as the chair of ancient history at Cambridge could report without much exaggeration that, "Ancient economy is an academic battle ground where the contestants campaign under various colours-apologists, Marxists, modernizers, primitivists. .. Even within schools, there are sects. Besides, new strategies, new alliances, new compromises are repeatedly devised. Fresh contingents of scholars arrive, new tactics (such as underwater archaeology) are developed. .. But no new weapon is finally decisive. The war continues." 2 The radical change was largely due to the success of Finley himself in writing the kind of history that was "about important matters of broad human concern" and reflected his "seriousness and his values." Indeed he had already fired the opening shots of the battle of ancient economy in a controversial confer-378

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No abstract

This article pursues two specific and entwined objectives. It accounts for the absence of a general concept of reformation in Max Weber's sociology of religion, and demonstrates the need for one and supplies it through a comparative analysis of Islam as a 'reform-prone' Abrahamic religion.