But his learning thrived through borrowed books and obliging teachers who didn't demand payment,[3] and Rodinson began to study oriental languages, at first on Saturday afternoons and in the evenings.

In 1932, thanks to a rule allowing persons without academic qualifications to take the competitive entrance examination, Rodinson gained entry to the Ecole des Langues Orientales and prepared for a career as a diplomat-interpreter.

His subsequent stay in Lebanon and Syria allowed him to escape the persecution of Jews in occupied France and extend his knowledge of Islam.

Rodinson spent most of the next seven years in Lebanon, six as a civil servant in Beirut and six months teaching in Sidon at the Maqasid[dubious – discuss] high school.

Rodinson left the Communist Party in 1958, following Nikita Khrushchev's revelations of Stalin's crimes[4] amid accusations of using the association to further his career, but nonetheless remained a Marxist.

According to Rodinson himself, the decision was based on his agnosticism, and he explained that being a party member was like following a religion and he wanted to renounce "the narrow subordination of efforts at lucidity to the exigencies of mobilization, even for just causes."

He became well known when he published Muhammad in 1961, a biography of the prophet's life written from a sociological point of view, a book which is still banned in parts of the Arab world.

A few months before publishing his famous article, Rodinson took part in a meeting organized in the "Mutualité" in Paris for the Palestinian struggle.

Elsewhere, he emphasized that my uncompromising condemnation of the errors and crimes committed under the aegis of the Zionist movement, in contradistinction to the apologies for these things by my opponents, has given me the right to criticize more or less analogous ideas and practices among the Arabs, who understandably are not interested in obviously biased discourses.

That is the reason why he disagreed with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), warning them against the illusion based on the Algerian FLN guerilla warfare which had driven out French "colons".

Rodinson's work combined sociological and Marxist theories, which, he said, helped him to understand "that the world of Islam was subject to the same laws and tendencies as the rest of the human race."

Throughout all of his later works on Islam, Rodinson stressed the relation between the doctrines inspired by Muhammad and the economic and social structures of the Muslim world.

For several centuries the explanation produced by Christians and rationalists has been that Muhammad was guilty of falsification, by deliberately attributing to Allah his own thoughts and instructions.

His sincerity appears beyond a doubt, especially in Mecca when we see how Allah hustled, chastised and led him into steps that he was extremely unwilling to take.This list refers to the English editions.