ABSTRACT
The state plays a fundamental role in the emergence of industrial capitalism in that it has to perform three roles in order for it to become possible. Max Weber might have argued that the relationship between the state and the law in Islam was bad for the former, and thus indirectly for the chances of modern capitalism too: this would be hard to deny. His basic point seems to be that a certain degree of legal rationalization is a precondition for the rise of capitalism and that legal systems which fail to reach this degree may act as barriers to it. Islamic law was shaped by “bourgeois elements,” in the sense of people overwhelmingly engaged in one form of commerce or other; it could be seen as an instrument of bourgeois interests; and its concrete provisions look highly conducive to capitalism in some respects, if in others the reverse.
