Emile Tuma
Editor: Abed Kanaaneh
Translator: Ruba Simaan
What happens when a Palestinian communist intellectual refuses to abandon Islamic heritage to his ideological opponents? Emile Tuma (1919–85) — historian, activist, and editor of Al-Ittihad — spent decades arguing that Islam’s history of rebellion, from the Zanj slave revolt to the Qarmatian movement, carries a genuinely revolutionary potential.
Part I introduces Tuma’s remarkable life and offers the first critical analysis of his Marxist engagement with Islamic social history. Part II delivers the first-ever English translation of his landmark Social Movements in Islam (1979) — making a foundational text of Arab-Marxist thought accessible to a global audience for the first time.
Biographical Note
Dr. Abed Kanaaneh is a senior lecturer in the department of Middle Eastern and African History at Tel Aviv University. His research interests include Shiʿite political thought, radical Islamic movements, revolutionary thought in the Middle East.
Ruba Simaan is a lead translator at Glocal Translations and Language Solutions in Haifa. She holds a Ph.D. in French from the Hebrew University. Her doctoral dissertation examined representations of female and male bodies in the novels of six male and female Francophone North African authors.
Readership
This book is for scholars and postgraduate students in Islamic history, Middle Eastern studies, Palestinian intellectual history, and postcolonial theory; specialists in Arab Marxism and left political thought; academic libraries collecting in these fields.
Table of Contents
part 1
Revolutionary Heritage: Emile Tuma and Reclaiming
Progressive Traditions in Islam
Abed Kanaaneh
1 The Making of a Revolutionary Intellectual: Short Biography of Emile
Tuma 3
1 Early Life, Education and Early Activism 3
2 The Nakba and Adapting to Israeli Rule 5
3 Intellectual Maturation and Major Works 6
4 Legacy and Death (1985) 8
2 Social Movements in Islam: A Marxist Reading of the History of
Islam 10
3 Survey of Al-Harakat Al-Ijtimaʿiyya fi Al-Islam 18
part 2
Social Movements in Islam, by Emile Tuma
Translated by Ruba Simaan
Edited and annotated by Abed Kanaaneh
Preface: Understanding History 27
1 The Role of Religion in General Societal Development 36
2 Social Ideologies in Islam 43
1 Pre-Islamic Mecca 43
2 From Tribe to Umma 48
3 Al-Shura (Consultative Council) 50
4 Social Justice 52
3 The Origins of Shiite Thought in Islam 55
4 The Revolutionary Faction within Ismaʿilism 69
1 The Context of the Ismaʿilism’s Emergence 72
2 Ismaʿili Social Ideas 74
5 Muʿtazila – The Rationalist Ideology 79
1 Intellectual Background 79
2 The Emergence of the Muʿtazila and their Views 82
6 Al-Ashʿariyya: The Ideology of the Feudal Era 90
1 The Era of Al-Mutawakkil as a Turning Point 90
2 Two Factors in the Development of Ashʿarism 96
3 The Social Principles of Ashʿarism 97
7 Al- Shuʿubiyya: An Ideology of Equality and National
Fanaticism 100
1 A Disposition, a Phenomenon, or an Intellectual Current? 100
2 Objective Opinions 101
3 Al-Shuʿubiyya as a Reaction to the Political Failures of the Ruling
Authority 102
4 When did Al-Shuʿubiyya Emerge? 103
5 Shuʿubiyya or Shuʿubiyyas? 104
8 The Relationship between Religion and Nationalism 110
1 Historical Aspects 110
2 The Emergence of Contemporary Nationalist Movements 115
9 The Relationship between Religion and Nationalism in the Arab
World 120
1 Two Parallel Currents 120
2 The Blend of Religion and Nationalism 124
3 The Muslim Brotherhood in Confrontation with Arab
Nationalism 126
4 The Triumph of Nationalism and its Abandonment by
Reactionism which Returned to Religion 128
10 Sectarianism under Ottoman Rule 131
11 Sectarianism – A Tool for Imperialism and Reactionism 138
1 Sectarianism in Palestine 138
2 France Resorts to Sectarianism in a Ridiculous Way 139
3 An Attempt to Transform the Religious Sects into
Nationalities 143
4 The Israeli Attempt 144
Bibliography 145
Index of Modern Authors 149
General Index (Names and Subjects) 150
