Mahdi 'Amil and Husayn Muruwwa : locating Marxism in the Arab context

Abstract

In the 1960s and 1970s, Marxist intellectuals were faced with an important challenge, that of reconciling Marxism with identity and culture. This question came as a natural evolution of the postcolonial context where nationalism had played an important role in galvanizing the colonized people against the colonizer. In the Arab context, the political withdrawal of Arab nationalism and the project of a secular Arab state gave rise to Islamism, which ideologically challenged Marxism in the Arab world on matters of authenticity. The argument was that Marxism as a Western theory could not adhere to the Arab world, not could it help answer the problems it faced. In this thesis, I take two Lebanese Marxist intellectuals, husayn Muruwwa and Mahdi 'Amil, and examine how they both approached the culturalist question. Husayn Muruwwa, adopting a Hegelian dialectical perception of historical evolution, went as far back in history as the early days of Islam to try and illuminate on the materialist thought in Arab Islamic philosophy. His goal was to show that Marxism in one of its most basic tenets was historically part and parcel of Arab cultural heritage as represented by its philosophical production. Mahdi 'Amil rejected the culturalist question as advanced by the Salafiyya. He called on a scientific study of Arab culture, not to try and link it to Marxism like Muruwwa did, but rather to show the weak foundations of the challenge posed by Islamists. 'Amil's contribution was however to try and construct an Arab theory of Marxism, accepting in one way or another the culturalist question the way it was asked by the postcolonial intellectual context. He saw that there was an internal need to formulate such an answer in order to properly theorize for national liberation movements. It is interesting to compare both these individuals because of the diverging answers they give to the culturalist question, which shows to what extent Marxism as a methodological approach can be flexible and can offer a broad spectrum of answers to ce