Breaking the Silence: A Forgotten Generation of Arab Communist Intellectuals, 1920–48

A generation of Arab intellectuals and activists who had founded the Lebanese/Syrian Communist Party in 1925 and constituted its core militant networks in the following decades had, by mid-century, disappeared. Its members had either renounced their membership of the party, or, much more commonly, had been purged. While the historiography has attributed this phenomenon to the policies of the Soviet Union and the leadership of the local communist parties, there has not been a thorough study of these individuals, or a comprehensive examination of the reasons behind their exclusion. My dissertation is an intellectual and cultural history of this first generation of Arab communists. Their exclusion from the party and its circles came as a result of their ideological heterogeneity. Using periodicals, memoirs, personal papers, and official records, I break the silence about the multiplicity of narratives and opinions that existed in Arab communist history by examining the ‘unorthodox’ way this generation interpreted and experienced communism, and how they struggled to maintain a fluid space in which they incorporated other worldviews. This flexibility, I argue, allowed them to stretch the limits of what it meant to be an Arab communist by redefining the terms of inclusion into their local political culture and a global revolutionary movement.