EUME
2026/ 2027

Abed Kanaaneh

Between Marxism and turath: Emile Tuma and the Synthesis of Class Consciousness and Islamic Heritage in Palestinian Political Thought

Portrait of Abed Kanaaneh
Photo: private.

Abed Kanaaneh is a senior lecturer in the Department of Middle Eastern and African History at Tel Aviv University. Previously, he was a postdoctoral Fellow of the Minerva Stiftung in the Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at Ruhr-University Bochum. He was also a visiting scholar in Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African studies at Columbia University. Abed holds a BA in political science and communication, an MA in political science from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and a PhD in Middle Eastern studies from Tel Aviv University. His research interests include Shiʿite political thought, radical Islamic movements, revolutionary thought in the Middle East, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and Marxism and neo-Marxism in the Middle East. He is the author of Understanding Hezbollah: The Hegemony of Resistance (Syracuse University Press, 2021). In the academic year 2026/27, Abed is an associated EUME Fellow at the Forum Transregionale Studien, co-hosted at the Institute of Islamic Studies at Freie Universität Berlin.

Between Marxism and turath: Emile Tuma and the Synthesis of Class Consciousness and Islamic Heritage in Palestinian Political Thought

My current research project produces the first comprehensive intellectual biography of Emile Tuma (1919-1985), examining how this Palestinian communist intellectual synthesized Marxist historical materialism with Islamic cultural heritage (turath) while operating as a member of a national minority within Israel. Tuma’s distinctive approach, focusing on social movements and class struggles in Islamic history rather than philosophical texts, occupies a unique position among Arab Marxist intellectuals who grappled with revolutionary internationalism and cultural authenticity. The study tests six interconnected hypotheses about intellectuals operating from minority positions; the development of political consciousness in non-traditional working-class contexts; methodological innovations in applying materialism to religious traditions; patterns of intellectual influence across constrained boundaries; cultural production as political practice; and challenges to Eurocentric narratives. Through comprehensive textual analysis of Tuma’s complete works (fifteen books, hundreds of articles), unprecedented access to personal archives opened for academic research for the first time, extensive oral history with contemporaries, and systematic comparative analysis with six Arab Marxist intellectuals (Muruwwa, al-Jawzi, Amel, al-'Azm, Tarabishi, Kanafani), the research illuminates how Tuma’s editorial leadership of Al-Jadid and Al-Ittihad nurtured Palestinian resistance poetry and reconstructed political consciousness after the 1948 Nakba.
 

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