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.