Emile Tuma (1919–1985) was a Palestinian communist intellectual and historian. His al-Harakat al-Ijtima’iyya fi al-Islam (Social Movements in Islam) is one of the most ambitious Arab Marxist readings of Islamic history, yet it has received little attention outside Arabic-speaking circles. This talk presents the first English edition of the work, newly translated and critically annotated, and asks what it means to read Islam’s history through the lens of historical materialism.
Tuma treats religion as a social formation rather than a timeless doctrine. In this reading, the transition from tribe to umma, early Shiite thought, revolutionary Isma’ilism, Mu’tazili rationalism, Ash’arism as the ideology of a “feudal” era and the Shu’ubiyya are expressions of class struggle and political contestation. The second half of the book extends this analysis to the 20th century. It examines the relationship between religion and Arab nationalism, the Muslim Brotherhood, and sectarianism as a tool of Ottoman, French and Israeli rule.
The talk places Tuma in his intellectual and political setting: the Nakba, Palestinian life under Israeli rule, and debates within the Arab left. It argues that his project, an attempt to recover progressive traditions within Islam, remains a vital resource for thinking about religion, hegemony and emancipation in the Middle East today.
Abed Kanaaneh is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Middle Eastern and African History at Tel Aviv University. He is a historian of modern Lebanon and Middle Eastern intellectual history. He works on Shiite political thought, Hezbollah, and the Arab left through Gramscian and post-Marxist frameworks. He is the author of Understanding Hezbollah: The Hegemony of Resistance (Syracuse University Press, 2021). He is also the editor of Islam, Marxism, and Social Change: Emile Tuma’s Social Movements in Islam (De Gruyter Brill) and author of its first part. His articles have appeared in the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, Middle East Critique, Historical Materialism, the Journal of Israeli History, and Left History, as well as in Arabic and Hebrew journals. He is currently a visiting scholar at Freie Universität Berlin and EUME fellow for the academic year 2026/2027.
Florian Zemmin is Professor of Islamic Studies at Freie Universität Berlin since 2021 and since 2023 also Director of the Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures and Societies. Previously he was Senior Researcher at the Humanities Center for Advanced Study “Multiple Secularities: Beyond the West, beyond modernities” at the University of Leipzig. His main field of research is religion and society in the modern and contemporary Arab and Islamic world. In that field, more specific topics include Islamic reformism, theories of secularity and Arabic sociologies of religion. Next to sociology of religion and sociology of knowledge, he mainly works with approaches of conceptual history.
This seminar will be held in cooperation with the Institute of Islamic Studies at Freie Universität Berlin.
Please register in advance via eume(at)trafo-berlin.de. Depending on approval by the speaker(s), the Berliner Seminar will be recorded. All audio recordings of the Berliner Seminar are available on SoundCloud.