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Mahdi Amel (1936–87) was a prominent Arab Marxist thinker and Lebanese Communist Party member. For the first time in English, this collection makes available lengthy excerpts from six major works by Mahdi Amel. These include the two founding texts on colonialism and underdevelopment in which Amel began to grapple with the question of dependency, his treatise on sectarianism and the state, his critique of Edward Said’s analysis of Marx, his exposure of emerging Islamised bourgeois trends of thought as part of a broader critique of everyday thought, and his reflection on cultural heritage as perceived by Arab bourgeoisie. Amel’s writings serve as a reminder of the need to renew Marxist thought based on concrete and particular social realities, like colonialism.
“[Amel’s] tenacity of thought can guide us in understanding and supporting today’s forms of anticolonial and Indigenous resistance. ‘You are not defeated as long as you continue to resist’: We return to these words, before we turn to face the world.”
—Bassem Saad, N+1
Mahdi Amel (1936–87) was a prominent Arab Marxist thinker and Lebanese Communist Party member. Born in south Lebanon, he studied, taught, and wrote on Marxist philosophy in relation to colonialism and national liberation in France, Algeria and Lebanon. He was assassinated in 1987.
Hicham Safieddine is lecturer in the history of the Modern Middle East at King’s College London and author of Banking on the State: The Financial Foundations of Lebanon. He is co-founder of Al-Akhbar English and The Legal Agenda English Edition.
Angela Giordani is an intellectual historian of the modern Arabic-speaking world. Her translations have appeared in Jadaliyya and The Arab Renaissance: A Bilingual Anthology of the Nahda