Mounir Shafiq: From Marxism to Islamism; or, the
Seamless Conversions of a Revolutionary
Palestinian Intellectual in Lebanon

Mounir Shafiq : du marxisme à l'islamisme, ou les conversions sans rupture d'un
intellectuel révolutionnaire palestinien au Liban

Mounir Shafiq: Del comunismo al islam político, las conversiones sin ruptura de un intelectual revolucionario palestino en el Líbano

Mounir Shafiq Vom Kommunismus zum politischen Islam, Die bruchlosen

Konversionen eines palästinensischen revolutionären Intellektuellen im Libanon

Nicolas Dot-Pouillard

Traducteur : Daniela Ginsburg

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OpenEdition
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Édition électronique

URL : https://journals.openedition.org/bssg/6417

DOI : 10.4000/13kyc

ISSN : 2490-9424

Cet article est une traduction de :

Mounir Shafiq : du marxisme à l'islamisme, ou les conversions sans rupture d'un intellectuel révolutionnaire palestinien au Liban - URL : https://journals.openedition.org/bssg/6260 [fr]

Éditeur

Presses universitaires de Paris Nanterre

Référence électronique

Nicolas Dot-Pouillard, « Mounir Shafiq: From Marxism to Islamism; or, the Seamless Conversions of a Revolutionary Palestinian Intellectual in Lebanon », *Biens Symboliques / Symbolic Goods* [En ligne], 15 | 2024, mis en ligne le 25 mars 2025, consulté le 28 mars 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/bssg/6417 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/13kyc

Ce document a été généré automatiquement le 28 mars 2025.

<figure><img src="image_2.png" /></figure>
Mounir Shafiq: From Marxism to
Islamism; or, the Seamless
Conversions of a Revolutionary
Palestinian Intellectual in Lebanon

Mounir Shafiq : du marxisme à l'islamisme, ou les conversions sans rupture d'un
intellectuel révolutionnaire palestinien au Liban

Mounir Shafiq: Del comunismo al islam político, las conversiones sin ruptura de
un intelectual revolucionario palestino en el Líbano

Mounir Shafiq Vom Kommunismus zum politischen Islam, Die bruchlosen

Konversionen eines palästinensischen revolutionären Intellektuellen im Libanon

Nicolas Dot-Pouillard

Traduction : Daniela Ginsburg

<footnote n="1">1 In May 2021, the publishing house of the Centre for Arab Unity Studies¹ published the memoirs of Mounir Shafiq, nicknamed Abu Fadi: a Palestinian intellectual and militant born in British Mandatory Jerusalem in 1936 who, over the course of his career, has moved from philo-Soviet Communism to Maoist-inspired Palestinian nationalism, eventually landing in political Islam. This work, entitled *Min Jamr ilā-Jamr* (Journey through the Embers; Shafiq 2021) is an autobiography, a genre embraced by Lebanese publishers after the civil war (1975–1990).² Former members of the Political Bureau of the Lebanese Communist Party (Battal 2019) and of the Organization of Communist Action in Lebanon (Traboulsi 1997; 2023),³ Fatah military officers⁴ (al-Taher 2017; Naccache 2022), and founders of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine⁵ (al-Yemeni 2021; Habache 2019) have all tried their hands at autobiography in recent years. For the most part, these authors are men, with a few exceptions: the former head of the General Union for Palestinian Women, Intisar al-Wazir, Abu Jihad's widow (1935–1988), the second in command of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), published her autobiography in 2022 (al-Wazir 2022).</footnote>
2 The generation gap between these various authors, born between 1930 and 1950, is lessened by the fact of their shared political history: these memoirs focus on the events that took place between the mid-1960s to the Palestinian military retreat from Beirut in the summer of 1982, including the “Palestinian revolution” in Lebanon (Sayigh 1979) and the emergence of Arab “New Lefts” (Guirguis 2020).⁶ These memoirs partake in the “biographical illusion” (Bourdieu 2004 [1986]) inherent to a genre always written after the fact, but such “life stories” make it possible to “construct a polyphony of testimonies that give events a plurality of meanings” (Laurens 2022: 46–48).

3 Mounir Shafiq joined the Jordanian Communist Party (JCP) in the 1950s. In Lebanon, he became a member of Yasser Arafat's Fatah in the 1960s and was part of the PLO Planning Centre (Markaz al-Takhtīt). The 1979 Iranian Revolution, which borrowed from the left's Third-Worldist narrative, marked a turning point that brought him to political Islam. There appears to be no rupture between these conversions, but rather a series of ideological shifts, which Shafiq explains in terms of an anti-imperialist continuity. His works, which were published in Lebanon from 1971 onward, focus on the Palestinian national question, military issues (from Clausewitz to Mao), and political Islam. His status as an intellectual does not come from holding any degree in the social sciences; the academic world is foreign to him, although he led a movement called the Student Brigade (al-Katība al-tullābiyya) in Fatah in the 1970s.

4 Shafiq belongs to the tradition of “revolutionary intellectuals”: “those who not only elaborated or defended innovative, rebellious and subversive theories but also chose a conduct of life and a political commitment that aimed at their accomplishment” (Traverso 2021: 213) in “an organic relationship between theory and action” (ibid.: 217). The historian Enzo Traverso contrasts the figure of the revolutionary intellectual with that figures like Guiseppe Garibaldi or Theodor W. Adorno: the former was “a man of action, but he never fixed his ideas in a theory or essay,” while the latter’s “criticism of domination was powerful and certainly inspired several radical movements [...] but he carefully rejected any form of political engagement or allegiance” (ibid.: 214). The revolutionary intellectual is not, however, a party intellectual, even of a revolutionary party: Shafiq’s heterodox theses run counter to those of the movement of which he was the longest member, Fatah.

5 Shafiq is a revolutionary intellectual in more ways than one. He was involved with three of the major utopian projects of the twentieth century: philo-Soviet communism, Maoism, and political Islam. His shift from one to the other of these utopias entailed not only ruptures and renunciations of past ideological paradigms, and his “militant reconversions” (Tissot, Gaubert & Lechien 2005) bear but a distant resemblance to those of Western European former Marxist activists and thinkers after May 1968. True, for Shafiq there were over the years “shifts in the militant space,” a “capitalization of militant resources” and “identity re-compositions,” but these were not accompanied by a “critical relationship to politics,” a “disillusionment with militant structures,” or “doubts about the effectiveness of revolutionary militancy”—let alone any “reclassifications forced by age such as professional career, marriage, and parenthood” (Pette & Sommier 2018: 516–517). Shafiq’s conversions entailed above all progressive shifts, resonances, and conceptual borrowings that invite us to “decompartmentalize fixed ideological categories” (Sfeir & Seurat 2022: 17). This journey from the left to Islam, a journey made by many Arab (not just Lebanese and Palestinian) intellectuals of the same generation (Burgat 1988), has had a limited reception in Western countries;
only two of Shafiq's works have been translated into French (Shafiq 1999a, 1999b). However, excerpts from his writings have recently been included in a rich anthology of Arab political writings published in 2022 by CNRS Éditions (Seurat & Sfeir 2022: 134-137).

Finally, it should be noted that Shafiq has a special relationship to Lebanon. It is true that his activism often unfolded elsewhere: Jordan in the 1950s and Tunis in the 1980s, for example. And Lebanon holds but a small place in his reflection—he wrote about the Palestinian national movement's strategy in Lebanon during the first years of the civil war. Given these facts, why raise the question of this Palestinian revolutionary intellectual's relationship to the Lebanese intellectual and political worlds? Three major elective affinities structure Shafiq's particular relationship to Lebanon. The first elective affinity has to do with the time of his youth: in the world of the British and French Mandates, where the borders between Lebanon and Palestine were porous, Beirut was never far from Jerusalem. The second elective affinity has to do with his move to Lebanon in 1966. The Maoist Fatah Student Brigade, which he founded a several years later, included in its ranks both Palestinian and Lebanese youth. Shafiq's critical stance on the involvement of Palestinians in the Lebanese Civil War, as well as a reading of Marxism inspired by the Vietnamese and Chinese experiences, exerted a strong attraction on young Lebanese leftists, both combatants and burgeoning intellectuals alike. The last elective affinity has to do with his final conversion, in 1979: the Islamic turn he called for within the Palestine national movement occurred in parallel with the emergence of Islamist movements in Lebanon. These three moments in the sociohistory of Shafiq's political and intellectual trajectory justify writing a history of ideas in the Lebanese and Palestinian contexts and of the gradual shifts that led from communism to political Islam. It also makes it possible to question the figure of the “revolutionary intellectual,” who exists outside the academic field but produces ideas and concepts that are reflected in the political field; a man of action who cannot be reduced to a simple party man. Finally, it allows for a Lebanon and Palestine *histoire croisée*: beyond the history of the Palestinians in Lebanon, there is a properly Lebanese history of Fatah.

# 1. A Communism on the Borders

Shafiq entered politics in 1953, joining the JCP, which he would leave twelve years later⁷. This was a time when “militant careers” were “built in spaces that did not coincide with state borders” (Ducange & Fertikh 2022). Beirut was a distant place in the early activist years of this young man then in his twenties. And yet, Lebanon held a singular place in his entry into militancy, and the context of his family home encouraged a politicization at the intersection of Communism and nationalism.

## 1. 1. Porous Borders

Born in February 1936, Shafiq spent his childhood in the neighbourhood of Qatmoun in the western part of Jerusalem, which was conquered by the Israelis in 1948. In April of that year, his family, who were Christian, was driven out of the former Mandate capital by the troops of the young Israeli state and temporarily settled in Zarqa, Jordan (Shafiq 2021: 33-41). Mounir Shafiq was the son of a “generation of conjuncture”
(Van Thao 2004: 13), for the year of his birth, 1936, was the year of the “Great Palestinian Arab revolt”⁸ against Zionist colonization and the British mandate, and the year 1948 marked his youth with the loss of the family home. In 1949, the Shafiq family returned to Palestine, settling in the eastern part of Jerusalem, then under Jordanian authority.

Lebanon holds a small but notable place in the first chapters of Shafiq's memoirs. It is associated with his memories of summer holidays, with uncles and aunts who lived there, and with a Lebanese teacher at the Anglican School where the young Shafiq attended primary school (Shafiq 2021: 24). From the 1920s to 1948, intellectuals, teachers, and activists, as well as manual laborers and peasants, circulated easily between Beirut and Jerusalem. The borders between Lebanon and Palestine were porous—Lebanon won its independence in November 1943, and the British withdrew from Palestine in May 1948. Major historical figures in the Palestinian national movement were born in Lebanon: for example, Ahmad al-Shuqayri (1908–1980), first president of the PLO, was born in a village in Tibnin in Southern Lebanon (al-Wazir 2022: 88).

## 1. 2. A Lebanese-Palestinian Communism

For Shafiq, Lebanon was also associated with the figure of his father, who was a lawyer and a “Marxist” (Shafiq 2021: 24), but never a member of the Palestinian Communist Party (PCP). In 1935, the British authorities expelled him to Lebanon for six months, due to his anti-colonial positions. He maintained a friendship with the left-wing Lebanese literary critic Raif Khoury (1913–1967), who visited the family home in Qatmoun.

The Palestinian communist activist Najati Sidqi (1905–1979) was also an acquaintance of Shafiq's father: “of Lebanese origin” according Shafiq (2021: 25), he was a son of the Comintern School (the Third Communist International). He went to Moscow in 1925 to study, and it was in Russia that he married a Ukrainian Jew.⁹ In August 1936, he was in Spain, then in the midst of civil war, and fought alongside the Spanish Communist Party (SCP). In 1937, he travelled back and forth between Damascus and Beirut, working with the Syrian Lebanese Communist Party (SLCP).¹⁰

The exchanges between Shafiq's father and figures such as Raif Khoury and Najati Sidqi—briefly mentioned in Shafiq's writings—shed light on the interactions between Lebanese and Palestinian communisms at the time. The Lebanese People's Party (LPP), the forerunner of the SLCP, created in 1924 by Yousef Yazbek (1901–1982) and Artin Madoyan (1904–1990) was under the influence of the PCP, which was recognized as the Palestinian section of the Communist International in 1924 (Budeiri 1979: 5–6).

In these years, the LPP's autonomy was not a given. Members of the PCP who travelled back and forth between Palestine and Beirut—Joseph Berger, Eliahu Teper, and Nakhman Levinsky—called for the Lebanese organization to be under the direct authority of the Palestinian communists (Suleiman 1967: 136–137). Throughout the 1920s, the Comintern advocated for the “Arabization” (Taʻarīb) of the PCP, many of whose leaders were of Polish-, Russian-, or Lithuanian-Jewish origin. Beyond the Lebanese and Palestinian contexts, as early as 1920 the Third International recognized “the revolutionary nationalism of dominated countries [...] and incorporated the nascent Arabism of the time, particularly evident in the Syrian uprising”
(Gallissot 2004: 382–383). In the 1930s, Lebanese communists espoused Palestinian nationalist demands against to Zionist colonization. There were interactions between Lebanese and Palestinian trade union circles. Supported by the Arab workers of the port of Haifa, the Palestine Arab Workers’ Society (Jam‘iyya al-‘Ummāl al-‘arabiyya al-filastīniyya) convened an Arab Workers Congress in Palestine in January 1930, and forged bonds of solidarity with the Lebanese Union of Tobacco Workers of Bikfaya and the Typographic Workers Union of Beirut (al-Yemeni 2018; Couland 1970: 154–155).

In short, the young Mounir Shafiq’s entry into communism owes good deal to family history: his Palestinian father’s openness to Lebanese political and intellectual life intersected with a nascent communism that straddled Mandate borders. His subsequent years in Jordan were marked by a communist militancy that was increasingly attentive to Arabism and to the centrality of the Palestinian national question, leading him to shift towards the Fatah movement—and to return to Lebanon.

## 2. Skirting the Civil War

Shafiq’s years of activism within the JCP, which lasted from 1953 to 1965, were marked above all by imprisonment: he was jailed several times by the Jordanian authorities. During this time, he read widely, and not just on Marxism—he took an interest in military issues and in particular Clausewitz. But at this stage, it would not yet be accurate to describe him as a revolutionary intellectual. Rather, he was a young rising member of the JCP, and what particularly struck him about the JCP’s communism was its mobilizations against the March 1948 treaty between Jordan and Great Britain (amended in March 1957) and against the “tripartite” aggression of France, Israel, and Great Britain against Egypt over the nationalization of the Suez Canal in October 1956. His communist activism partook in the spirit of the era. Basking in the glow of the USSR’s post-1945 international power of attraction, the Lebanese, Sudanese, and Iraqi communist parties became central political actors in the Middle East and enjoyed a strong popular presence. But Shafiq was nevertheless critical of philo-Soviet communism: he denounced the USSR’s recognition of the November 1947 partition plan for Palestine and criticized the opposition of Arab communist parties to the 1958 Syrian-Egyptian United Arab Republic, as well as the Chinese-Soviet conflict of the early 1960s. He dates his “intellectual evolution” (Tahawwul fikrī) as a critic of philo-Soviet communism to the end of 1959 (Shafiq 2021: 169). His farewell to his comrades was therefore by no means “a departure from Marxism and revolution,” he writes (ibid.: 225): in his move from Jordanian communism to the Fatah movement, Marxist categories—henceforth inspired by Maoism—remained in place.

### 2.1. Beirut, Capital of the Revolution

In the late 1960s, the international—and idealized—image of a Lebanese capital thought of as the “Paris of the east” faded in favour of “a Third-Worldist imagination linked to the capital of North Vietnam”: Beirut would become an “Arab Hanoi” (Maasri 2020: 11). As Lebanese “New Lefts” emerged—Socialist Lebanon, Organization of Lebanese Socialists, Union of Lebanese Communists¹¹—Palestinian nationalist movements took root in Lebanon, a place of “radical cosmopolitanism” (ibid.). Palestinian organizations were not external to the Lebanese political scene. Fatah’s first magazine, Filastīnunā
(Our Palestine), which came out in October 1959 in Beirut, was published by two Lebanese individuals: Tawfiq al-Houri and Hani Fakhouri (al-Wazir 2022: 45).

17 In April 1966, out of Jordanian prison, Shafiq arrived in Beirut at the home of his sister Samira, with no particular plan. Samira was married to a Palestinian activist, Naji Alloush (Abu Ibrahim, 1935–2012),¹² who introduced Shafiq to Fatah circles. Naji Alloush ran a publishing house in Lebanon, *Dār al-Talīʻa*, and was editor the magazine *Dirāsāt ʻarabiyya* (Arab Studies). It was with this publishing house that Shafiq published his first book, in 1971: *Hawal al-Tanāqud wa-l-Mumārasa fi-l-Thawra al-filastīniyya* (On contradiction and practice in the Palestinian revolution, Shafiq 1971). Between 1966 and 1968, he tried his hand at translating Marxist works into Arabic for Dār al-Talīʻa. He moved away from “*Taqlīd al-marksī*” (Marxist imitation inspired by Soviet or European examples), and now looked towards Asia: Ho Chi Min, Mao and General Giap were his references, and in this way he was similar to Lebanese and other Arab “new leftists” who took their examples from the anti-colonial revolutions underway in Third World countries (Bardawil 2019; Shafiq 2021: 233–234). He enrolled in philosophy courses at the Arab University of Beirut, not far from the Kola district, adjacent to the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila. These years, between 1966 and 1968, were politically fallow, without partisan commitment. However, he grew closer to Fatah, and joined its Department of International Relations, then under the leadership of Kamal Adwan (1935–1973).¹³ For the leaders of Fatah, Shafiq represented a surplus value: as a former communist activist and someone familiar with Marxist concepts, he was able to speak to both the European and Asian lefts. He met with the leaders of the Italian Communist Party (ICP), Enrico Berlinguer (1922–1984) and Luigi Longo (1900–1980), and was in dialogue in France with the French writer Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980). In November 1969, he was sent by Fatah to India, to speak with the Indian Communist Party. After another stint in Jordan in 1969 with Fatah, he returned to Beirut in 1970.

## 2. 2. Applying Maoist Concepts to Lebanon

18 Within the Jordanian Communist Party, Shafiq was a communist who did not fit in neatly with Soviet positions. In Lebanon, the same was true within Fatah: he was critical of the Palestinian leadership, which he perceived as too timid. Fatah, he said, must not give in to Arab and international calls for either direct or indirect negotiations with Israel, and should remain focused on armed struggle alone. Alongside Naji Alloush, Muhammad Daoud Awdeh (Abu Daoud, 1937–2010)¹⁴ and Sabri al-Banna (Abu Nidal, 1937–2002),¹⁵ he founded the “*Tyār*” (Current) movement within Fatah in the early 1970s. This movement had as its sole objective to focus Fatah and the PLO on a “protracted people’s war” (*al-ḥarb al-sha‘biyya tawīla al-amd*) against Israelis in Southern Lebanon and the occupied territories. Inspired by Maoism, the Current sought to reorient Fatah to its left. In calling for armed struggle in place of any logic of negotiation with Israel, and in vehemently opposing the bureaucratization of the PLO, the Current sought less to gain seats on the Fatah Revolutionary Council than to establish itself among the militant base in refugee camps.

19 During this period, Shafiq joined the PLO Planning Centre (*Markaz al-Takhtīt*), founded in 1968 after a decision by the National Council. Under the leadership of economist Yousef Sayigh (1916–2004),¹⁶ Palestinian intellectuals were tasked with fuelling the
strategic reflections of the members of the PLO Executive Committee, preparing their speeches, and working for the international recognition of the PLO. The Centre's offices were located on Sadat Street in the Hamra district, west of Beirut; they later moved to the Tariq al-Jdideh district. Shafiq was initially tasked with political oversight of the occupied Palestinian territories, but he felt his work was marginalized after the 1973 assassination of Kamal Adwan, his primary supporter within the PLO leadership. His relationship with Yasser Arafat was stormy during this time. He became disillusioned in his vision of the Planning Centre: his recommendations were not followed by Palestinian leaders, who were wary of his "leftism." In spite of this, he became the Centre's deputy director during the 1970s. And, within the Centre, he had a fruitful intellectual collaboration with Mahjoub Omar (1932–2012), a former member of the Egyptian Communist Party who took up the cause of Fatah, and whose positions were not far from those of Shafiq's Current.¹⁷ However, what made Shafiq the intellectual revolutionary he would eventually become was not his position in the PLO Planning Centre, but rather the series of Marxist works he published in Arabic over the course of the 1970s with Naji Alloush's Lebanese publishing house, such as *Al-Thawra al-filastīniya bayn al-Naqd wa-l-Tahtīm* (The Palestinian Revolution between Criticism and Destruction, Shafiq 1973), *Mawdū'at min Tajruba al-Thawra al-filastīniya* (Topics in the Experience of the Palestinian Revolution, Shafiq 1974), and *Fi-l-Wahda al-‘arabiya wa-l-Tajzi‘a* (On Arab Unity and Partition, Shafiq 1979). The 1960s and 1970s were the era of militant publishers and the “massification of the revolutionary book” (Aubert 2020: 217), which went well beyond the simple pamphlet, whether in Third World countries or in Western Europe (see, for example, Éditions Maspero, whose magazine *Partisans* devoted many issues to the Palestinian question).

20

In the 1970s, Shafiq sought to apply the major Maoist concepts to the reality of Palestinians in Lebanon: the “primary contradiction” (al-Tanāqud al-ra’īsī), the “secondary contradiction” (al-Tanāqud al-thānawī), the “mass line” (Khatt al-Jamāhīr) and the “protracted people’s war.” If the Palestinians’ “main contradiction” was with Israel, then there was no reason to focus the policies of Fatah and the PLO on recognizing Israel as a nation. Hence Shafiq’s opposition to the “Ten Point Programme” (Barnāmaj al-Nuqāt al-‘ashara) of 9 June 1974 adopted by the Palestinian National Council, the legislative body of the PLO. Its second article called for the installation of a “national, independent, combatant People’s Authority” to govern all the “liberated” parts of Palestine (Dot-Pouillard 2016: 38–39). For Shafiq, this amounted to covert recognition of the June 1967 borders—and therefore, of Israel. The Fatah Current claimed one Palestine, stretching from the sea to the Jordan River, and a “right of legitimate violence” (Bouamama 2016: 89) to liberate it. However, Shafiq felt that it was nevertheless crucial to remain part of Fatah, a position that was not shared by another of the founders of the Current, Abu Nidal. Opposition to the PLO’s “ten-point agenda” was unanimous within the PLO’s Planning Centre, which was sidelined on this issue.

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Secondly, if the “principal contradiction” was indeed that between Palestine and Israel, then other contradictions needed to remain “secondary,” including relations between Fatah and the Arab regimes (thus, Fatah should demonstrate neutrality in Arab affairs), and with Lebanon. On the one hand, Shafiq was careful not to cut the Palestinian national movement off from any pan-Arab unitary dynamics. On the other hand, he feared the partition of a fragile nation-state, Lebanon, along sectarian lines, which he believed would do a disservice to Palestinians. Thus, on the eve of the 1975 civil war, he was opposed to the slogan “‘Azl al-Katā’ib” (isolate the Phalanges), used by the PLO as
well as by the Lebanese left of the Communist Party and Kamal Jumblatt's (1917–1977) Progressive Socialist Party (PSP). The Lebanese Phalanges, a Maronite Christian organization founded in 1936 by Pierre Gemayel (1905–1984), could certainly be classified by the Maoist cadres of the Current as falling on the right of the political spectrum. However, from Shafiq's point of view, engaging in armed confrontation with the Lebanese Christians would serve only to further distance the Palestinians from Palestine (Shafiq 1994: 76–79). The “protracted people's war” must be waged exclusively against the Israelis. Naji Alloush, co-founder of the Current, did not agree, and he broke politically with Shafiq. His publishing house, Dār al-Talīʻa, however, remained open to him.

The strategy of avoiding Lebanese intercommunal conflicts had a third consequence: rather than the PLO limiting itself to cooperation between the Palestinians and the Lebanese left, it meant that it extended its alliances to more traditional elements in Lebanon, such as Dār al-Fatwa, a Sunni community organization, the Shiite Higher Islamic Council, founded in 1967, and Lebanese Christian religious figures. Finally, Shafiq's fourth main idea lay in applying one last Maoist concept to the Palestinian context: that of the “mass line.” In the Palestinian context, this meant intermingling with the most vulnerable sections of the Lebanese population, gradually settling in the working-class neighbourhoods on the outskirts of the Lebanese capital, and finding support in the rural areas of Southern Lebanon bordering Israel.

## 2.3. Towards Southern Lebanon

In 1973, the Current became the Fatah Student Brigade, where Lebanese and Palestinians members mixed indiscriminately. A former military officer of the Brigade, Muin al-Taher¹⁸ (2017: 47–50), dates its creation to May 1973, when the Lebanese army mobilized in the Beirut districts of Tariq al-Jdideh and Kola in order to bring into line Palestinian organizations whose offices and institutions were located there. Lebanese and Palestinian students from the Arab University of Beirut faced off against Lebanese troops. Since 1970, the Fatah Maoist Current had established itself beyond the Arab University: it found supporters at the Lebanese University (LU), in the public secondary school sector of the national education system, and, to a lesser extent, at the American University of Beirut (AUB) (Shafiq 1994: 88–89). Three Lebanese Maoist organizations decided to join the Fatah Student Brigade: Roger Nabaa's and Saoud al-Maoula's Revolutionary People's Core,¹⁹ the Arab Communist Party of Hilal Raslan, a former Syrian ambassador to China and a refugee in Lebanon, and Michel Naoufel's Union of Marxist-Leninist Cells. The Brigade established links in Tripoli to Khalil Akkaoui's (1955–1986) Popular Resistance, which late the French researcher Michel Seurat (1973–1986) described as the failure of two utopias; communist and Islamist (Seurat 1985: 45–86). Lebanese “Patriotic Committees” (Lijān wataniyya), closely associated with the Brigade, formed in poor neighbourhoods of the capital's suburbs.

Shafiq's heterodox theses within Fatah could not avoid being drawn into the Lebanese civil war. In 1975, the Student Brigade was involved in the battle of Barjawi against the Lebanese Phalanges; Barjawi is a Muslim enclave nestled within Christian neighbourhoods of Beirut, in a triangle that extends between the current location of the French Lycée, the Jewish and Protestant cemeteries, and the hospital. In the summer of 1976, the Student Brigade was engaged in a fierce fight against the
Phalanges on the heights of Mount Sannine, and Shafiq's brother Georges Asal (Abu Khaled), was killed during clashes on August 3. A future Lebanese novelist who was at the time a member of the Brigade and whose works would later be translated by Éditions Actes Sud was wounded during this battle: Elias Khoury. The confrontation between the PLO and the Syrian Arab Army in 1976 also undermined the Brigade's dreams of pan-Arab solidarity.

<figure><img src="image_3.png" /><figcaption>Figure 1</figcaption></figure>

Cover page of a pamphlet by Mounir Shafiq, *Lessons from the experience of five martyrs*. The book is undated and lists no place of publication; it was likely published after 1976. It is dedicated to five Student Brigade militants, including Shafiq's own brother, Georges Asal (Abu Khaled, second from the right), killed on 3 August 1976 in the Battle of Mount Sannine.

Source: Author's personal collection.

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The Brigade then decided to extricate itself from this Lebanese sectarian conflict and to distance itself from Beirut: its military forces assembled in southern Lebanon as part of a strategy of permanent confrontation with Israel. At this time, Shafiq still had his offices in the capital, at the PLO Planning Centre. But the villages of Nabatiyeh, Bint Jbeil, and the former Crusader castle of Beaufort (Qalaʻa al-Shaqī), not far from the borders with Israel, were the Brigade's new theatres of combat, particularly during the Israeli invasions of March 1978 (Operation Litani) and the summer of 1982. The Student Brigade, which was renamed the "al-Jarmaq" Brigade in 1976, after a mountain near Jenin in the West Bank, became part of the al-Qastal Forces,²⁰ comprising four Fatah brigades in Southern Lebanon (al-Taher 2017: 100). Shafiq had no military responsibility within the Brigade; rather, he was its political leader and its revolutionary intellectual, drawing on the reflections of fighters based near the southern border of Lebanon to write his texts. He became the local Palestinian spokesperson of an internationalized and global Maoism (Collins 2011)—the specificity
of Maoism lies in “its ability to express its ideas in a clear language that is understandable by all, whether intellectuals or peasants, whether in Berlin or the Malaysian jungle,” and in its applications, “which draw their strength and their ability to make sense from multiple terrains of the post-World War II social and geopolitical situation: the Cold War, decolonization, the expansion of the international division of labor, and North-South inequalities” (Bantigny et al. 2023: 486). This “ability to make sense” of global Maoism locally led Shafiq to explain his shift towards Islam as having been not in spite of Marxism and Maoism, but in virtue of the latter.

## 3. The "établis" of Islam

26

In the summer of 1982, following the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, Shafiq left Beirut along with PLO troops. The Palestinian leadership relocated to Tunis. But his distance from Lebanon was only relative: he retained influence over Lebanese and Palestinian members of the Brigade, who together made a turn toward Islam beginning in the late 1970s into the 1980s. This Islamic turn could be seen throughout the Arab world and was not limited to the Lebanese and Palestinian political fields: the propulsive force of the 1979 Iranian revolution created region-wide ideological aftershocks. In Egypt, the Socialist Labour Party, under the leadership of Adel Hussein (1932–2001), turned toward Islam. The Tunisian journal 15/21 and the Egyptian journal *al-Yasār al-islāmī* (*The Islamic Left*) examined the sometimes-conflicting relationships between Arab nationalism, the left, and Islamism. Thus, Shafiq’s move from the left to Islam was not an isolated case. However, this seamless conversion had a unique specificity: it was based on the Palestinian national question and on the particular effects the 1979 Iranian revolution had on the Lebanese and Palestinian political fields.

### 3.1. Islam, or the Proper Application of Marxism?

I saw in Islamic Arab history, both ancient and contemporary, a vast field from which to draw, without any Western, left-wing, or modernist complex. This has become, in my opinion, the true revolutionary path. And this was the essence of Marxism as I understood it (Shafiq 2021: 398).

27

By “the essence of Marxism” here must be understood not Marxism in general, but Asian Marxism: according to Shafiq, the success of the Vietnamese and Chinese revolutions was due to the acculturation of a decreasingly Westernized Marxism, and to encounters between communists and peasants who bore little resemblance to the mythical figure of the skilled worker. Thus, no need to look “elsewhere” (to Paris, Moscow, or even Beijing) for myths to mobilize the Lebanese or Palestinian “masses”: the Arab world can easily find revolutionary references from its own past, from the Moroccan Abdelkrim al-Khattabi²¹ to the Palestinian Sheikh Ezzedine al-Qassam.²² Here, gradual conversion to Islam is understood as Marxism—and Maoism—properly applied.

23
<figure><img src="image_4.png" /><figcaption>Figure 2</figcaption></figure>

The 12 August 1977 issue of the magazine *al-Wahda* (Unity: *The Voice of Defenders of the Homeland and the Resistance*). Unity was a Lebanese magazine with close ties to the Student Brigade. The magazine is a testimony to the gradual Islamization of the Lebanese and Palestinian members of the Brigade. At the top left, a quote from Lenin: "What mean by nations' right to self-determination is the separation as a state from other national groups, and it certainly includes the creation of independent national states." On the right, a quote attributed to the Prophet of Islam: "He who walks with the oppressor to help him, and who knows that he is an oppressor, has already abandoned Islam." (Issue lent to the author by Saoud al-Maoula).

28 In Southern Lebanon, tensions between Palestinians and the predominantly Shia Lebanese population occasionally clashed with the revolutionary phraseology of left-wing organizations. The convergence of struggles between the uprooted refugees and rural or semi-urban Lebanese populations was not always straightforward. The members of the Student Brigade were well aware of this: in 1978, Editions Dār al-Talīʻa published a short manifesto written by Shafiq's brother, Georges, who had died two years earlier, and by Saad Jaradat, a leader of the Brigade who had also been killed in 1976: *Afkār thawriya fi Mumārasa al-Qitāl* (Revolutionary Thoughts in the Practice of Combat; Shafiq & Jaradat 1978). They called on Palestinian activists to use the “mass line” method, to adopt “moral” (ikhlāqī) behaviour toward the Lebanese and Palestinian working classes, to respect their customs, religion, rites, and traditions, and to do away with all avant-garde “arrogance” (ibid.: 12–13). Shafiq also thought of the “mass line” as a “moral revolution” (*Thawra ikhlāqiyya*, Shafiq 1994: 32)—one that would soon lead him to Islam.

29 Brigade activists met with religious figures, who sometimes worried about the spillover security issues created by the presence of armed Palestinians in Southern Lebanon. In the village of Bint Jbeil on the Israeli-Lebanese border, the Shiite Sheikh Abdelraouf Fadlallah invited Brigade members to pray alongside him on Fridays: for these militants, Muslim practice preceded Muslim faith, and paved the way for
conversion (Al-Ghabra 2012: 231–233). The militants of the Brigade gradually became “établis” of Islam, just as young French Maoist students became “établis” among the working class (Linhart 1981 [1978]). In order to calm any tension with the Shiite population of Southern Lebanon and to strengthen the Palestinian military presence on the southern border, Shafiq and the militants of the Brigade also engaged in dialogue with Shiite Imam Mousa al-Sadr (1928–1978), founder of the Movement of the Disinherited, Imam Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah (1935–2010), and with Sheikh Hani Fahas. This Shiite cleric, who rallied to the cause of rural tobacco workers in Jibchit during their strikes in the 1960s, became close to the Maoist left of Fatah, as well as to Yasser Arafat (al-Maoula 2014). Shiite millenarian theology was rooted in the memory of the death of Imam Hussein (626–680) in Kerbala, Iraq at the hands of the Umayyad caliphate, and in the continual promise of a new era of justice at the end of time. Thus, the Palestinian settlement in predominantly Shiite southern Lebanon was a site where the revolutionary aspirations of those who were “disinherited on their land and those who were disinherited from their land” (Hillion-Launey 2021) could converge.

30

The Brigade also became internationalized: activists from the Egyptian, Iraqi, and Bangladeshi lefts settled in Southern Lebanon. Iranians received military training as part of the Brigade: opposed to the Shah's regime and exiled to Lebanon, beginning in 1979 these exiles fostered links between Shafiq and the young Iranian Islamic Republic. In the south, the Brigade coordinated its movements with Mostafa Chamran (1932–1981), the future Iranian Minister of Defence, who was also the founder of Amal (the Lebanese Resistance Regiments), the armed branch of the Movement of the Disinherited, alongside Imam Moussa Sadr. In 1979, Ayatollah Khomeini (1900–1989) shut down the Israeli embassy in Iran and allowed the Palestinians to establish a PLO diplomatic presence. Yasser Arafat made a triumphant visit to Tehran on 17 February 1979, which was dubbed the “meeting of the two revolutions” (Liqā’ al-Thawratayn) by the Lebanese magazine al-Wahda (Unity), which had close ties to the Brigade. Political pilgrimage to Tehran became an obligatory rite of passage for Palestinians: the military leader of the Brigade, Muin al-Taher, accompanied the second-in-command of the PLO, Abu Jihad, to Iran, alongside Hani al-Hassan (1939–2012), who took charge of the new Palestinian embassy in Tehran. Shafiq also travelled to Iran: as a former communist, he connected with officials in the Iranian Communist Party (Tudeh), to which he had had ties since the 1960s. But the ideological break had been made: the impact of the Iranian revolution in Lebanon and among the Palestinian ranks was such that Shafiq could not recognize himself in the Iranian communists' opposition to Ayatollah Khomeini.
<figure><img src="image_5.png" /><figcaption>Figure 3</figcaption></figure>

The 24 February 1979 issue of *al-Wahda magazine*. The photo of Ayatollah Khomeini and Yasser Arafat bears the caption "the meeting of the two revolutions."

Issue lent to the author by Saoud al-Maoula.

31 For Shafiq and the members of the Brigade, the transition to Islam was gradual, and took place at the crossroads of three intersecting dynamics. First, Maoist concepts made it possible to go beyond a Marxism considered too Eurocentric. Second, encounters between Brigade militants and the rural Shiite classes in South Lebanon made in the name of the “mass line” concept convinced these militants to adopt a religious orthopraxy—and eventually to become Islamists. And finally, at a regional level, the Iranian revolution of 1979 offered support to the Palestinians and adopted a Third-Worldist and revolutionary rhetoric that was familiar to former left-wing activists. The separation from left-wing utopias also had to do with a regional and international context that saw the collapse of former great revolutionary narratives: in the same year as the Iranian uprising, Asian Marxism broke down in the Chinese-Vietnamese conflict of 1979, and the Soviet Union invaded a Muslim country, Afghanistan. Once socialist ideals fell into crisis, political spirituality took over, gradually giving “the anti-colonial movement and its anti-imperialist corollary a new symbolic resource” (Burgat & Rey 2022: 18).

## 3. 2. A "Negation of the Negation"

32 Beginning in the early 1970s, Shafiq sought to focus the efforts of Fatah and the PLO on the armed struggle in Palestine and not only in Southern Lebanon. Once the PLO declared its withdrawal from Beirut in 1982, this focus was enacted. The Brigade changed its name, and the *Sarāyā al-Jihād al-islāmī* (Islamic Jihad Brigades) were born
within Fatah. Three officers who were especially close to Shafiq took over the military
work of the Sarāyā: Muhammad Bassam Sultan (Hamdi), Muhammad Muhammad
Buheis (Abu Hassan) and Marwan al-Kayali. They were assassinated by car bomb in
Cyprus on 18 February 1988 by the Israeli Mossad. Hamdi and Abu Hassan left behind a
political will written in 1983, which Shafiq republished eleven years later as As'ila hawal
al-Islām wa-l-Marksiya min warā' al-Qadabān (Questions on Islam and Marxism from Behind
Bars) (Buheiss & Sultan 1994). The booklet circulated in Israeli prisons as well as in
Lebanon. In it, Islam is described as the anti-imperialism of modern times and as the
only way to mobilize the Palestinian, Lebanese, and Arab working classes. The authors
make reference both to “monopolistic capitalism” (al-Rā'smāliyya al-ihtikāriyya)
associated with “the West and America” and to Soviet “one-party state capitalism.”
They also acknowledge the failure of the Chinese cultural revolution. Islam is
represented as a self-sufficient system, in that it would naturally condemn
“exploitation, slavery, feudalism, colonialism and all injustice” (ibid.: 161). The
adoption of Maoism was intended as an alternative to Western-centered Marxism: by
mobilizing a dialectical and classically Hegelian “negation of the negation”, it was now
Marxism itself—and with it, the class struggle—that was rejected, precisely in the name
of the “mass line.”

33

Inspired by the arguments of Shafiq, Muhammad Bassam Sultan and Muhammad
Muhammad Buheis, the “Lebanese of the Brigade” also took an Islamic turn in the
early 1980s, and joined Islamist organizations in their country of origin. Lebanese and
Palestinian Islamisms mirrored one another, because they were born and built in the
shared crucible of Israeli occupations, from the West Bank to Southern Lebanon. Shiite
former Brigade members joined the Hezbollah movement, either as militants or as
fellow travellers: this was the case of Trad Hamade, the future Minister of Labor
appointed by Hezbollah in the second half of the 2000s. Sheikh Hani Fahas, who was
close to the Brigade, however, distanced himself from Tehran in the late 1980s.
Saoud al-Maoula lived in Paris from 1982 to 1986; upon returning to Lebanon, he also
distanted himself from Hezbollah and the Iranians beginning in 1988, in order to begin
a career at the Institute of Social Sciences at the Lebanese University (Dot-
Pouillard 2008). In Tripoli, in Northern Lebanon, members of the Brigade joined the
Islamic Unification Movement (Tawhīd) founded in 1982 by Sheikh Said Shaaban (1930-
1998). This was also what Samir al-Sheikh and Ismat Mrad, the “Khomeinist Sunnis,”
(Lefèvre 2019: 157) did. The former, a native of Beirut rather than of Tripoli, had been
an economics student at the American University of Beirut. A veteran of the Brigade in
Southern Lebanon and a Maoist, he participated in the founding of Tawhīd in 1982 and
encouraged links between Sunni and Shiite Islamists in both Tripoli and Beirut, only to
be assassinated in 1984, likely on the orders of the Syrian intelligence services.
Ismat Mrad was a former medical student at the University of Toulouse, where he was
active in Maoist organizations. In Southern Lebanon, he fought alongside
Jalal Eddine al-Farsi,²⁴ an Iranian militant with the Brigade who fostered connections
between Shafiq and Ayatollah Khomeini. Ismat Mrad subsequently founded, in the
north, the Arab Lebanon Movement, a Maoist organization that joined Tawhīd (ibid.: 181).²⁵

34

In the 1980s and early 1990s, Shafiq was far from the Lebanese and Palestinian theatres
of combat; he was still a member of the PLO Planning Centre, whose offices were
located in Tunis. He was managing director of the Planning Centre, a position he lost
in 1992 by order of Yasser Arafat. Relations between the Palestinian leader and Shafiq were never easy. Shafiq was ambivalent towards Arafat: he admired the charismatic veteran but criticized his political leanings, especially those that led to the signing of the Oslo Accords in September 1993. In fact, Shafiq distanced himself from Fatah in the 1980s: his intellectual influence played out instead in Lebanese and Palestinian Islamic movements. He had numerous meetings with the major Islamist leaders of the Arab world, including the former president of the Sudanese Parliament Hassan al-Turabi (1932–2016) and Sheikh Rached Ghannouchi, founder of the Ennahda movement in Tunisia. His status as an Islamic thinker comes not from having undertaken religious studies, but rather from having published a series of books such as *Islam in Struggle for Civilization* (Shafiq 1982) and *Shuhadā' wa Masīra. Abu Hassan wa Hamdī wa Ikhwān humā* (*Martyrs and the Path*; Shafiq 1994). Most of these books were published in Beirut and circulated among Islamists in Tunisia, Egypt, and Lebanon. In 1993, as he left Tunis, he also left behind Fatah and the PLO and gradually resettled first in Jordan and then in Lebanon.

Since 1994, Shafiq has devoted himself to political dialogue between Islamist, Arab nationalist, and left-wing currents as a member of the Nationalist and Islamic Conference, which he became general coordinator of in 2006. This conference, which holds sessions every two years, was founded at the initiative of the Centre for Arab Unity Studies, located in Beirut. Beginning in the second half of the 2000s, he also began working on the publication of a magazine published in Lebanon, *al-Mawāzīn* (*The Scales*). As a former communist turned member of Fatah and then Islamist who has moved through several protest ideologies, Shafiq is interested in smoothing out the ideological differences between opposing currents, always in the name of anti-imperialism and opposition to Israel—the true “main contradictions.” He is certainly an “Islamic thinker,” but he has also become a mediator between “secularists” and “the religious,” drawing on his intellectual influence and the transnational networks he has built since the late 1960s in Lebanon. The dialogue he has created between Islamists and Arab nationalist or left-wing currents, between the religious and the secular, is facilitated by the series of seamless conversions he underwent. He has justified the transition from communism to Islam in terms of the proper application of Maoist principles rather than by a rejection of the entirety of the Marxist worldview. And his Islamism does not imply belonging to any political organization: whereas his Marxism was expressed, between the 1950s and the 1980s, by partisan commitments (the Jordanian Communist Party, the Fatah movement), his Islamism has no political encapsulation. A revolutionary intellectual is not necessarily a party intellectual.

## Conclusion: Fatah, a Lebanese Site of Learning?

Mounir Shafiq’s intellectual journey lies at the crossroads of three major protest ideologies: in the 1950s, in the midst of the Cold War, challenging Israel and the West meant committing to communism. Critical of the Soviet Union, in the 1960s and 1970s, he joined with the anti-imperialist Arab “new leftists” who in Lebanon and Palestine took China and Vietnam as their examples. A Palestinian nationalist, he tried to Arabize communism, and eventually ended up Islamizing Marxism. There are continuities behind these apparent ideological ruptures: Shafiq uses Maoist concepts to theoretically justify his shift from Marxist nationalism to Islamic anti-imperialism.
These continuities also block any overly-strong comparison to the evolutions of communist or Maoist intellectuals in Europe. If in Western Europe (and the United States), the 1980s and 1990s did indeed lead former Marxist activists to unburden themselves of any utopian aspirations to the point of radically critiquing the Marxist paradigm (as the historian François Furet, a former militant with the French Communist Party, did), the same cannot be said of Shafiq. For the latter, there was no break, but rather a constant operation of shifting, recycling, and translating. Anti-imperialism and the Palestinian national question are the main threads of his thought; these sometimes translate into communism and sometimes into Islamism, depending on various political conjunctures (the regional influence of Communist parties in the Arab world as a result of the Soviet wave; the emergence of radical “new lefts”; the rise of Fatah; the Iranian revolution). However, there is some utility to the comparative perspective: Shafiq’s transition from communism to Islam, like that of many Arab activists and intellectuals of his generation, points the way to a vast field of comparison to the countries formerly known as Third World and currently called the “Global South”: from Christian Liberation Theology in Latin America to Haiti by way of sub-Saharan Africa, “revolutionary cosmologies” and “local tradition as a revolutionary tool” were often the rule rather than the exception (Tassi, Holbraad & Cherstich 2020: 145–153).

37

The revolutionary intellectual figure that Shafiq embodies blends with the history of an armed movement: the Fatah Student Brigade, which relocated from Beirut to Southern Lebanon. The Brigade has been the subject of remembrance: the Qatari channel al-Jazeera devoted a documentary to it in 2016. In Lebanon, Shafiq is also a regular guest on TV shows devoted to the “Maos” and “Islamists” of Fatah. This memorial return is sometimes literary: Abu Ali Toq, one of the military leaders of the Brigade, was killed in Shatila in January 1987 during fighting between Fatah and the Shiite Amal movement, and the Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury portrayed him in his 1994 work, *The Kingdom of Strangers*.

38

The Brigade also has its Palestinian legacy: former officers based in Lebanon returned to the West Bank after the 1993 Oslo Accords and were among the founders of the al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades (AAMB), Fatah's armed wing during the second Intifada of the 2000s (Marwan Zaaloum, Jihad al-Amarein, Masira Abu Hamdiye).²⁶ Others, abandoning the utopian dreams first of Maoism and then of political Islam, made a career within the Fatah apparatus—for example, Mahmoud al-Alloul, the current vice-president of the movement. But the memory of the Student Brigade also has an intimate connection to Lebanon: dozens of Lebanese died in the civil war while serving in its ranks. Several of its members participated in the founding of Hezbollah and the Islamic Unification Movement. Others are now retired professors from the Lebanese University, researchers, journalists, publishers, or former ministers.

39

There was an intermediary in the shift from the left to Islam in both Lebanon and Palestine: Fatah. Neither leftist nor Islamist, but ideologically flexible, Yasser Arafat's party mobilized around the solely anti-imperialist and nationalist signifiers of activists and intellectuals from various backgrounds. The Lebanese history of Fatah therefore cannot be reduced to a history of the Palestinians in Lebanon. And this history is still being written, and as such is the subject of memoirs that are gradually being published. This reminds us that Fatah was not only a site of military and political education but
also of intellectual apprenticeship for many Lebanese activists who identified with a Palestinian party that was both nationalist and internationalized.

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## Writings by Mounir Shafiq

(1971). *Hawl al-tanāqud wa al-mumārasa fī al-thawra al-filastīniyya* [On Contradiction and Practice in the Palestinian Revolution]. Beirut, Dār al-Talī'a.

(1973). *Al-Thawra al-filastīniyya bayn al-naqd wa al-tahtīm* [The Palestinian Revolution: Between Critique and Destruction]. Beirut, Dār al-Talī'a.

(1974). *Mawdū'āt min tajruba al-thawra al-filastīniyya* [Topics in the Experience of the Palestinian Revolution]. Beirut, Dār al-Talī'a.

(1979). *Fī al-wahda al-'arabiyya wa al-tajzi'a* [On Arab Unity and the Partition]. Beirut, Dār al-Talī'a.
(1983). *Al-Islām fī ma'raka al-hadāra* [Islam in the Struggle for Civilisation]. Beirut, Dār al-Kalima.

(1994). *Shuhadā' wa masīra. Abū Hasan wa Hamdī wa ikhwānhumā* [Martyrs and Way: Abu Hassan, Hamdi and their brothers]. Beirut, al-Wafā'.

(1999a). *L'islam en lutte pour la civilisation*. Al Bouraq, Paris.

(1999b). *L'islam et les défis du monde contemporain*. Al Bouraq, Paris.

(2021). *Min jamr ilā jamr. Safahāt min dhikrayāt Munīr Shafīq* [Journey through the Embers]. Beyrouth, Centre d'études pour l'unité arabe.

## Writings and biographies of militants

AL-GHABRA Shafiq (2012). *Haya ghayr āmina. Jīl al-ahlām wa al-ikhfāqāt* [A Life under Threat: A Generation of Dreams and Impasses]. Beirut, Dar al-Saqi.

AL-MAOULA Saoud (2014). “Hānī Fahs. Al-dhākira hiya shart al-hall” [Hani Fahas: Memory Shapes the Solution]. *Al-Rumi*, 18 septembre 2014, consulté le 30 avril 2023.

AL-TAHER Muin (2017). *Tabagh wa zaytūn. Hikāyāt wa suwar min zaman muqāwim* [Tobacco and Olives: Stories from an Era of Resistance]. Beirut, Arab Centre for Research and Policy Studies.

AL-WAZIR Intisar (2022). *Rifqa 'umr. Mudhakkirāt Intisār al-Wazīr (Umm Jihād)*. [The Apprenticeship of a Life: The Memoirs of Intisar al-Wazir]. Beirut, Arab Centre for Research and Policy Studies.

AL-YEMENI Ahmad Hussein (2018). *Jam'iyya al-'Ummāl al-'arabiyya al-filastīniyya fī Hayfa* [The Organization of Palestinian Arab Workers in Haifa]. Beirut, Institute for Palestine Studies.

AL-YEMENI Ahmad Hussein (2021). *Mudhakkirāt Abū Māhir al-Yamanī: Tajrubatī maʻ al-ayyām* [Memories of Abu Maher al-Yemeni: My Experience with Days]. Beirut, Arab Centre for Research and Policy Studies.

BATTAL Georges (2019). *Anā al-shuyūʻi al-wahīd* [I Am the Only Communist]. Baghdad, Dār al-Madā.

BUHEISS Muhammad Muhammad & SULTAN Muhammad Bassem (1994). *As'ila hawl al-islām wa al-marksiyya min warā' al-qudbān* [Questions on Islam and Marxism behind Bars]. In *SHAFIQ Mounir (1994). *Shuhadā' wa Masīra. Abū Hassan wa Hamdī wa Ikhwānhumā* [Martyrs and Way: Abu Hassan, Hamdi and their brothers]. Beirut, al-Wafa'.

SHAFIQ Georges Asal & JARADAT Saad (1978). *Afkār thawriyya fī mumārasa al-qitāl* [Revolutionary Thoughts in the Practice of Combat]. Beirut, Dār al-Talī'a.

HABACHE Georges (2019). *Safahāt min masīratī al-nidāliyya* [Pages from my Journal as a Combattant]. Beirut, Centre d'études pour l'unité arabe.

KHOURY Elias (1993). *Mamlaka al-ghurabā'* [The Kingdom of Strangers]. Beirut, Dār al-Adab.

NACCACHE Anis (2022). *Dhikrayāt Anīs al-Naqqāsh* [The Memoirs of Anis Naccache]. Beirut, al-Bissān.

TRABOULSI Fawwaz (1997). *Ṣūra al-fatā bi al-ḥmar: ayyām fī al-silm wa al-ḥarb* [Portrait of a Young Man in Red. Days of Peace and War]. Beirut, Riad El-Rayyes Books.

TRABOULSI Fawwaz (2023). *Zaman al-Yasār al-jadīd* [The Era of the New Left]. Beirut, Riad El-Rayyes Books.
NOTES

1. The Centre for Arab Unity Studies was founded in Beirut in 1975.

2. Mounir Shafiq's memoirs are an essential source for this article. However, the present article also draws heavily on his other works, published beginning 1971, as well as on the memoirs of other former activists of the Fatah Student Brigade cited in this article. These written sources are cited in a specific section of the bibliography to this article. In 2007, as part of my doctoral thesis in political science, I interviewed Mounir Shafiq for the first time (Dot-Pouillard 2008). The interviews continued until 2013, and were published as part of a book on the Islamic Jihad Movement in Palestine printed by Éditions La Découverte (Alhaj, Dot-Pouillard & Rébillard 2014). Since that time, formal interviews have given way to more informal exchanges with Shafiq as well as with former officials of the Fatah Student Brigade. Since Shafiq is still active in politics, as are many former members of the Student Brigade, the places, timing, and conditions of these interviews in Lebanon will not be specified here on the request of the parties in questions.

3. The Organization of Communist Action in Lebanon (OCAL) was created in 1969 out of the merger of Socialist Lebanon and the Organization of Lebanese Socialists.

4. Fatah (formerly the Palestinian National Liberation Movement, and the largest organization of the PLO) was born in Kuwait in 1957, at the initiative of Yasser Arafat (Abu Ammar, 1929–2004), Khalil al-Wazir (Abu Jihad) and Adel Abdel Karim (1933–2017).

5. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) was founded in December 1967 by activists from the Arab Nationalists' Movement (ANM).

6. Over the past fifteen years, the history of the Arab “New Lefts” and revolutionary Third Worldism in the region has been the subject of a twofold memorial return, both autobiographical and academic, especially in the English-speaking world (Bardawil 2020). The autobiographies of militants are rarely translated and are mainly aimed at an Arabic-speaking audience.

7. From the 1950s to the early 1980s, Palestinian communist militants in the West Bank were members of the JCP. It was not until 1982 that the Palestinian Communist Party (PCP) was born in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

8. The “Great Palestinian Arab Revolt of 1936–1939” was led against the British Mandate and Zionist immigration to Mandatory Palestine. It manifested in Arabs’ refusal to pay taxes, strikes, and armed attacks against Zionist colonies.

9. The Institute for Palestinian Studies, in its Interactive *Encyclopedia of the Palestinian Question* (in English and Arabic), devoted a note to Najati Sidqi.

10. The Syrian Lebanese Communist Party was born in Lebanon out of the merger of two organizations: the Lebanese People's Party (LPP) and “Spartak,” an organization rooted in the Lebanese Armenian community. The SLCP split into a Lebanese branch and a Syrian branch in 1943, but maintained a shared Central Committee until 1963.

11. Nakhle Moutran's and Admoun Aoun's Union of Lebanese Communists split off from the Lebanese Communist Party in 1965.

12. A member of Fatah, Naji Allouch was a former Arab nationalist militant with Michel Aflaq's (1910–1989) Ba'ath Party.
13. Murdered on 10 April 1973 in Beirut by the Israeli secret services, Kamal Adwan was a member of the Fatah Central Committee and the PLO National Council. Originally from Lebanon, he was notably responsible for the political oversight of Fatah's "western sector" (al-Qitāʻ al-gharbī)—the West Bank.

14. Abu Daoud is known for leading the Black September organization, which was responsible for taking Israeli athletes hostage in Munich in September 1972.

15. Expelled from Fatah by Yasser Arafat in 1974, Sabri al-Banna (Abu Nidal) went on to found the Fatah-Revolutionary Council (Fatah-al-Majlīs al-thawrī). Turned mercenary in the service of several Arab countries, he was responsible for the assassination of several of Yasser Arafat's relatives.

16. A member of the Palestinian National Council since 1964, Youssef Sayegh, founder of the Planning Centre, also headed the PLO's Palestinian National Fund (al-Sundūq al-qawmī).

17. Although close to the political positions of the Current and the Fatah Student Brigade, Mahjoub Omar was never part of either, primarily due to his proximity to Abu Jihad, second-in-command of Fatah and the PLO.

18. The main military leader of the Student Brigade beginning in 1976, Muin al-Taher was also a member of the Fatah Revolutionary Council and the High Military Council for the Palestinian Revolution.

19. Of the two founders of the Revolutionary People's Core, only Saoud al-Mawla joined the Fatah Student Brigade.

20. The al-Qastal Forces (Quwwāt) in Southern Lebanon were themselves part of al-ʻĀsifa (The Storm), Fatah's armed movement.

21. Abdel Karim al-Khattabi (1882–1963) was the short-lived ruler of the Rif Republic in Morocco in the early 1920s.

22. Originally from Jabla, Syria, Sheikh Ezzedine al-Qassam (1882–1935) launched an armed insurrection in 1935 against the British in the Jenin Mountains. He was killed in November of the same year.

23. Shafiq's conversion to Islam was twofold. It was both political—from the left to Islamism—and religious, since he had been a Christian. And, the relationship between Christianity and Islam is not antagonistic in contemporary Arab thought—quite the contrary: the Syrian thinker and Christian Michel Aflaq (1910–1989) defines Arabism as “a body whose soul is Islam” (Seurat & Sfeir 2022: 41).

24. Born in 1935 in Mashhad, Iran, after the Iranian Revolution Jalal Eddine al-Farsi became a member of the Iranian Parliament and of the Assembly of Experts on the Constitution.

25. Esmat Mrad was assassinated on 2 August 1984, in Tripoli.

26. Former senior members of the Brigade, Marwan Zaaloum and Jihad al-Amarein were assassinated by the Israelis in April 2002. The Fatah leader in Hebron, Masira Abu Hamdieh, was arrested in May 2002, and died in prison in April 2013.
## RÉSUMÉS

Né en 1936 à Jérusalem, Mounir Shafiq est un « intellectuel révolutionnaire » passé du communisme philo-soviétique au nationalisme palestinien inspiré du maoïsme, pour aboutir à l'islam politique. Il intègre les rangs du Parti communiste jordanien dans les années 1950. Il devient membre du Fatah de Yasser Arafat dans les années 1960, et intègre le Centre de planification de l'Organisation de libération de la Palestine (OLP). La révolution iranienne de 1979 est un point de bascule qui l'emmène vers l'islam politique. Nulle rupture apparente dans ces conversions, que Mounir Shafiq justifie rétrospectivement par la continuité « anti-impérialiste ». Le parcours intellectuel de Mounir Shafiq semble énigmatique : il est pourtant partagé par nombre de militants arabes de sa génération. En termes d'histoire des idées politiques, le basculement opéré du communisme à l'islam n'est pas comparable au tournant postmarxiste opéré en Europe occidentale à partir du début des années 1980 par de nombreux intellectuels passés dans les rangs des partis communistes ou de formations maoïstes. Il est ici plus adéquat de parler de conversions sans ruptures : le nationalisme et l'anti-impérialisme tracent des points de continuité dans les bascules idéologiques entre communisme et islam. La trajectoire politique de Mounir Shafiq permet aussi d'interroger la figure de « l'intellectuel révolutionnaire », hors champ académique mais producteur d'idées et de concepts qui se reflètent dans le champ politique, homme d'action qui n'est pas réductible à un simple homme de parti. Enfin, l'histoire de la Brigade étudiante du mouvement Fatah, dont il fut l'un des principaux dirigeants et inspirateurs dans les années 1970 et 1980, autorise une histoire croisée entre Liban et Palestine : au-delà d'une histoire des Palestiniens au Liban, il y a une histoire proprement libanaise du Fatah.

Mounir Shafiq est a "revolutionary intellectual" born in Jerusalem in 1936. His trajectory has taken him from philo-Soviet Communism to Maoist-inspired Palestinian nationalism, eventually culminating in political Islam. He joined the Jordanian Communist Party in the 1950s, and in the 1960s became a member of Yasser Arafat's Fatah organization as well as of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) Planning Centre. The 1979 Iranian Revolution was a turning point that led him to political Islam, but there appears to have been no ruptures between these conversions, which Shafiq has retrospectively explained in terms of an "anti-imperialist" through line. His intellectual trajectory may seem enigmatic, and yet, it is one he shares with many Arab militants of his generation. In terms of political intellectual history, the shift from Communism to Islam is not comparable to the post-Marxist turn that occurred in Western Europe among many intellectuals in the early 1980s who joined the ranks of Communist parties or Maoist organizations. In Shafiq's case, it is more fitting to think in terms of seamless conversions, in which nationalism and anti-imperialism represent elements of continuity within the ideological swing from Communism and Islam. Shafiq's political trajectory also allows us to investigate the figure of the "revolutionary intellectual" who exists outside of the academic field but produces ideas and concepts that are reflected in the political field; a man of action who cannot be reduced to merely a "party man." Finally, the history of the Student Brigade of the Fatah movement, of which Shafiq was one of the main leaders in the 1970s and 1980s, calls for a Lebanon and Palestine *histoire croisée*—for beyond the history of Palestinians in Lebanon, there is also a properly Lebanese history of Fatah.

Nacido en 1936 en Jerusalén, Mounir Shafiq fue un “intelectual revolucionario” que pasó del comunismo philo-soviético al nacionalismo palestino inspirado en el maoísmo para desembocar en
el islam político. Se incorpora a las filas del Partido Comunista Jordano en los años 50. En los años 60 se hace miembro del Fatah de Yasser Arafat e integra el Centro de Planificación de la Organización para la Liberación de Palestina (OLP). La revolución iraní de 1979 constituye un punto de inflexión que lo llevó al islam político. No hubo ninguna ruptura aparente en estas conversiones, que Mounir Shafiq justifica retrospectivamente a través de una continuidad “antimperialista”. La trayectoria intelectual de Mounir Shafiq parece enigmática: sin embargo, es compartida por muchos militantes árabes de su generación. En términos de historia de las ideas políticas, el vuelco del comunismo al islam no es comparable con el giro postmarxista operado en Europa occidental desde principios de los años 80 por muchos intelectuales que entraron a las filas de los partidos comunistas o de las formaciones maoísticas. Aquí, resulta más adecuado hablar de conversiones sin rupturas: el nacionalismo y el antimperialismo trazan puntos de continuidad en los puntos de inflexión ideológicos entre el comunismo y el islam. La trayectoria política de Mounir Shafiq también permite examinar la figura del “intelectual revolucionario”, ajeno al campo académico pero productor de ideas y conceptos que se reflejan en el campo político, un hombre de acción que no es reductible a un simple hombre de partido. Por último, la historia de la Brigada de estudiantes del movimiento Fatah, de la que fue el principal dirigente e inspirador en los años 70 y 80, permite una historia cruzada entre el Líbano y Palestina: más allá de una historia de los palestinos en el Líbano, existe una historia propiamente libanesa del Fatah.

Mounir Shafiq wurde 1936 in Jerusalem geboren und ist ein „revolutionärer Intellektueller“, der vom philo-sowjetischen Kommunismus über den vom Maoismus inspirierten palästinensischen Nationalismus zum politischen Islam gelangte. In den 1950er Jahren trat er in die Reihen der Kommunistischen Partei Jordaniens ein. In den 1960er Jahren wurde er Mitglied der Fatah von Jassir Arafat und trat dem Planungszentrum der Palästinensischen Befreiungsorganisation (PLO) bei. Die iranische Revolution von 1979 war ein Wendepunkt, der ihn zum politischen Islam führte. In diesen Konversionen, die Mounir Shafiq rückblickend mit der „antiimperialistischen“ Kontinuität rechtfertigt, ist kein Bruch erkennbar. Mounir Shafiqs intellektueller Werdegang erscheint rätselhaft, obwohl er von vielen arabischen Aktivisten seiner Generation geteilt wird. In Bezug auf die Geschichte der politischen Ideen ist der Wechsel vom Kommunismus zum Islam nicht mit der postmarxistischen Wende vergleichbar, die in Westeuropa seit den frühen 1980er Jahren von vielen Intellektuellen vollzogen wurde, die in den Reihen der kommunistischen Parteien oder maoistischen Gruppierungen standen. In diesem Fall ist es angemessener, von Konversionen ohne Brüche zu sprechen: Nationalismus und Antiimperialismus bilden die Kontinuitätspunkte in den ideologischen Umschwüngen zwischen Kommunismus und Islam. Mounir Shafiqs politischer Werdegang ermöglicht es auch, die Figur des „revolutionären Intellektuellen“ zu hinterfragen, der außerhalb des akademischen Feldes steht, aber Ideen und Konzepte produziert, die sich im politischen Feld widerspiegeln, ein Mann der Tat, der nicht auf einen einfachen Parteimann reduziert werden kann. Schließlich erlaubt die Geschichte der Studentenbrigade der Fatah-Bewegung, deren Hauptführer und Inspirator er in den 1970er und 1980er Jahren war, eine Crossover-Geschichte zwischen Libanon und Palästina: Über eine Geschichte der Palästinenser im Libanon hinaus gibt es eine spezifisch libanesische Geschichte der Fatah.
## INDEX

**Schlüsselwörter**: arabische Linke, Antiimperialismus, Fatah, Intellektuelle, Kommunismus, Nationalismus, Palästina, politischer Islam

**Mots-clés**: anti-impérialisme, communisme, Fatah, gauches arabes, intellectuels, islam politique, nationalisme, Palestine

**Keywords**: anti-imperialism, Arab lefts, communism, Fatah, intellectuals, political Islam, nationalism, Palestine

**Palabras claves**: anti-imperialismo, comunismo, Fatah, izquierdas árabes, intelectuales, islam político, nacionalismo, Palestina

## AUTEURS

### NICOLAS DOT-POUILLARD

Associate researcher at the Institut français du Proche-Orient (Ifpo).
nicolas.dot.pouillard[at]gmail.com