An Analytical Reading of Husayn Muruwwa’s Discourse on Arab Heritage and Islamic Thought in Light of Historical Materialism

Abstract

This study presents an analytical reading of the discourse of the Arab thinker Husayn Muruwwa (1908–1987) and his intellectual cultural project, situating him as one of the most prominent figures of twentieth-century Arab socialist thought. The analysis focuses on his methodological approach to the study of the Arab-Islamic heritage through the lens of historical materialism. Although the question of heritage has long occupied a central place in modern Arab thought, its interpretation remained, for decades, confined within Salafi frameworks that claimed exclusive authority over its meaning and positioned themselves as the rightful guardians of the tradition. Muruwwa’s project sought to dismantle this monopoly through a wide-ranging critical intervention that reread philosophical, theological, and juridical corpora as products of their social-economic and historical conditions, a perspective most clearly embodied in his monumental work Materialist Tendencies in Arab-Islamic Philosophy.

The study traces the mechanisms through which Muruwwa approached heritage as a dynamic historical structure governed by the laws of social transformation, rather than as a fixed, sacralized entity. In doing so, he transformed heritage from a static and isolated past into a living epistemic space where the achievements of earlier generations interact with the questions of the present and the possibilities of the future in a continuous dialectical movement. The paper demonstrates how Muruwwa endeavored to reconstruct the Arab-Islamic intellectual tradition as an open field of inquiry and critique, rather than a closed repository of sanctified texts.

Finally, the study highlights the epistemological and methodological value of Muruwwa’s project within contemporary debates on renewing the study of heritage. It underscores the necessity of approaching heritage critically and historically — through rigorous scientific analysis — in order to reintegrate it into modern Arab cultural consciousness and contribute to the construction of a modern civilizational vision that draws inspiration from the past without becoming captive to it