This paper studies the Arabic translation of Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, published in Cairo in 2015, to address the question of method and its relation to language in Arabic studies. What are the historical and social forms this scholarship presumes? What are the forms of subjectivity, and subjection, this scholarship authorizes and proliferates? If two interventions in relation to Arabic studies have drawn the attention of scholars—the publication of Edward W. Said’s Orientalism (1978) and Talal Asad’s Formations of the Secular (2003)—how can we think the Arabic translation of Black Marxism within this lineage as a text for Arabic studies and a critique of its terms? Black Marxism elaborates 2 moments: (1) the historical emergence of capitalism as a global, racialized form; and (2) the social emergence of the Black radical tradition as a practice of struggle and as a mode of being and way of knowing, which extends from the maroon communities in the Americas to the writings of W.E.B. DuBois. Robinson writes of a “shared past,” which is “precious,” “not for itself, but because it is the basis of consciousness, of knowing, of being.” The Arabic rendering of this passage—“laysa fi hadd dhatihi, wa lakin li’annahu yu‘tabar asas al-wa‘i wa al-ma‘rifa wa al-wujud”—compels attention to each of these terms, and in particular “knowledge” and “being,” in relation to Arabic linguistic practice. In this frame, the Arabic Black Marxism gives to us a renewed attention to language as a practice, where the “texts” one reads are no longer understood to exemplify (or fail to exemplify) a historical, literary, philosophical, or religious tradition, trend, or movement, but are understood merely to occasion a certain way of doing language and, therefore, a certain sense of being. In approaching language in this way, we might open a reflection on Arabic studies that explicitly delinks it from the state, capital, the logic of property, and the modes of understanding language and subjectivity these authorize. This paper reads closely the translation of 2 moments in the Arabic Black Marxism—in particular the passages that address “feudalism” in its relation to “capitalism,” and those that address the sense of being, which the Black radical tradition, for Robinson, makes manifest—to address how a reading of these two moments becomes a locus for thinking method in Arabic studies as a decolonial praxis.