The idea of a “New” as opposed to an “Old” Left is that the former is understood to be self-consciously defining itself against the latter--that is, against dogmatic Marxists—while at the same time distinguishing itself from other so-called “mainstream” or “reactionary” forces with an explicitly progressive and activist orientation. Both in their focused appropriation of a distinctly Marxist method of historical materialism and in their self-conscious application of that method to an intellectual project aimed at critically rereading the Islamic tradition (turath) in new ways, thinkers like Husayn Muruwwa (1910-1987) and Tayyib Tizini (b. 1938) defy easy association with either Old or New. Why does the heritage become an object of study in the 1970s? What is to be gained from a dialectical materialist account of history? How does is this intellectual project intended to relate to the political projects in which these figures were embedded? The methods and arguments champions of these two figures (as well as others of the time) drew criticism both from the Arab left and Islamic right. These controversies, while sometimes seeming to miss the mark, help uncover at least part of what was at stake in this period. I argue that the debates over method facilitated a novel understanding of the socio-political position a revolutionary intellectual should occupy in relationship to past, present and future while it simultaneously called into question many of the other projects that were seeking to use what went by the names of “heritage” and “modern” for other (in the views of Muruwwa and Tizini, less-progressive) purposes. Their return to the Arab-Islamic heritage with a materialist approach is aimed at the study of history not for its own sake such that it would render that history obsolete or unbridle its hold on the present, nor for its instrumentalist value in some sort of vulgar attempt to make it serve one’s own practical, political ends in the present. Muruwwa and Tizini are perhaps most concerned with the way in which heritage is being marshalled as such to serve the ends of the ruling class and other reactionary forces. Instead, a materialist reading of the heritage is intended to actualize a dynamic praxis, attuned to the way in which human beings create and are created by the external world but capable of bringing about progressive social change to counteract the material-ideational dynamics that weigh upon the present.