In the summer of 1943, 'Umar Fakhuri, a Lebanese intellectual and man of letters, ran as a candidate supported by the Communist Party for a parliamentary seat in Beirut in the Lebanese elections that preceded independence that year. Responding to criticisms that emerged against his involvement in politics as an ad?b, Fakhuri argued that if it were his role traditionally to safeguard human morals and values, shouldn't it also be his concern when these very values are being threatened? Shouldn't he react or even take sides? According to Fakhuri, most of the udab?' of his time might have been scared that by being engaged, they had to continuously change with the changing society. What they did not understand, Fakhuri argued, was that life and society were inevitably going to change. If the ad?b did not reflect and accommodate that change, he and his literature would cease to be relevant and would wither away; however, society and its life would continue to exist. Fakhuri, one of the pioneers of the literary movement of iltizam, argued for the political engagement of men of letters and intellectuals. This paper explores how leftists during the Mandate period infused their perspectives on literature and its role in society with influences from the nahda and the times they lived in. It examines the way Fakhuri and others discussed literature and engaged with the debate on commitment, arguing that by doing so, they pushed the boundaries of literature, of their status as intellectuals, and of the public sphere itself. They also questioned the categories that allowed individuals to be involved in the public sphere, first by arguing for literature for and by the people, and then for conceptualizing a category of intellectuals (muthaqqaf?n) that pushed against the traditional category of scholars. By examining the pioneers of iltizam in Mandate Lebanon, this paper in turn pushes against the historiographic periodization of this movement of literary commitment and questions its limits and scope beyond the parameters of Soviet socialist realism.