The Great Intellectual Odyssey of Husayn Muruwwa He was one of the most versatile Arab intellectuals of the twentieth century. Destined since the age of eight to became a Shi`i cleric, Husayn Muruwwa, left the poor south Lebanese village of Hadatha to Najaf. Studying logic and law his heart was in poetry. While still a student he was accidentally exposed to the great Egyptian liberal texts of the 1930s. Torn between Cairo and Najaf, and unsure which world to embrace, he had a nervous breakdown. After recovering, he left Najaf and flirted briefly with liberal Iraqi politics. Then he read Marx and Lenin and joined the Iraqi communists. He became a staunch activist and was deported from Iraq. Settling in Beirut he became a powerful literary critic and the first to write a coherent manifesto of Socialist Realism. In the 1950s and 1960s he was at the vanguard of the post-colonial intelligentsia and its search for a new Arab culture. Over the years, his critical voice, as well as his poetry, earned him much respect but also some enemies. In 1987 he was gunned down in Beirut. He was 77 year old. How should historians approach such an odyssey and what does it tell us about modern Arab thought? Much of what was written about Husayn Muruwwa's life is divorced from the historical circumstances of his time and emphasis polarization, namely: from the village to the city, from religion to a secularism and so on. However, as this paper shows, Husayn Muruwwa, and dozens of others like him, never disowned who he was. He never left religion and religion never left him. Likewise, his Marxism was heavily informed by the lives of the peasants in his childhood village. Rather than shifting positions, or "converting," Muruwwa kept adding layer after layer to what became a complex intellectual identity that simultaneously drew on several traditions and intellectual genealogies. More broadly, a close analysis of Muruwwa's career reveals the common trajectory of the post-colonial intelligentsia as a whole. As the first ideological generation in the Arab world who were decisively influenced by global events such as the economic crisis of the 1930s and WW II, this generation sought to establish a workable synthesis and a healthy dialectic between several seemingly contradictory local and foreign worlds.