Imad Nuwayhid was a leftist intellectual and martyr. During the 1960s-1970s, he was active in Marxist circles in Lebanon. He died in late 1975, the beginning of the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990), as a fighter for the Lebanese Communist Party. In the aftermath of Imad’s death, his party, comrades, friends, and family collectively produced his “martyr narrative.” Like others of the era, the narrative was disseminated through various leftist media—textual, oral, visual, aural—stressed party ideology over individuality, and sought to mobilize other youth to fight for the causes of deconfessionalization and Palestinian liberation. While some family members spoke at rallies and wrote in defense of the party’s position, not all were satisfied. Some chose, and continue to choose, to remember Imad as their brother, not a communist. These actions reclaim Imad as a Nuwayhid, but not always as he lived. With Imad’s writings, newspaper reports, and interviews with family, friends, and comrades conducted between 2016-2021, this paper explores the contentious politics surrounding the memorialization of one, “ordinary,” Arab leftist martyr. It focuses on Imad’s family, examining their public comments and actions in 1975-6, and their memories today. Particularly, the paper discusses what I term “cleaning the slate,” an act of corrective storytelling and resistance to official, party-produced martyr narratives. Today, several of Imad’s siblings criticize the Lebanese Communist Party, wondering why they sent a budding intellectual to the frontlines. Furthermore, some downplay his radical politics, question his affiliation with the Lebanese Communist Party, and believe Imad would have shed his leftist beliefs if he were alive today. I argue that this narrative (re)construction, which divorces Imad from his intellectual becoming, is not disingenuous, but serves as a challenge to the hegemonic power of parties and militias during and after the Lebanese Civil War. Cleaning the slate recasts Imad in their image, detaching Imad away from the party, the leftist movement, and their roles in the war. This paper seeks to bring the rank-and-file into the history of the Arab Left, as well as argue for the necessity of the family—as a concept and perspectives—in this scholarship. It also hopes to complicate the “bad” party, “good” family dichotomy common in literature on martyrdom and the war. Indeed, the institution of the family, like the party, is diverse, must be disaggregated, and is active in the myth making, and unmaking, of leftist martyrs to the Lebanese Civil War.

The Moroccan socialist leader Omar Benjelloun was assassinated in September 1975 as he came out of his house in Casablanca by members of the Shabiba al-Islamiyya, youth Islamist militias. This younger leader was on the cusp of taking the Moroccan al-ittihad al-ishtiraki lil-quwat al-shaabiyya (Moroccan Socialist Party) to a new stage of its history as the party’s newly elected secretary general, with the promise of reconstituting a progressive front to dislodge the Moroccan conservative forces, and to finally live up to its revolutionary promise. His assassination has been elevated as one of the most tragic disappearances of the Moroccan left and the latest in a line of “stolen” leaders under the “years of lead”, to explain this party’s decline from the most popular force in Morocco. The silence and unanswered questions around his murder have coexisted with a regime of memorialization of his tragic death: every year, the party commemorates the man and address verbal attacks toward the Islamists. These commemorations have reinforced nostalgia among its members that is consistent with a defeatist mindset compounded by a sense of unfairness. In this paper, I engage with Benjelloun’s memorialization as martyr of the Moroccan left, which I argue stems from his tragic and early disappearance more than his actual contribution to the Moroccan left’s political programme. In fact, his political project has been omitted or erased from the subsequent discussion of Moroccan socialist thought. I explore the forms and themes that emerge from the yearly commemoration of his assassination during several public events and on leftist social media groups. I contrast them with his place and legacy in the “official” memory of the leftist leaders who led the movement after his passing, chief among them Abderrahman Youssoufi, the Socialist Prime Minister during the Alternance Government (1998-2002), in his recently released memoirs, and others. This paper then explores the alternatives to “martyrdom history” of the left through a drawing of Benjelloun’s profile as an ideologue and a political leader on the basis of the collection of his speeches, his political papers and a deep analysis with his political thought, rather than solely the recollections produced in hindsight. By bringing these approaches in dialogue, a necessary social-historical labor, this paper aims to unpack the ubiquity of myth-history and open new possibilities for the Arab left’s legacy and dynamic portrayal of such past figures.