Friday, June 28, 2013

Al-`Afif Al-Akhdar is dead

Al-`Afif Al-Akhdar is dead.  This Tunisian thinker fought in the Algerian revolution and later was a leader in the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine in the early seventies before breaking with Leninism altogether.  (He served as chief of indoctrination in the schools of DFLP in Jordan).  He was the first Arab writer to introduce the anarchist and Marxist critiques of Leninism and Marxism-Leninism.  I have to admit that he had an influence on me.  He established network of "majalis" (councils or societies) in Beirut during the war and popularized leftist/anrachist/Marxist/ critiques of the Arab left.  I used to be an avid reader of his in my youth, especially his first translation of the Communist Manifesto from German, and in which he wrote long essays about Islamic history.  He published another important book titled Sultat Al-Majalis (Power of the Councils) I should write more about him soon.  Yet, in the 1990s, the man underwent horrible transformation and became an advocate of the Bin Ali dictatorship and even of GCC countries but was banned from Gulf media after he attacked Wahhabiyyah once on Al-Jazira.  He became basically a lousy Arab liberal.  There is a lousy book about him by a man who has not read a word of Marxism: the Saudi propagandist, Shakir Nabulsi who calls himself a liberal.  (Nabulsi has a book on the genius of the colloquial poetry of Prince Khalid Al-Faysal).  I will be writing more about this man: most people (East and West) have never heard of him.