Scholarship's long neglect of Arab left-wing trends in the 1950s–1970s is in keeping with the near-complete erasure of Arab radical and democratic traditions in public culture. In 1989, the reassessment of Marxism that followed the collapse of the USSR and of a world perceived as bipolar epitomised the disorientation of the Left on a global scale. Even ten years before the 1989 systemic collapse, the revolution in Iran, the Egypt–Israel peace treaty and the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan marked a watershed in the history of the Middle East and the demise of the Left as a leading force and a dominant imaginary. These structural changes disrupted the rules of knowledge production and the definition of the fields of knowledge, while intensive media and political focus on the short term, and the apparently more threatening face of Middle Eastern societies, enhanced scholars’ interest in political Islam. The defeat and ‘left-wing melancholia’ henceforth appeared as the main appropriate ways in which to address the history of the Left, as evidenced by the sometimes contradictory afterlives of the assassinated communist intellectual Hussein Muruwwa (Frangie) and of Khaked Ahmed Zaki, the ‘Che Guevara of the Middle East’, whose rebellion in Iraq's southern marches is fist remembered as having ‘instigate[d] further action … whereas later commemorations have a rather resigned, mournful and depressed tone‘ (Winkler). Militants themselves were often the first to slip into auto-criticism, if not self-flagellation. These defeated leftists, though, have not been completely eradicated, nor have they remained silent. As Takriti observes in this volume, they made noticeable contributions to the history of the region, and militant experiments have shaped the sensibility as well as the intellectual and analytical skills of leading figures who fostered the development of social sciences and the renewal of literature and cinema in the Arab world.

Yet, the Arab Lefts of the 1950s to the 1970s recently surfaced in scholarship and revived in militant memories and multi-faceted archival practices, from the flourishing of novels, memoirs or fictional biographies to the digitisation and dissemination of militant documents through various channels, up to the writing of histories on these revolutionary times.