In the Battlefield

Ruba Salamah, B.L Pal3 (2025) 135.5 x 198, cm.

Hanna Mikhail was born in British Palestine in 1935. Walter Rodney in British Guiana in 1942. Both were extraordinary scholars. Once anti-imperialist students at the great imperial schools of Harvard and SOAS, they were destined to take their talents far beyond the campus and the page. If Mikhail and Rodney entered the library to understand origins (of Islamic political theory and the Atlantic slave trade, respectively), their subsequent political activity was motivated by endings: ending colonial rule, political domination, and capitalist exploitation. Capacious and erudite in their scholarship and humane and committed in their sensibility, they eventually arrived upon the battlefield, and not the metaphorical one we delimit for ideas. Their deaths, untimely in the extreme, great tragedies for their kin and their movements, precipitated profound reflections from their comrades distant from the battlefield. C.L.R. James and Edward Said below. 

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That is why Walter found himself in a car with a member of Burnham’s army making some arrangement about some gadget that turned out to be an explosive. He should never have been there. No political leader had any right to be there. Not only should he have never been there, the people around him should have seen to it that he was not in any such position. That was a fundamental mistake, and it was a political mistake. IT was not a mistake in personal judgment. It was because he was doing all sorts of things to show them that a revolutionary is prepared to do anything. And that was not the way. In the middle of the Russian Revolution, they were locking up leaders and their followers to tell them, “Go to Finland, get out of here, or you will be arrested. They will have a trial and the judge will condemn you to death. Or even before you are brought out, they will shoot you in the jail.” They had to chase Lenin out. Walter should never have been in that situation. Never, I hope you agree with me, and I hope you realize that that was a fundamental mistake, a political mistake. It is the business of a political organization to protect its leaders and its important people. So the whole tendency was as if he was already ready for a civil war. And even if he was ready for civil war, no leader should have been in that situation at all.

— C.L.R. James, “Walter Rodney and the Question of Power” (1981) 

In the months before his death, I was impressed with how his dissenting ideas had spread within Fateh in Beirut. He told me of a trip he took to North Vietnam and how that had strengthened his conviction on selfless dedication and careful organization and discipline. I had also begun to surmise-I have no hard information on which to rely, except that somewhat precarious evidence I deduced from friends of his –that he had begun to trouble the leadership with his earnest dissent and the growing influence that he exerted on those who worked with him. I must say in all honesty and sadness that his untoward disappearance and subsequence death in 1976 seemed to me not to have been so inconvenient for those in Fateh who found his opposition to political maneuvering, cronyism and the bending of principles so irritatingly well-represented by Hanna’s practice and theory. His disappearance while on what appeared to be a foolishly contrived mission to go by a small and unprotected boat from Beirut to Tripoli in waters that were constantly patrolled by Israeli and Phalanges forces seemed like the result of incredibly poor planning and a great deal of unacceptable carelessness. For year after this tragic cadence to his life, I often thought that that ill-fated voyage had robbed the Palestinian movement of one of its most principled and humanely inspired cadres. No wonder then that so many of his friends and especially his brave widow Jehan refused to accept that fact of his capture as final, and no wonder that so many of us had a strong stake in keeping hope alive for his release and return.

— Edward Said, “Preface,” in Hanna Mikhail, Politics and Revelation: Mawardi and After (1995)