As a young communist activist, Najati Sidqi (1905-1979) was both energetic and unlucky enough to live through many of the early twentieth century’s upheavals. He experienced the first decade of Stalin’s Soviet Union, the violence of 1929 in Palestine, and the Spanish Civil War. He served time in Jerusalem’s British prisons, ran an underground newspaper in interwar Paris, and drank vodka with Muslim bureaucrats in Tashkent. He crossed borders and broke taboos. In 1940, during the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, he was expelled from the Communist Party for publicly calling Nazism incompatible with Islam. Sidqi’s memoir, now available in English for the first time, narrates this dizzyingly eventful life with intelligence, wit—and a strange emotional detachment. This talk will explore both his adventures and the darker stories he chooses not to tell. And it will ask: one hundred years later, why does Sidqi’s ultimately unsuccessful work with the global Left seem both so far away and yet so eerily contemporary?
Margaret Litvin is associate professor of Arabic and Comparative Literature at Boston University (USA) and the author, most recently, of Red Mecca: The Life and Afterlives of the Arab-Soviet Romance (Princeton University Press, forthcoming). Her co-translation of Najati Sidqi’s memoir (University of Texas Press, 2025) is part of an ongoing research project on Najati Sidqi, his wife Lotka Lorberbaum Sidqi, and their daughter Dawlieh Saadi. Margaret was a EUME Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in 2017/18.
Zeynep Türkyılmaz received her PhD from the Department of History at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) in 2009. After holding many fellowship and teaching positions, she is currently an associated EUME Fellow at the Forum Transregionale Studien. Her research and teaching interests include state formation, gender, nationalism, colonialism, and religion with a focus on religious non-conformity and missionary work in the Middle East from 1800 to the present.
Pleaser register in advance via eume(at)trafo-berlin.de. Depending on approval by the speaker(s), the Berliner Seminar will be recorded. All audio recordings of the Berliner Seminar are available on SoundCloud.
