Muhammad Najati Sidqi (Arabic: محمد نجاتي صدقي, Muḥammad Najātī Ṣidqī, 19 May 1905 – 17 November 1979) was a Palestinian public intellectual and activist,[1][2] trade unionist,[3] translator, writer, critic and erstwhile communist.
[11] He developed contacts with Joseph Stalin, Nikolai Bukharin, Georges Marchais and Khalid Bakdash, the Kurdish leader of the Syrian Communist Party,[11] met Mao Zedong and got acquainted with the Turkish poet Nâzım Hikmet and members of the family of Jawaharlal Nehru.
[4] Based in Haifa, where he supervised the Party's local branch, Sidqi maintained regular contacts with Sheik Izz ad-Din al-Qassam,[13] and defined the latter's death in 1935 as one of martyrdom.
[15] As surveillance from the Mandatory administration intensified, the Communist Party smuggled him abroad in June 1933[13] to Paris where he assumed the editorship of the Comintern's Arabic-language journal, The Arab East.
Sidqi had first hand experience of Nazi Germany, having travelled through the country in 1936, and when, later, party loyalty dictated silence after the signing of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, he refused to buckle under and conceal his disagreement.
[21] Sidqi was one of at least four Palestinian Arabs, the other three being Mahmoud al-Atrash, Ali Abds al-Khaliq and Fawsi al-Nabulsi, who are known to have fought on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War.
Reflecting the general trend of the Palestinian national movement, newspapers like Filastin were averse to Communism and backed the Spanish Fascists, partly out of a desire to antagonise both Great Britain and France, the region's colonial powers.
Most of his activity however consisted of making radio broadcasts, writing pamphlets in Arabic, and haranguing Moroccan troops in their trenches by means of a megaphone.
[23] His proposal that an anti-colonial revolution be stirred up in the Moroccan Rif in order to deprive the fascists of cannon fodder met with resolute opposition from Dolores Ibárruri, La Pasionaria of the Spanish Communist Party, who is said to have opposed any alliance with what she called "hordes of Moors, beastly savages (morisma salvaje) drunk with sensuality who rape our women and daughters.
[27] Sidqi then moved to Algeria where he tried, unsuccessfully, to set up a clandestine radio station to broadcast appeals for the natives of the Rif mountains to desert.
His translations included works ranging from major American and Chinese novelists[33] to Russian classics: he introduced Alexander Pushkin,[b] Anton Chekhov and Maxim Gorky to the Arabic world.
The first, The Sad Sisters (al-Akhwat al-Hazinat, Cairo 1953), looks at the problems Palestinians encountered in adjusting from traditional, romantically remembered Arab Jaffa to the rising metropolis of Tel Aviv and the strange habits of foreigners, the new Jewish society.
"[7] From his Soviet years, Sidqi was primarily interested in the problem of how one might bring about the transformation of Muslim societies into modern industrialised countries without damaging their traditional social fabric.
He thus declares that: There is no doubt that the spirit of Islam is totally antithetical, in each and every aspect, to all the principles of Nazism: the political regime, society, family, economic, education and personal freedom.
[38]Though Sidqi took a distinctive approach – he was not a typical Islamic thinker – his book's argument was not unique but reflected a widespread trend in Arab rejections of Nazism.
He compares the ideological material in these sources with Islamic classical texts ranging from the Qur'an and the Hadith collections to modern writings, including works by Muhammad Abduh, Jamal ad-Din al-Afghani and Mustafa Kamil.
[38] Nazism was wedded to the idea of German racial purity and dedicated to weeding out or destroying "inferior" races, among which the Jews, and then the Russians, Negroes, Arabs, Egyptians, and Turks were classified.
"[40] Whereas Nazism is materialistic, bestial and pagan, and accentuates the physical sensual nature of man, Islam embodies, for Sidqi, the ideational human side.
The one constitutes a real revolution (thawra), Nazism sows disobedience (iṣyān) and plunges man back into the degraded pagan state of bestial idolatrous ignorance, which would effectively lead to "social barbarism" (al-hamijiyya al-'ijtimā'iyya).
Sidqi criticized Mustafa el-Nahhas for an inept reading of the growing threat from Hitler and Mussolini's forces, and called on Egypt to assume its historic responsibilities by siding with "the two noble peoples of England and France".