Sumud and Samah

Sumud emerged in Palestinian political and pastoral discourse during the late twentieth century as a concept that did the work the existing forgiveness vocabulary could not do for communities living under ongoing harm. The standard forgiveness frames assume a past-tense wound: the harm has happened, the chapter is closed, the work is to address the memory. Sumud is a present-tense posture for communities for whom the chapter has not closed and may not close in the practitioner's lifetime. The word itself is rooted in s-m-d, with cognates meaning to remain firmly in place, to be steadfast, to not be moved. Raja Shehadeh's Palestinian Walks (2007) traces the everyday practices through which Palestinian villagers articulated sumud across decades of land confiscation and movement restriction: planting olive trees, repairing terraces, walking ancestral footpaths, refusing to abandon disputed land.

The pairing with samah completes the framework. Samah is the Arabic root for forgiveness, generosity of spirit, and tolerance — the disposition of one who does not allow the daily harm to harden into reciprocal hatred. The pairing is structurally important because sumud alone can calcify into bitterness, and samah alone, in a context of ongoing harm, can collapse into capitulation. The two together name a posture that is rooted, undefeated, and refuses to let the daily harm produce the inner harm of consuming hatred. Toine van Teeffelen, at the Arab Educational Institute in Bethlehem, has documented the way this dual framing is taught to Palestinian children as a daily disposition rather than a heroic exception. Sumud is what gets you through Monday; samah is what keeps you from becoming what is being done to you.

Naim Ateek and the Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center in Jerusalem have developed the Arab Christian version of the same dual framing, anchored in the Sermon on the Mount's instruction to love one's enemies and pray for those who persecute one. Ateek's argument is that the Sermon on the Mount was given in a colonial context — Roman-occupied Galilee — and that Western theology has often domesticated the instruction by reading it as advice for interpersonal grievance rather than as a discipline for communities under sustained structural harm. Read in its original context, the instruction is the Christian form of sumud and samah: remain rooted, do not capitulate to the logic of domination, refuse to be remade into what is being done to you. The Sabeel framing has been adopted in liberation-theology settings beyond Palestine, including in Latin American and South African contexts where chronic structural harm has required the same dual vocabulary.

Worthington has written about this category of forgiveness work under the term unfinished forgiveness. His clinical framework, developed primarily for past-tense wounds, did not initially have a category for the practitioner whose harm is still in motion. In Forgiveness and Reconciliation Through a Christian Lens and in later technical papers, he has argued that unfinished forgiveness requires a different treatment protocol than the standard REACH sequence. The recall step has to be ongoing rather than retrospective. The empathic-joining step must be repeated as new harm continues to occur. The hold step has to be the central practice, with the understanding that the decision will be made many times rather than once. The framework Worthington describes is structurally close to the sumud-samah pairing, which suggests a convergence between Levantine community wisdom and Western clinical practice on the structural demands of forgiving while harm continues.

A common error in importing sumud into non-Levantine settings is the appropriation of the word without its weight. Sumud is not a self-help concept; it was developed inside communities living under sustained loss and carries the specific texture of those communities. Practitioners outside that context who find the framework useful for their own chronic-harm situations — long illness, intractable family estrangement, refugee status, structural racism — do best when they acknowledge the source rather than abstracting the practice from its origin. The Arab Educational Institute's published materials are explicit that sumud is a Palestinian contribution to global forgiveness practice and should be named as such when applied elsewhere. The naming is itself a form of the witness sumud asks for.

For a practitioner working with this framework in a setting where the harm is still actively occurring, the core operational shift is to stop treating forgiveness as a destination and to start treating it as a posture renewed daily. The practical implications include: a daily review at a regular time, in which the question is not have I forgiven yet but did I let the harm shape me today; a single durable act of identity — a prayer, a song, a recipe, a language, a walk — that the harm cannot touch and that the practitioner deliberately performs as a declaration of continuity; and a community of witness, even one other person, with whom the practice is shared. The Arab Educational Institute's curriculum is explicit that sumud without community ages badly. The community does not have to be large. It does have to be real.