Malek Bennabi

Works

• 1949The Conditions of the Renaissance

  Why the Muslim world declined and how it might rise again: civilisation combines people, soil and time under the impulse of a religious idea, and colonial domination presupposes an inner “coloniability”.

• 1954Vocation of Islam

  A history and critique of modern Muslim reform movements and of the “post-Almohad” society that had lost its creative impulse.

Position

Bennabi’s question, taken up from Ibn Khaldun, was how civilisations rise and fall. A civilisation, he wrote, is the product of three elements – the human being, the soil and time – which remain inert until a religious idea binds them together and sets them in motion. Civilisations pass through phases dominated by spirit, by reason and by instinct; the Muslim world, in his view, had entered a long decline after the Almohad period, producing a “post-Almohad” human being without creative impulse. From this he derived his most debated concept, “coloniability” (colonisabilité): colonial rule succeeded because a society had already lost its inner capacities, and political independence alone would not end this condition. Nationalist critics objected that the concept shifted responsibility onto the colonised; Bennabi insisted that it was meant as a call to inner renewal, not as an excuse for colonialism. In “The Problem of Ideas in the Muslim World” (1970) he distinguished the worlds of persons, ideas and things and criticised societies that seek progress through the accumulation of things. He also criticised the apologetics of reformers who defended Islam without changing its social reality.

Life & context

Malek Bennabi was born on 1 January 1905 in Constantine in eastern Algeria and grew up in Tébessa. He attended French school and Qur’anic school and studied at the médersa of Constantine, then worked for a time as a court clerk. In 1930 he went to Paris, where he was refused admission to the school of oriental languages and instead trained as an electrical engineer. He lived in France until the 1950s, married a French woman who converted to Islam, and wrote his first books there, among them “The Qur’anic Phenomenon” (1946) and “The Conditions of the Renaissance” (1949). In 1956, during the Algerian war of independence, he moved to Cairo, where he supported the Algerian cause and published in Arabic. After independence he returned to Algeria in 1963 and served as director of higher education. In his last years he held regular seminars in Algiers that were attended by many students. His memoirs, “Mémoires d’un témoin du siècle”, appeared from 1965. He died in Algiers on 31 October 1973.

Further main works

• The Qur’anic Phenomenon (Le Phénomène coranique, 1946)
• Afro-Asianism (L’Afro-asiatisme, 1956)
• Memoirs of a Witness of the Century (Mémoires d’un témoin du siècle, 1965)
• The Problem of Ideas in the Muslim World (Le Problème des idées dans le monde musulman, 1970)