Democracy and Islam in Malek Bennabi's Thought

Abstract

The growth of political Islam in the 1970s and the possibility of
Islamist parties coming to power in various countries led many scholars
and political analysts to question the compatibility of Islam and democracy.
Most studies have concentrated on popular Muslim thinkers who
were considered Islamic activists such as Sayyid Qutb or Abu ‘Ala Al-
Maududi, but no attention has been paid to the thought of the remarkable
Algerian Islamic thinker, Malek Bennabi (1905-1973). A French-educated
electrical engineer, strongly influenced by the ideas of Rashid Rida
and Mohammed Abdu, Bennabi’s most important concern throughout his
life was the adaptation of Islamic values to modernity. Very familiar with
western civilization-as well as many others-he felt that the Muslim
world failed to rise above its inertia not only because it is incapable of
absorbing modem technology, but also because its elite borrowed failing
ideologies, such as Marxism, without attempting to recapture the best
values that were produced by Islamic civilization. In other words, the
Muslim world failed to reproduce the experience of such successful
nations as Japan. In his view, Japan achieved modernity because “the
‘deadly ideas’ [i.e., materialism] of the west did not make it deviate from
its path: It [Japan] remained faithful to its culture, its traditions, and its
past.”’ More importantly, throughout his work Bennabi puts most of the
blame for the Muslim world‘s predicament, not on western colonialism,
but on the Islamic world itself, a notion that m s against the prevailing
opinion in the Arab-lslamic world that argues that western powers are
mostly responsible for the backwardness of the Muslim world.
After his return to Algeria in 1963, following his long exile in Egypt,
Malek Bennabi joined the first Islamist organization in Algeria,
Al-Qiym al-slamyya (Islamic Values), founded the same year. The
association was opposed to the “Marxist” policies of President Ahmed ...