230318P - MALIK BIN NABI – A DARING ORIGINAL THINKER

Presented at a 2-day international conference on the personality, thought, and times of Malik Bennabi organized by the Institute of Objective Studies India 18-19 March 2023 by Dr Omar Hasan Kasule MB ChB (MUK), MPH (Harvard), DrPH (Harvard) Professor of Epidemiology and Bioethics

INTRODUCTION

• We are gathered here today to celebrate one of the greatest thinkers about history and civilization since Ibn Khaldoun (first Muslim scholar of underlying causes of historical change
• He is the Ibn Khaldoun of our century and will inspire future centuries of thinkers
• His thought was provoked by the realities of his times and also by his educational background
• We should benefit from his methodology to analyse our times and not just copy or transpose his ideas

WORLD IN TURMOIL

• Both Bennabi and Ibn Khaldoun wrote when the ummah was undergoing turbulence and both were personally involved in that turbulence playing various roles that also included being victims of persecution or exile.
• Algeria conflict indigenes vs colons. Natives impoverished. Violence.  Forced exile. Humiliation. Apartheid aka Palestine.
• The context of colonial Algeria as well as rest of the Muslim world cannot be separated from his thought. He saw injustice and exploitation in his native Constantine and in the Algerian immigrant community in France. He experienced discrimination on applying for jobs. He was under observation by security agencies
• Moments of stress catalyse original thinking. Intellectual complacency when everything is quiet

BREAKDOWN OF TRADITIONAL SOCIAL INFRASTRUCTURE

• Malik Benabbi experienced break-down of the traditional societal structure in Algeria under pressure of colonial invasion
• Things Fall Apart by the Nigerian author Chinua Achebe described breakdown of traditional structures with the entry of British colonization. He copied the title of his novel from an Irish poem ‘The Second Coming’ written by the Irish poet WB Yeats in 1920 after the civil that ended with Irish independence from Britain. The poem reflects the disruptions of the Irish struggle for independence.
• Malik Benabbi did not stop at lamenting the breakdown but proceeded to diagnose the underlying causes
• It is remarkable that he did not lay the turmoil in the hands of colonial invaders but also realized internal factors that he explained under the term colonisability

DUAL EDUCATIONAL BACKGROUND

• Background education provides the context for original thought… Malik attended the Kuttab and the Qadiriyah Zawiyah that were formative in his thought. Story tellers (hakawati) kept culture alive because there was no written material. Memorization of Quran and hadith. He had to put in extra effort to strengthen his Arabic language. His educational background helped him define his identity and Infuse a sense of honor.
• Besides traditional education, he entered in 1921 the Lycee Franco-Musulman (French-Muslim high school) also known by the famous name “La Madersa”. He entered the school as a resident student; there he met many new students from different parts of Algeria and Europe.
• Introduced to new ideas: Emir Khalid (Emir Abdelkader’s grandson) and Moustapha Kemel Attaturk whose portraits were hanging on the walls of the dormitories of the Madersa. Further readings of Mohamed Abduh and Rashid Reda. Introduced to Rene Descartes. Introduced to the ideas of Bin Badees
• We are challenged to solve the problem of duality of education. Malik Benabi had both ilm aqli and ilm naqli. Many of our youths have only one source of knowledge

THE WORLD OF IDEAS

• Bennabi emphasized the importance of ideas to growth and survival of civilizations. He connected ideas to cultural change. He also ascribed civilizational decay to lack of ideas.
• You do not need great scholarship to understand the power of ideas. The Prophet called for tauhid in Makka and met immediate and severe opposition. He never talked about shari’at and his criticisms of the Quraish religion and society were mild at the start. They however realized that tauhid was a new and powerful idea and did not wait for details
• Some Quraish accepted Islam on realization that the new ideas were more powerful than existing ideas
• I want to add that the ideas that make a change must be new, relevant and programmable into actions. Ideas outside the context of application are either empty disputes (jadal) or are ivory tower philosophy

WE NEED ORIGINAL THINKING AND ORIGINAL IDEAS

• We now discuss and repeat the ideas of Malik. We need to think as we face our modern challenges; some are old but many are new. Among the new ones is the evolving cultural invasion through the mass and social media.
• What we face is not what he faced. The principles are the same but the details differ by time and place
• We need original thinkers … no copiers or angry reactors
• Ideas cannot be formed by research in libraries. We need thinkers who know the reality. This means that any serious thinking must be preceded by empirical research to quantify the problems.
• The West is dominating because it has the initiative to bring new ideas and we sheepishly follow. The current idea is sustainable development goals…
• We need many Malik Bennabi today and my hope and prayer is that this conference will inspire some of our youths to follow his footsteps.

Bibliographic reference:

https://wisdomattempt.wordpress.com/2016/06/05/malek-bennabis-biography.

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