Democracy and Islam in Malek Bennabi's Thought

The growth of political Islam in the 1970s and the possibility ofIslamist parties coming to power in various countries led many scholarsand political analysts to question the compatibility of Islam and democracy.Most studies have concentrated on popular Muslim thinkers whowere considered Islamic activists such as Sayyid Qutb or Abu ‘Ala Al-Maududi, but no attention has been paid to the thought of the remarkableAlgerian Islamic thinker, Malek Bennabi (1905-1973). A French-educatedelectrical engineer, strongly influenced by the ideas of Rashid Ridaand Mohammed Abdu, Bennabi’s most important concern throughout hislife was the adaptation of Islamic values to modernity. Very familiar withwestern civilization-as well as many others-he felt that the Muslimworld failed to rise above its inertia not only because it is incapable ofabsorbing modem technology, but also because its elite borrowed failingideologies, such as Marxism, without attempting to recapture the bestvalues that were produced by Islamic civilization. In other words, theMuslim world failed to reproduce the experience of such successfulnations as Japan. In his view, Japan achieved modernity because “the‘deadly ideas’ [i.e., materialism] of the west did not make it deviate fromits path: It [Japan] remained faithful to its culture, its traditions, and itspast.”’ More importantly, throughout his work Bennabi puts most of theblame for the Muslim world‘s predicament, not on western colonialism,but on the Islamic world itself, a notion that m s against the prevailingopinion in the Arab-lslamic world that argues that western powers aremostly 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-Zslamyya (Islamic Values), founded the same year. Theassociation was opposed to the “Marxist” policies of President Ahmed ...