The War in Algeria: Islam: Portrait of an Intellectual

...now it also has an intellectual leader who has developed in French a philosophy of colonialism that explains it primarily in terms of the weaknesses of a Moslem order which failed to achieve its own proclaimed social aims and allowed itself to become what Malek Bennabi, the theologian and philosopher who is the author of this remarkable work, calls "colonizable...

...Bennabi believes that the latter are "as obsolete as the pan-Europeanism which some people try to impose in Strasbourg," and inclines to expect a rebirth of Islam in Pakistan or in Indonesia rather than in any of the Arab nations...

...and he concludes that Mohammedans can "obtain a real liberation only if they themselves prepare the technical basis for it...

...Their number and structure are constantly changing...

...On the one hand, he accuses traditional Islam of being vain in its belief that the Mohammedan ideal need not be improved upon because it is utterly and forever perfect...

...On this issue, Bennabi quotes, with an admiration that is rare in a Mohammedan and strikingly proves his good faith, the example of Jewish self-help which functioned even as a clandestine organization under Nazi terror...

...IN A DETAILED ANALYSIS Of the beliefs and social structure of Islam since the end of the Almohad dynasty of Caliphs in the late Middle Ages, Bennabi then goes ahead to define the causes and symptoms of the paralysis which has made it possible for almost all of the Moslem world to be conquered and exploited by descendants of peoples who, five centuries earlier, had been dazzled by the technical skills of the powerful and prosperous empire of these Calphis...

...Like the conquered Poles in Hitler's Germanic Empire, the Mohammedans of Algeria seem to be systematically denied any education or training in the skills of Western technology...

...As the first North African disciple of Sir Mohammed Iqbal, who was for Pakistan what Mahatma Gandhi was for India, Bennabi has formulated a (Please turn the page) philosophy which, from Tunis to Mar-nist or pan-Arab propagandists, and rakech, has already gained an enthu-who in the midst of the painful birth siastic hearing among many of North of the Mahgreb nations are seeking a African Islam's more thoughtful lead-doctrine that will prevent them from ers...

...It is these bands that form our main adversary...

...However, they have now been localized...

...Only from time to time does an Arab with a thoroughly French education have enough character and idealism to escape this moral and intellectual degradation and to risk his freedom and perhaps his life in behalf of his less privileged coreligionists...

...In Algeria, as you know, we are first of all confronted by a few terrorist groups having no permanent existence and whose very limited effective forces can hardly be evaluated with any preciseness...

...7. ISLAM: PORTRAIT OF AN INTELLECTUAL Edouard Rodifi Not only are the people of Algeria underemployed and undernourished, but they are frustrated in almost every attempt to escape as individuals from the dismal fate of idleness...

...We know most of their leaders and we know about their armament, the number of their effective forces and how they change...

...As opposed to classical Marxism, all these non-materialist philosophies of history have one characteristic in common, their tendency to seek an immanent reason to explain or determine why empires rise and fall...

...Malek Bennabi's other published works include a regionalist novel, an essay interpreting the social philosophy of the Koran, and a pamphlet discussing the conditions for a rebirth of Algeria political and cultural life...

...Quite properly, he protests that present legislation and graft make it easier to obtain permission to open a gaming-house, a house of prostitution or a bar in Algeria, where the Mohammedan majririty is forbidden by its faith to drink any alcoholic beverages, than to establish a school for the teaching of the Koran...

...In his analysis of the policies of cultural assimilation which some colonial powers impose on their dependent territories, Bennabi is particularly critical of their attempt to shift "from the sacred to the profane without stopping at the sublime, from the Islamic 'urn (doctrine) to an up-todate schooling without pausing to consider the notion of culture...

...LIKE THE SOUTH AFRICAN Negro novelist Peter Abrahams, Malek Bennabi views the oppressors of his people with the pity that all sinners deserve in the eyes of the truly good man...

...The cynical, hedonistic, confused and anti-social North-African thieves, receivers of stolen goods, dope-peddlers, pimps and male prostitutes who now constitute an "Arab problem" for the Paris police in certain Montmartre and LeftBank cafes, are typical examples of the kind of desperate hooliganism that such policies must inevitably produce, if only as a by-product of a hasty and superficial assimilationism...

...He concludes that "Islamic paralysis tends towards apathy, but the paralysis of the Western World produces on the contrary convulsions and fits of insane howling...

...Among the main characteristics of "post-Almohadian" thought, Bennabi notes a somewhat Byzantine litteralism which made many Moslem thinkers lose interest in seeking truths because of the fascination that sheer argument now exerted on them: "One no longer listens to one's rival in an argument, but lets a veritable verbal deluge loose upon him...

...Premier Guy Mollet, interview in fours de France, May, 1956 development, one that transcends all the mere opportunism of pan-Arab or pan-Islamic politics...

...He cites, for instance, the war against Israel as a striking example of the typically Moslem "complex of the easy job," and concludes that the Arab nations experienced there a salutary and instructive defeat which should now help them recover from "the divorce between thought and action" and the need to flaunt "a better appearance" rather than "a better state of affairs" which is so typical, he feels, of post-Almohadian Islam...

...This kind of rhetorical jousting which is known in Arabic schools as moudjadala, Bennabi feels, is "all the more harmful because founded on a truly insane love of words...

...One of his basic tenets—he is not a Marxist—is that "the moral sciences, that is to say the social and psychological sciences, are now far more necessary than the sciences of the material world...

...It is evidently more difficult," writes Bennabi in Vocation de l'Islam, recently published in Paris by Editions du Seuil, "to understand or to form the human being who will be typical of a given civilization than to put together an engine or to train a monkey to wear a necktie...

...FROM THE POLITICAL LIFE of Indonesia, Pakistan, Iran, the Arab nations of the Middle East, Egypt and even Turkey, one might quote many examples of "the composite mixture of unsifted anachronisms and unfiltered anticipations" that have characterized the awakening of the sleeping beauty of Islam...

...His followers are those younger sinking into the sloth that charactermen who are no longer content with izes so large a part of the Islamic the solution offered them by Commu-world...

...In his summing up, Bennabi condemns the totalitarian nature both of post-Almohadian Islam, which turned out to be completely "colonizable," and also the traditional colonial imperialism which has survived, after its defeat in Indonesia and Indochina, in French North Africa, in Kenya and in Madagascar...

...For the whole of Algeria, these forces are presently around 12,000 to 15,000 men with arms...

...on the other hand, he accuses it also of a kind of defeatism that, especially in Algeria, discourages any Moslem initiative to solve, with the means that are still available to it, those problems of public health, public education and public welfare that have now become so horribly pressing...

...The result of such a situation is that a very limited class of privileged Moslem stooges, known in Algiers slang as the Benoui-oui or "sons of yes-yes," acquires a French education and becomes associated with the French in exploiting the population...

...Since Jacques Maritain, Karl Barth, Paul Tillich and Martin Buber, we have known, in the West, a number of religious leaders who have at tempted to breathe into the dry bones of Christianity, whether Catholic, Greek Orthodox or Protestant, and of Judaism, some new life and a spark of the idealism that centuries of formalism or of rationalism had suffocated...

...For the Islamic faith, Malek Bennabi's book represents an analogous "These Bands...

...Of such political leaders, Algeria has already had a few in recent years...

...they have practically no Arabic schools of their own or Arabic press, but at the same time so few French schools, especially in the inland mountainous areas, that they are deprived of almost every opportunity to acquire French culture as an alternative to Arab culture...

...Bennabi condemns, above all, postAlmohadian Islam's indifference to so cial justice, which encouraged a fatal istic passivity in the masses that it ex ploited, preparing them to accept col onialism as a lesser evil...

...But there are also relatively organized and well-staffed bands who engage in guerrilla activities or collective terrorism...

...In his historical analysis Bennabi bases many of his arguments on striking passages in the writings of Ibn Khaldoun, an Arab philosopher of the late Middle Ages who seems to have heralded, with his idealistic theory of history interpreted in terms of recurring cycles, much that Vico, Michelet, .Hegel, Croce and Spengler subsequently formulated as an improvement on eighteenthcentury Cartesianism's more simple doctrines of progress...

...But these tensions and conflicts are particularly instructive if one studies them in the light of a theory such as Bennabi's, which takes into account the spiritual heritage of Islam too, instead of concentrating on a few economic and political commonplaces...