Wijhat al-Alam al-Islami
- Author died
- 1393 AH
- Editions
- Dar Al Fikr Al Mouaser
Wijhat al-Alam al-Islami (The Vocation of Islam) is a work of civilizational analysis by the Algerian thinker Malik Bennabi (1323–1393 AH / 1905–1973 CE), examining the historical decline, colonizability, and modern trajectory of the Muslim world .
Composition and Publication
Bennabi composed the book in French under the title Vocation de l'Islam, completing its manuscript in 1950, with an introduction penned in June 1954 ahead of its publication in Paris that same year . It was published as part of his series Mushkilat al-Hadarah ("Problems of Civilization") . A second French edition appeared in 1970, for which Bennabi added a new preface noting that the Muslim world had failed to make substantial structural progress since the early 1950s .
The work was translated into Arabic by Abd al-Sabur Shahin and published in Cairo by Maktabat Dar al-Urubah in 1959 . Subsequent Arabic editions were released by Dar al-Fikr under the editorial supervision of Nadwat Malik Bennabi, an initiative established under the direction of Omar Meskawi pursuant to Bennabi's legal testament regarding his intellectual estate .
Themes and Methodology
The work provides an internal sociological and historical diagnosis of the Muslim world's stagnation rather than attributing its condition solely to external political plots . Bennabi traces the roots of decline back to the post-Almohad era (asr ma bad al-Muwahhidin), arguing that the intellectual paralysis of that era created an internal state of "colonizability" (al-qabiliyya lil-isti‘mar), which preceded and enabled Western imperialist expansion into Muslim lands .
Bennabi argues that genuine reform requires eradicating internal colonizability through spiritual and psychological revitalization rather than superficial imitation of Western material products . The book also engages critically with Western orientalism; while acknowledging observations made by the British orientalist H.A.R. Gibb in Modern Trends in Islam, Bennabi refutes Gibb's thesis that atomism is an innate characteristic of the Arab mind, presenting it instead as a universal human phenomenon, and critiques the uncritical adoption of Western concepts of humanism in Arab modernization movements .
Related Works and Second Part
Bennabi drafted a prospective second part intended to examine the external and global dimensions of the modern era, focusing on the historical role of Jewish intellectual and economic influence in Western civilization and the geopolitical fallout following the 1948 Palestine catastrophe . This complementary study was withheld from general circulation during his lifetime and was later translated from French and published by Dar al-Fikr as Wijhat al-Alam al-Islami: al-Mas'ala al-Yahudiyya .
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