Texts on the ideological struggle

To better understand the invisible war

By Malek Bennabi, Preface by Sadek Sellam, Héritage Éditions

Access to the archives allowed the publication of the reports devoted by the colonial police to Malek Bennabi . Their content confirms the validity of his theses on "The ideological struggle".

When he arrived in Cairo in 1956, he was intrigued by the persistent rumours, malicious disinformation and calculated confusions surrounding him. True to his habit of linking "event and history", he related these persistent companions to what he knew about the Machiavellian methods that colonialism used against all that threatened it, such as the manipulations that the failure of the Algerian Muslim Congress of 1936. Bennabi devoted an entire book to the methods by which colonialism sought to exert influence from a distance, for lack of being able to continue to accumulate all the powers in the countries in the process of decolonization. In "Vocation de l'Islam", he had voluntarily refused to dwell on "foreign intrigues. He preferred to concentrate on the study of the "internal dynamism" of the Muslim world. But he ended up devoting a volume to them when these "intrigues", by becoming repetitive, risked undermining this "internal dynamism ", favoring the deculturation of a part of the intellectual and political elites little interested in total decolonization . had tried to react to the campaigns intended to slow down the diffusion of his ideas informs about the disturbed situations lived by the author.These dated texts explain the genesis of his ideas concerning this "invisible war" which still takes new forms.

About the Author: Malek Bennabi

Malek Bennabi (1905-1973) studied the problems of civilization in general and those of the Muslim world for a long time. Strongly imbued with Arab-Muslim and Western culture, we owe him the concept of "colonizability", a concept characterizing societies in decline. He has to his credit more than twenty books dealing with civilization, culture, ideology in general and problems related to the stagnation of Muslim society in particular. Through his writings, Malek Bennabi wanted to awaken Muslim consciences and relaunch a renaissance of Muslim society.