A Metatheoretical Study of Malek Bennabi's Approach to Civilization

This study investigates Malek Bennabi's approach to civilization and aims at analyzing the various factors contributed to the formulation and development of Bennabi's approach by using metatheorizing methodology (Mu) through its four dimensions. It goes beyond available literature on Bennabi, to not only present his approach, but to understand its underlying structure. The researcher, by using (Mu), realized that civilization is a multi-aspects concept and it had been dominated by the paradigms of philosophy of history and social sciences, on the one hand. On the other hand, it is found that Bennabi's interdisciplinary approach to civilization in its two parts; the major concepts and the interpretation of the movement of civilization, is a result of the internal-external and the social–intellectual factors which formed the context of his approach. The internal-social factors as his background (family, religion and education) and his intellectual pursuits (activities and intellectual connections), on one hand, and the external-social factors as the colonization and decolonization processes on the other hand, formed the social structure of Bennabi's approach.Moreover, the internal-intellectual factors as the dominant paradigms and schools within civilization studies, on the one hand, and the external-intellectual factors as the impacts of the Qur'an and Sunna, the reformist thought in the Muslim world, psychology, philosophy and the modernity discourse, the natural sciences and mathematics, on the other hand formed the intellectual or the cognitive structure of his approach. The researcher found that by applying (Mu) in this study, he could go beyond mere presenting Bennabi's approach, and could gain an in-depth understanding of Bennabi's interdisciplinary approach to civilization and its underlying structure. In addition, (Mu) offered a methodological tools to understanding Bennabi's approach to civilization, and could provide a potential methodology to study the formulation and development of ideas, approaches and theories, because of (Mu)'s comprehensiveness in integrating the tools of philosophy of science, history of ideas and sociology of knowledge in one methodology which is metatheorizing.

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