Birth of a Society

This is a reading of the book “Birth of a Society” by Professor Malek Bennabi, one of the greatest and most famous pioneers of Renaissance thought in the modern era. This small book is a revealing mirror of all his ideas in the rest of his books, so it should not be read in isolation from them, and this is what I tried to do; as I recalled in the margin of the reading illuminations from his book “Conditions of Renaissance”, especially with regard to the impact of the religious idea. In this reading, I relied on analyzing the author’s text and restructuring it by placing subheadings that further illuminate the idea and spark its contemplation, which helped me monitor the book’s tools on which its construction was based, including terms such as: society, spirit, civilization, and culture.

The aim was first to present the ideas of the book, then to identify its tools on which its analytical structure was based, as well as to identify a historical philosophical theory hidden in the metaphysics of this text. After verifying this requirement, I hinted at its originality or lack thereof, and concluded that Malek Bennabi was establishing his own historical philosophy, but at the same time he did not stray far in the origin of his idea from Ibn Khaldun and others, as I indicated during the reading.

This reading aims to explore the main features of his reform project, which is originally concerned with addressing the problem of backwardness. This goal emerged from his larger project on the civilizational renaissance, its cycle and its problem, which was represented in his interest in the tools of the science of the philosophy of history and its pioneers as tools for reading the current scene in the theater of Arab history, especially the Algerian case.