In Part I, we introduced Malek Bennabi — the man, the oeuvre, and the five conceptual weapons that constitute his analytical grammar: colonisability, the civilisational triad, mondialisme, the ideological struggle, and the pipeline of betrayal. We now deploy those weapons against the burning dossiers of our era. Six theatres. One diagnosis. The same text, written fifty years ago.
IV. The Axis of Armed Colonisability: Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen
Afghanistan: Two Trillion Dollars for Nothing
Bennabi had stated it in 1960: a military power can win every battle and lose the civilisational war if it ignores the internal dimension of resistance.[1] The United States spent $2.3 trillion in Afghanistan between 2001 and 2021.[2] Result: the Taliban recovered power intact following the most humiliating withdrawal in American military history. This is not primarily a military failure. It is a civilisational collapse — the empirical proof that brute force cannot substitute for ideas.
American mondialisme in Afghanistan was an attempt to transplant an exogenous political model into a society whose internal logics had never been understood. This is what Robert Nicholson wrote in his 2021 post-mortem:[3] the West failed because it was “driven by a noble desire to see humans as equal and interchangeable beings for whom faith and culture are ‘accidents of birth’ — but these accidents are non-negotiable truths for hundreds of millions of people who would rather die than abandon them.” Bennabi had said this in different words sixty years earlier.
His 1956 formulation in L’Afro-asiatisme remains the most exact description of the structural aporia of every exogenous military intervention:[4] “The crisis in which the world still struggles stems from the fact that, outside the road that leads to a dead end, no other road seems to exist but one leading to yet another.” From Kabul to Baghdad, from Tripoli to Sana’a, that aporia has not moved.
The key distinction Bennabi makes[5] is between globalisation as an economic process — the circulation of goods, capital and persons, which he regards as potentially positive — and mondialisme as a political project of normative domination: the requisition of universal language (democracy, human rights, rule of law) to serve particular imperial interests. One can export institutions; one cannot export idées-forces. That is why none of the countries “liberated” by force between 2001 and 2023 produced a durable democracy.
Bennabi had also perceived, from the late 1950s, the internal fragility of the Soviet bloc.[6] In 1972 — at the moment when the USSR appeared at the zenith of its power — he announced its inevitable decline, comparing it to the collapse of the Qarmatians who had menaced the Abbasid state before disintegrating. The fall of the Berlin Wall (1989) and the dissolution of the USSR (1991) gave him, eighteen years after his death, a dazzling posthumous confirmation. The structural logic was the same: a system that exhausts its idée-force without renewing it does not collapse from external pressure. It collapses from interior void.
In 1972, a year before his death, Bennabi formulated the following:[7]
“We see opening in our epoch considerable events. These reasons push us to liken this last third of the twentieth century to a river nearing its mouth into the sea, swollen by the convergence of all its tributaries descending from the high mountains of the hinterland — a period of history in which all the tributaries converge, with everything this implies in psychological, social, political and scientific consequences.” Malek Bennabi, Algiers conference, 1972
That river is where we now stand. Afghanistan is one of its most turbulent tributaries. And its waters, as Bennabi foresaw, do not flow back.
Iraq: The Inverted Triad
The 2003 invasion of Iraq is, for a reader of Bennabi, the textbook case of mondialisme operating at maximum destructive capacity.[8] Under the double cover of “human rights” and “democratisation” — the two universals of Bennabi’s mondialisme — a Western coalition dismantled a state, looted its museums, eliminated its intellectual class, dissolved its army, and deliberately sowed a sectarian civil war whose embers still burn today.
The destruction of Baghdad in 2003 echoes, across eight centuries of long duration, the destruction of Baghdad by the Mongols in 1258 that Bennabi cites as the founding trauma of what he calls the post-Almohad decline[9]: the moment when Islamic civilisation lost the idée-force that had sustained it and entered a structural condition of colonisability. History does not repeat. It stutters. And Baghdad stuttered again.
What Bennabi would have identified with surgical precision[10] is that the real destruction of Iraq lay not in its buildings but in the deliberate annihilation of its ideological capital: the systematic targeting of universities, hospitals and cultural institutions; the forced exile of 40 percent of its professional class; the dismantling of all state infrastructure. This is the inverted triad: no man capable of action, no soil that belongs to its inhabitants, no time — because a society without institutions cannot inscribe itself in duration. The deliberate eradication of the conditions for any future renaissance.
Lebanon: Organised Paralysis as a Mode of Government
Lebanon is, for a Bennabi reader, the most perfect laboratory of what he calls structural colonisability — not because it lacks talent or intelligence, but because its political architecture, the institutional confessionalism inherited from the French Mandate, has organised paralysis as a mode of government. The state cannot decide; the society cannot cohere; each crisis is absorbed by the same system that produced it.
The September 2024 pager and walkie-talkie attacks that killed 32 people and wounded more than 3,250[11] illustrate with clinical precision what Bennabi called the invisible war: the war that is never formally declared but methodically deconstructs a people’s capacity to defend and to reproduce itself. The physical infrastructure of an entire movement was targeted not with bombs but with the infiltration of everyday objects — the war of ideas has become the war of things.
From 1982 to 2024, Israel bombed Lebanon on at least eighteen distinct occasions. The Arab world’s response each time: verbal condemnations flowing through the pipeline of betrayal before being absorbed into diplomatic silence. Between October 2023 and November 2024 alone: 3,445 Lebanese dead, 400,000 displaced. Bennabi would not have been surprised. He would have asked the same question he asked in 1962: where are the ideas that should have made the Arab world an actor rather than a spectator of its own catastrophe?
But he would also have noted the other side of the Bennabi paradox: that it is precisely from this devastated Lebanon that emerged, in the last decades of the twentieth century, one of the most formidable idées-forces the Arab world has produced since independence. A colonisable society and a society of resistance are not mutually exclusive; they are the two faces of the same unresolved equation.
Yemen: The Paradox of the Humiliated Resisting
Yemen is the most implacably Bennabi-like case of the early twenty-first century. A country of 33 million inhabitants, one of the poorest in the region, devastated since 2015 by a proxy war in which regional and global powers test their weapons on civilian bodies:[12] between 150,000 and 377,000 dead according to ACLED, 4.5 million displaced, an infrastructure reduced to ruins.
And yet: it is from this very devastated population that the Houthis launched, between October 2023 and April 2024, more than 160 drones and missiles toward Israel and toward the warships of the most powerful navy in the world. This is not a military paradox. It is a Bennabi paradox: where there is an idée-force — however contested, however instrumentalised — a people without an army can resist a navy.[13]
Bennabi had conceptualised this as the reification of man: the colonial system transforms populations into objects of foreign policy, into bodies counted in statistics, into collateral damage. The resistance of the reified is always underestimated by those who produce the statistics. Yemen demonstrated that a colonisable people in the material sense — without an economy, without a modern state, without sophisticated weapons — can generate a non-colonisable resistance if it possesses a conviction.[14]
The question Bennabi would put to Yemen is the same he put to Algeria in 1962: will this resistance remain purely reactive, exhausting itself in survival — or will it produce, in the crucible of the ordeal, the ideas of a renaissance? The distinction between surviving and civilising is the whole of Bennabi’s programme.
V. Iran: The Millennial Civilisation Against the Hegemonic Order
➜ 28 February 2026: Operation Roaring Lion / Epic Fury. Bombs fall on Tehran. Bennabi would turn the page — he had already written it.
Iran is, in Bennabi’s civilisational topography, a case of remarkable complexity. It is a civilisation of more than five thousand years, bearer of a ʿasabiyya — in the Khaldunian sense that Bennabi makes his own — of exceptional robustness: a capacity for collective cohesion under pressure that has survived the Arab conquest, the Mongol invasion, the Ottoman pressure, and decades of Western sanctions without dissolving.
The 1979 revolution was, whatever one thinks of its political content, one of the rare revolutions of the twentieth century borne by an indigenous idée-force: not imported from Moscow, not borrowed from Washington, not a copy of a foreign model — but constructed from the civilisation’s own intellectual and spiritual resources. This, in Bennabi’s grammar, is the definition of a civilisational resistance as opposed to a mere defensive reaction. Defensive reactions exhaust themselves. Civilisational resistances transform the ordeal into capital.[15]
What American mondialisme cannot tolerate in Iran[16] is not the nuclear programme as such — Israel has possessed nuclear weapons for six decades without equivalent pressure — but the ideological autonomy the programme symbolises. A state that refuses imposed schemas, constructs its own doctrine of defence, and declines integration into the Western normative system represents an existential challenge to the hegemonic order regardless of its domestic policies. It demonstrates that the order is not universal. It is particular.
The 2026 war against Iran[17] — whatever its military outcome — confirms the Bennabi analysis: mondialisme does not negotiate with civilisations that possess an idea of themselves. It attacks them. The civilisations that survive the attack do so by the force of their internal resources — spiritual, cultural, intellectual, scientific — before doing so through their missiles.
The question Bennabi would put to Iran is the one he put to Algeria after independence: is this resistance colonisable or civilisational? A colonisable resistance mobilises purely defensive forces and exhausts itself in survival without producing the ideas of a renaissance. A civilisational resistance forges, in the ordeal, the conditions of its own renewal by activating its productive forces — intellectual, moral, scientific, educational. Only the second endures beyond the generation that bore it.
Iran’s answer to that question remains open. But its very capacity to survive a war that no Arab state has dared to confront directly suggests that the ʿasabiyya is there. Whether it will be transformed into civilisational programme — into science, into institutions, into ideas exportable beyond the borders of ideology — is the question of the century.
VI. The West and the Declining Hegemon: Bennabi’s Premature Autopsy
Bennabi is not anti-Western. The distinction is not semantic: it is constitutive of his entire project. He is anti-mondialisme — anti-the-particular-disguised-as-the-universal. He admires Descartes; he recognises the debt of medieval Islamic civilisation to Western science and rationality; he advocates, from the 1930s onward, an Islamic-Christian dialogue in the tradition of Emir Abdelkader. His intellectual formation is European as much as it is Arab-Islamic. He is, in this, the anti-thesis of identitarian withdrawal.
But he sees in the West, after the two world wars, a civilisation that has exhausted its spiritual motivations without having produced new ones.[18] The Sartrean existentialism he comments with precision is not a philosophy of renaissance: it is a philosophy of after-catastrophe — of after-Auschwitz, of after-Hiroshima, of the collapse of the idea of progress. A civilisation that can no longer project itself into the future with a sense of purpose has, in Bennabi’s clinical vocabulary, entered a crisis of motivation.
This is what Fukuyama diagnosed in his own way — without having read Bennabi — when he conceded in 2022 that liberal democracy was not self-evidently triumphant.[19] This is what Trumpism reveals structurally: not a new empire on the march, but a hegemony defending itself by destroying the multilateral rules it had itself established. The desperate sign that an order no longer has the confidence to maintain itself through persuasion.
The multiplication of proxy wars simultaneously unresolvable, the inability to close any of the conflicts ignited over twenty-five years — Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Ukraine, Gaza, Iran — the de-dollarisation process, the expansion of BRICS,[20] the fracturing of the “rules-based order”: all of this confirms what Bennabi wrote in 1956 in L’Afro-asiatisme on the inevitability of Western hegemonic retreat and the emergence of a multipolar world.[21]
His 1956 formula on the Islamic-Western relationship retains all its force:
“Islam will borrow technique from the West once it has accomplished its cultural revolution. But Islam — by virtue of necessary complementarity — will make the West discover the spiritual dimension of the problems of man. It will make it understand that for a spiritual problem, an exclusively socio-economic solution is ineffective.” Malek Bennabi, L’Afro-asiatisme, Cairo, 1956
This is not a prophecy of victory. It is a programme of reciprocity. Bennabi’s West is not an enemy to be defeated but a partner to be brought to its senses — as Islam, in the mirror, must bring itself to its own. Two civilisations in a crisis of motivation; one diagnosis; one prescription: the recovery of idées-forces that transcend the management of things.
VII. The Gulf: Luxury Colonisability
Bennabi had formulated the pathology of the rentier society with troubling clarity, decades before the oil monarchies had taken their current form.[22] In his civilisational triad, the Gulf states embody the maximum disequilibrium: a plethora of things (oil resources, sovereign capital, pharaonic infrastructure), an abundance of persons (demography, and the systematic importation of foreign talent), and a poverty of ideas — the structural absence of critical thought, an independent press, an autonomous university, an endogenous cultural production.
This is not a moral judgment. It is a clinical one. The Gulf is living demonstration that wealth without ideas does not produce civilisation: it produces Dubais — architectural performances erected by migrant workers under conditions documented by every human rights organisation on earth, giant commercial cathedrals in intellectual deserts, air-conditioned kingdoms that purchase the world’s arts, sciences, sports and minds precisely because they cannot generate them in sufficient number from within. Bennabi would call this luxury colonisability: cultural and intellectual dependence dressed in the garments of material sovereignty.
When dynastic interest enters the equation, the pipeline of betrayal functions at maximum capacity.[23] The Abraham Accords, the sustained normalisation with a state bombing Gaza, the $400 billion in American armaments purchased in a decade: the Arab soil is there, the Arab man is there, the time is there. The idée-force that would transform this raw accumulation into a civilisation is absent. And in the absence of that idea, others will supply it — as they always have, in every cycle of Bennabi’s civilisational history.
Here Bennabi’s analysis intersects with Ibn Khaldun’s: the ʿasabiyya of the Gulf states has been dissolved by prosperity. The Bedouin solidarity that built the Arabian kingdoms has been replaced by a dependent comfort that outsources every essential function — defence, construction, finance, medicine, education — to foreign operators. This is the Khaldunian cycle in its modern form: the luxury that dissolves the cohesion that made the conquest possible.
CONTINUING IN PART III
The six theatres examined in this instalment — Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen, Iran, the Gulf, and the West — were each, for Bennabi, case files in a larger indictment. But one dossier he treated differently. He returned to it obsessively across five decades. He called it the most consequential question in the modern history of Islam — and, by extension, in the modern history of the world.
Part III:
Palestine: The Original Wound and the Accomplished Prophecy
Chapters VIII (Palestine through the Bennabi Lens) · IX (Absolute Originality: What No One Else Said) · Epilogue
[1]Malek Bennabi, Perspectives algériennes (Algiers: ENAG, 1964; repr. 2004), pp. 140–150. Bennabi analyses how military victory without prior ideological preparation produces a social void that the coloniser reoccupies in new forms after formal independence.
[2]Costs of War Project, Brown University, ‘United States Budgetary Costs and Obligations of Post-9/11 Wars Through FY2022′, September 2021. The figure of $2.313 trillion covers direct war spending in Afghanistan only; broader estimates including veterans’ care reach $6 trillion.
[3]Robert Nicholson, ‘The Unconquerable Islamic World’, The Wall Street Journal, 19 August 2021.
[4]Malek Bennabi, L’Afro-asiatisme (Cairo: Maél, 1956; repr. Algiers: Dar El Bay’a, 2006), p. 11. The preface is dated 6 November 1956 — four days into the Suez Crisis, which Bennabi explicitly connects to the structural aporia he is describing.
[5]Bennabi, Le problème des idées dans le monde musulman (Algiers: El-Bay’a, 1970), pp. 55–62. On the distinction between mondialisme and universalism as political programme vs. philosophical ideal, see also: Mondialisme (Algiers: Dar El Hadhara, 2004), pp. 17–30.
[6]On the USSR’s internal fragility as perceived by Bennabi from the late 1950s: Malek Bennabi, Naissance d’une société (Cairo, 1962; repr. Algiers: Dar El Bay’a, 2006), pp. 210–220. Bennabi’s comparison with the Qarmatian collapse appears in Vocation de l’Islam (1954; repr. 2006), p. 121.
[7]Malek Bennabi, cited in Rachid Ghannouchi, ‘Bennabi et la question de la renaissance’ (lecture, Institut Superieur de Théologie, Tunis, 1985; repr. in Bennabi Studies, n° 3, Algiers, 2001, pp. 44–45). The passage on the ‘tributaries of history converging’ is from a 1972 conference in Algiers.
[8]Seymour Hersh, Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib (New York: HarperCollins, 2004); Robert Fisk, The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East (London: Fourth Estate, 2005). Iraqi civilian deaths 2003–2011: Iraq Body Count database, annual report 2011 (100,000–200,000 range).
[9]Bennabi, Les conditions de la renaissance, op. cit., pp. 120–130. The concept of ‘post-Almohad man’ designates the individual formed in civilisational decline after 1269 (fall of the Almohad dynasty): incapable of initiative, structurally reliant on external frameworks. Bennabi traces the pathology through eight centuries.
[10]On the deliberate destruction of Iraq’s institutional and intellectual infrastructure after 2003: Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007), chaps. 16–17; Ali Allawi, The Occupation of Iraq: Winning the War, Losing the Peace (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), pp. 189–215.
[11]Robert Fisk, Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War (London: André Deutsch, 1990). On the September 2024 pager and walkie-talkie attacks: UN Human Rights Office, preliminary assessment, October 2024. Lebanese casualties October 2023–November 2024: Human Rights Watch, World Report 2025; OCHA Lebanon Situation Report, December 2024.
[12]United Nations Human Rights Council, Report on Yemen, A/HRC/42/CRP.1, September 2019. ACLED estimates: 150,000–377,000 deaths attributable to the conflict 2015–2022. UNHCR: 4.5 million internally displaced. On Houthi drone and missile operations toward Israel and US naval assets: ACLED Yemen Conflict Monitor, April 2024.
[13]Malek Bennabi, La lutte idéologique dans les pays colonisés (Cairo, 1962; repr. Algiers: El-Bay’a, 2006), pp. 72–85. On the concept of ‘reification of man’ as a tool of colonial and neo-colonial domination, see also: Colonisabilité (Algiers: ANEP, posthumous, 2000), pp. 33–40.
[14]Bennabi, Les conditions de la renaissance, op. cit., p. 88. The formula ‘post-Almohad man with an idée-force’ — that is, the exceptional individual who breaks with collective paralysis through conviction — appears in Bennabi’s discussion of reformist figures such as Sheikh Ben Badis.
[15]On Iranian civilisational depth and its geopolitical implications: Ali M. Ansari, Confronting Iran: The Failure of American Foreign Policy and the Next Great Conflict in the Middle East (New York: Basic Books, 2006); Vali Nasr, The Shia Revival: How Conflicts within Islam Will Shape the Future (New York: Norton, 2006).
[16]On the Iran–USA–Israel war initiated 28 February 2026 (Operation Roaring Lion / Epic Fury): CENTCOM official communications; Jane’s Defence Weekly, March–April 2026; Middle East Eye live coverage, February–May 2026.
[17]On the military and strategic dimensions of the Iran–USA–Israel war (Operation Roaring Lion / Epic Fury, initiated 28 February 2026): CENTCOM official communications, February–April 2026; Jane’s Defence Weekly, March–April 2026; Middle East Eye live coverage, February–May 2026. For the broader civilisational framing, see fn 30 above.
[18]Bennabi, Vocation de l’Islam (Algiers: ENAG, 1954; repr. 2006), p. 97. Bennabi specifies that the West’s ‘crisis of motivation’ is not a crisis of resources or technique, but a ‘crisis of the idea of man’ — the loss of a civilisational project that transcends material accumulation.
[19]Francis Fukuyama, ‘More Proof That This Really Is the End of History’, The Atlantic, 17 October 2022. BRICS Johannesburg Summit Declaration, 23 August 2023 (expansion to six new members). On de-dollarisation: Zoltan Pozsar, ‘War and Interest Rates’, Credit Suisse, 7 September 2022.
[20]BRICS Johannesburg Summit Declaration, 23 August 2023 (expansion to Saudi Arabia, Iran, Ethiopia, Egypt, UAE and Argentina). On de-dollarisation dynamics: Zoltan Pozsar, ‘War and Interest Rates’, Credit Suisse, 7 September 2022; also IMF World Economic Outlook, April 2024, on the gradual erosion of dollar dominance in bilateral trade settlements.
[21]Bennabi, L’Afro-asiatisme, op. cit., pp. 34–40. Bennabi drafted this book a year before the Bandung Conference (April 1955), which he regarded as a partial confirmation of his thesis on the emergence of a ‘neutralist front’ — a Third World bloc capable of resisting both American mondialisme and Soviet imperialism.
[22]Malek Bennabi, Le problème de la culture (Algiers: ENAG, 1959; repr. 2006), pp. 103–115. On Gulf states’ spending on foreign cultural imports vs. endogenous production: UNESCO Institute for Statistics, Cultural Times: The First Global Map of Cultural and Creative Industries, 2015.
[23]On the Abraham Accords (15 September 2020) and their civilisational implications: Dalia Dassa Kaye & Shira Efron, ‘Israel’s Dangerous New Bet’, Foreign Affairs, November/December 2021. On Gulf arms purchases: Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), Arms Transfers Database, 2024.
