The self and the other in Malek Bennabi’s Thought

Malek Bennabi did not present ready-made methods for the Arab and Islamic nation to overcome its crisis, nor did he stand with those who call for transfer without inquiry about the identity of the transferor. However, Bennabi urged in his diverse articles for the necessity of knowing the modern civilization and tried to emphasize the similarity and difference between the religious, political, economic, and cultural history of the East and the West. Consequently, he stepped forward toward rationality of the Arab ego in its relations with the western other. In this research, we try to focus on the most frequent phrases in the modern and contemporary Arab speech, which is ego and the other, and which embody awareness of deep relations between the Islamic and European worlds or the West and the East; and as such require from us to distinguish between the general human components in the composition and history of modern civilization, and that it is represented now in a geographical zone which is named “the west or the east.” Each one of them aims at understanding the other in a way that makes it understand itself and discover oneself through the other. The human community has witnessed a continuous movement of mutual relations between the ego and the other in the past and the present. Such movement does not have a regular rhythm; however, it is nonstop. It keeps moving between giving and taking determined by the situation of the ego and the other in the civilized arena as well as its ability to give. In one era, people may give to take in another era whereas relations between civilizations are, in reality, a mutual dialogic relation taken from needs and capabilities.