"Malek Bennabi’s Theory of Culture: A Reading in the Dialectical Relationship Between the System of Ideas and the Conditions of Renaissance"

"Malek Bennabi’s contribution to the construction of concepts, conceptions, and analytical tools reveals a process in dealing with culture that is very much needed in the kind of education concerned with shaping “a society’s common style from its savants to its peasants.” The present study aims at delineating the milestones of that process by uncovering the determinant elements of Bennabi’s theory of culture in accordance with the following considerations: in terms of his choices to define the concept of culture, in terms of his determining the sociological and pragmatic functions of culture, and in terms of his discussion of the issues that made culture on top of the problems of civilization in the Muslim world. The researcher will draw mainly on an analysis of Malik Bennabi’s following two books; ‘The Problem of Culture’ and ‘The Conditions of Civilization’, without losing sight of his other works and what has been written on him. It is expected that the present study will lead to testing the possibility of adopting Bennabi’s paradigm of the cultural question in dealing with concrete educational practices in the teaching of university common cultural courses."