Document Type : Research Article / Original Article

Authors

• Fatemeh Nazari ¹
• Majid Zamani Alavijeh ²
• Ahmad Fazeli ³

¹ Phd student of ethics, University of Qom, Qom, Iran.

² Phd student of ethics, University of Qom, Qom, Iran

³ Associate Professor of Ethics Department, University of Qom, Qom, Iran.

Abstract

This article examines the civilizational thought of Malek Bennabi and demonstrates how his critique of the foundational assumptions of Western civilization provides the groundwork for Islamic civilizational renewal. Bennabi argues that Western civilization presupposes a universal truth and regards the civilization it has produced as the ultimate embodiment of that truth. By contrast, he maintains that truth is situated and communitarian: each ummah is endowed with a form of truth corresponding to its collective capacity, and no community may claim exclusive access to absolute truth. According to Bennabi, these communal truths are context-bound and contingent. He identifies a range of factors that condition and delimit truth, emphasizing in particular the dominant spirit of a people and the culture that permeates social life as the primary constituents of civilizational truth. This study adopts a comparative-analytical approach to examine Bennabi’s civilizational ethics and political thought. The research is based on library sources and employs thematic content analysis to extract core conceptual patterns from Bennabi’s writings. The findings indicate that Bennabi’s civilizational framework assigns Muslims the responsibility of constructing a distinctive civilization aligned with their own talents and dispositions. His ethical schema culminates in a form of communitarian deontology, in which moral obligation is conferred upon the moral agent by the ummah. Within this paradigm, war is valorized over peace, insofar as every civilization is required to engage in continuous struggle to preserve its identity. Moreover, Bennabi’s model entails the fusion of religion and politics, rendering ethics subordinate to religion and challenging the normative authority of Western human rights discourse. From this perspective, each ummah is entitled to construct a legal system consistent with its own civilizational ethos.

Keywords

• Contextualism
• Deontological Ethics
• Human Rights
• Islamic Civilization
• Malek Bennabi
• Valorization of War

Main Subjects

• Rereading and interpreting the ideas of leading Muslim thinkers