Malek Bennabi Reading Gandhi: On the Means and Ends of Decolonization

Abstract

Malek Bennabi’s philosophical and political thinking brings into synthesis various Western, Indian and Arabic-Islamic intellectual traditions. My focus in this paper, however, is to map out Bennabi’s connections to the intellectual traditions of the Indian subcontinent, through contextualising and demonstrating the ways in which Gandhi is integrated into Bennabi’s project.  More concretely, I will examine his reading of Gandhi’s anticolonial political thinking with a focus on the means-ends question of decolonization as a political action.  Bennabi’s philosophy of liberation is underpinned by a different form of politics that works against Machiavellianism and the Realpolitik of decolonization as a modern project and historical experience. Similar to that of Gandhi, Bennabi’s politics is means-oriented not only by way of asserting legitimate means as the only way of attaining desirable and legitimate ends reaffirming the ethical in the political but also as a form of attuning to the means available at the colonized’s disposal to achieve “self-rule”, thereby teasing out the efficacy of any decolonizing politics. For Bennabi, this means-oriented politics is at once duty-oriented. The right-duty relationship for him is ontological in which duty is prioritized. What does this serious assertion on the primacy of the means and duty over ends and rights mean for his project of decolonization and for politics in general? In this paper, I argue that Bennabi’s formulation, alongside Gandhi’s, bears overarching consequences on the nature of socio-political and economic configurations of the political body, especially that of the nascent post-colonial state under construction. Through reframing and re-orienting the ends and rights as corollaries of means and duties, Bennabi asserts that means, and duties shape and configure the ends and rights. Thus, a more credible tangent, means and duties must be given the primacy of any political or social concerted action, whether on a local or global level. This project runs against the modern concept of politics that underpinned by the language of right.