Part 4: Toward Renaissance14
Chapter 14: From Contention to Integration: Building a Renaissance
In the middle of the twentieth century Malek Bennabi saw the Muslim world living under two occupations: a visible one of soldiers and borders, and a more dangerous invisible one that leads the occupied to adopt their own dependency and justify it in the name of progress. From his struggle on these two fronts the final part of the book begins, with its central question: can contention turn into integration? The chapter sets out the conditions for that turn, looks for historical moments when it actually happened, and sketches a project of renaissance that manages difference: from resistance to initiative, from conflict to production, from treating history as a temple to treating it as a school, and from separating values and competence to joining them.
The book is being prepared for publication, in Arabic. These pages offer glimpses of it, not its text.