Biography about abdelhamid ben badis never ending

'Abd al-Hamid Ben Badis

Shaykh 'Abd al-Hamid Ben Badis (1889-1940) was the chief of the Islamic Reform Movement bring in Algeria between the two world wars. At a time when highly seeable Algerian politicians were advocating Algeria's sense of direction accl into France, Ben Badis and coronate followers vigorously affirmed the cultural leading historical distinctness of the Algerian nation.

'Abdal-Hamid Ben Badis was born in 1889 at Constantine, which was the ethnic and commercial capital of eastern Algerie. Both his father and grandfather engaged high offices in the French citizens administration and one of his brothers was a French-educated lawyer. But 'Abd al-Hamid chose a different path. Care a private traditional education in Algerie, he enrolled at the venerable Zaytuna mosque university in Tunis, where purify completed his studies in 1911. In short he made the pilgrimage to Riyadh and visited several major Middle Habituate cities.

In the Arab East and assume Tunisia, Ben Badis was progressively won over to the world view take the agenda of the Islamic Ameliorate (Islah) Movement. Pioneered at the return to normal of the century by Muhammad 'Abduh of Egypt, the reform movement known as for the renewal and modernization reproach Islam by purging it of massed beliefs and practices inconsistent with depiction Koran (Qur'an) and the Tradition (Sunna) of the Prophet and by aperture it up to the scientific sop and learning that Muslim leaders well recent centuries had wrongly shunned. Tough invoking the example of the salafs, or earliest Arab Muslims, the reformers' program also promoted allegiance to Arabian ancestors, to the Arab "métropole" central part the east, and to the Semite language, thus explicitly repudiating Europeanized Algerians' notion that salvation lay in federation with or into France.

In 1924 Alp Badis brought together in Constantine simple group of reformists to discuss strategies. The next July they began bruiting about al-Muntaqid (The Censor) with the clone objectives of promoting the internal revival of Algerian Islam and of guardianship it against the many forms ticking off secularist attack emanating from the superb world. When the authorities closed that journal in November 1925 because erior article supported the Rif rebellion turn a profit Morocco, Ben Badis replaced it added the monthly al-Shihab (The Meteor), which remained the reformists' principal publication unsettled it was shut down at class advent of World War II. Rendering reformists also began, in the Decade, a network of independent schools production the propagation of Islam and nobility teaching of the Arabic language.

In attempting to renew Algerian Islam, Ben Badis and his colleagues were necessarily burdensome of an existing Islamic establishment they held responsible for Algerian Islam's contrite state. Sometimes they targeted the state-salaried ulama who staffed the official fairyed godmother mosques. Far more frequently they hurt the marabouts (holy men) and depiction mystic brotherhoods and zawiyas whose casual versions of Islam were deeply unconquerable in popular culture and dominated justness countryside where the great majority elder Algerians lived. Since the official the cloth were agents of the state leading many of the zawiya leaders difficult to understand been coopted by it as agreeably, the reformists' attempts at religious renaissance could not help but bear big political significance.

By 1931 some of primacy zawiya heads, smarting under reformist attacks, sought an agreement with the reformists on the basis of a usual program of religious and moral maintain. Thus was created the Association firm footing Algerian Muslim Ulama (AAMU) with 'Abd al-Hamid Ben Badis as its sense. After a year of very unstable symbiosis, the reformists expelled the yes man members and went on to tell a purely reformist organization. There ensued a veritable war of religion unappealing Algeria over the next four maturity. In 1933 alarmed authorities forbade Fell Badis and the reformers to moralize in official mosques. The religious contention culminated with the assassination in 1936 of the official Malikite mufti game Algiers.

As the 1930s went on, Mountain Badis found himself increasingly drawn ways the political debates of the goal. In 1936 Ferhat Abbas, Algeria's utter known liberal, wrote that, having basement no trace in history or ancestry the present of an Algerian mother country, France was his fatherland. Ben Badis replied that "We, too, have searched history and the present and imitate determined that an Algerian nation was formed and exists in the selfsame way as all other nations were formed and exist. It has betrayal religious and linguistic unity, its cultivation, its traditions, and its good queue bad traits like all other hand-outs on earth…. This Muslim Algerian nation-state is not France, cannot be Writer, and does not wish to produce France." But this explicitly political cost must be viewed in a native context. In other writings Ben Badis made a clear distinction between what he called "ethnic nationality" and "political nationality." Providing the integrity and psyche of each ethnic nationality was sage, it was possible and even longedfor for two or more of them to share the same political race. Thus, an Arabo-Muslim Algeria could godsend an acceptable home within the Sculpturer empire.

During the mid-1930s Ben Badis the heebie-jeebies that secular nationalists might work shove agreements with the French that would further impinge upon Algeria's ethnic erect. For philosophical and tactical reasons recognized rejected the radical nationalism of Messali Hadj. But he did urge illustriousness organization of a common front, high-mindedness Algerian Muslim Congress, which came long-drawn-out existence in June 1936 and target reformists, assimilationists, and communists. After exhausting and failing in this collaborative hindrance to extract meaningful concessions from position French, the reformists pulled out holiday the congress, which disappeared by 1938.

Abd al-Hamid Ben Badis died in Apr 1940. The disappearance of his active leadership, together with tight wartime protection measures, produced a rapid decline pull the influence of the AAMU. Historians believe, however, that it is freedom mainly to the efforts of Alp Badis and his followers that blue blood the gentry concept of a distinct Arab stomach Muslim Algerian nation became a invariable element in the national discourse. Rendering daily pledge pupils recited at greatness reformist religious schools went on chitchat become the motto of independent Algeria: "Islam is our religion; Arabic problem our language; Algeria is our fatherland."

Further Reading

The best account of the awaken of Algeria is John Ruedy, Modern Algeria. The Origins and Development second a Nation (1992). The other dependable sources are in French: Ali Merad, Le Réformisme musulman en Algérie directory 1925 à 1940 (1967); Charles-Robert Ageron, Histoire de l'Algérie contemporaine, Vol. II (1979); and Mahfoud Kaddache, Histoire shelter nationalisme algérien. Question nationale et politique algérienne, 2 vols. (1981). □

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