Wir freuen uns, Sie auf mehrere neue Artikel von Dr. Mahmoud Al-Zayed (eh. Drittmittel-Mitarbeiter und z.Zt. Gastwissenschaftler am Institut für Islamwissenschaft) hinzuweisen:

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Decolonization as Transformation

Mahmoud Al-Zayed; Malek Bennabi’s Philosophy of Liberation, from Part I - Activists, Intellectuals, and Movements, Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 September 2025

Abstract

This chapter engages with the philosophy of liberation of the Algerian philosopher and anticolonial thinker Malek Bennabi (1905–1973). It argues that Bennabi’s decolonization theory aims at transforming the structural conditions of the colonized that made colonization even possible. The chapter lays out some of the significant aspects of Bennabi’s theory, focusing on how Bennabi conceived the problem of colonialism/colonizability and what answers he attempted to offer to overcome it. The chapter also examines Bennabi’s theory of society and its elementary aspects before explicating Bennabi’s politics of liberation that aims at transforming (and perfecting) both the means of transformation and the humans as its agents. Bennabi’s philosophy of liberation is not predicated on changing the political system or institutions but on the transformation of their sociopsychological infrastructures in which the behaviors of the individuals can be molded, making their social actions engender a different kind of politics.

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Introduction: Concepts of the Human from the Global South

Mahmoud Al-Zayed Philosophy and Global Affairs 5 (2):313-332 (2025)   Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

This introduction frames the papers in this symposium on concepts of the human from the Global South. While doing so, it offers some thoughts on the ends and significance of theorizing the human, both politically and epistemologically. The papers are introduced by means of two concepts: Man-normality, which names the colonial imposition of Euro-American white norms on other humans, and pluri-humanity (akin to pluri-universality), which names a condition and a common plural ground for liberatory politics. Building on anti-colonial and decolonial philosophers from the Global South, these articles interrogate the philosophical and methodological problems of Eurocentric humanism and offer an alternative praxis of being human. This requires questioning the Euro-modern concept of the human that, in view of its latent presence in literary, cultural, and philosophical productions, can be described as an epistemic racism that saturates global cultural and academic production.

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Anticolonialism and the Secularity/Coloniality of Being

Mahmoud Al-Zayed

Abstract

This article interrogates the secularity/coloniality of Being in the context of the colonization of Algeria, taking the works of the Algerian Muslim philosopher Malek Bennabi as a point of departure for theorizing the colonial processes of dehumanization. I engage Bennabi in conversation with Frantz Fanon—particularly in relation to “the peasantry”—to illuminate their divergent and convergent critiques of colonialism. I begin by laying bare Eurocentric mono-humanism as it is elaborated with an assimilative colonial logic. While the Euromodern colonial story is conditioned by anti-Muslim sentiments articulated within religious as well as secular language, this paper teases out the secularity of anticolonialism that silences religious elements in the anticolonial struggle during and after Euromodern colonialism. This operation requires interrogation of the epistemic and ontological superiority of the secular that was born with the second modernity and that became an epistemic and political yardstick deployed by European modernity to subalternize its others. I build on the concept of coloniality of Being and propose reformulating it as a secularity/coloniality of Being. Finally, I conclude with an invitation to think with “pluri-humanity” as a common ground, a human horizon for imagining just futures beyond secular colonial regimes.

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