As part of my broader dissertation research, I explore the notion of takwīn al-nafs (formation of the "spirit/self") and a constellation of analogous concept-practices—such as zirā‘at al-wa‘ī (cultivation of awareness), takwīn akhlāqī (ethical cultivation), and fikr naqdī (critical thought)—as elements of an emancipatory ethico-politics and practice that emerged in the writings and works of a group of anticolonial Algerian intellectuals and activists during the years surrounding the Algerian Revolution (1954–1962).
Drawing on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork, I examine these concept-practices among graduates of the schools of the Association of Algerian Muslim Scholars (Association des oulémas musulmans algériens, AOMA, 1931–1956) and among students of the intellectual and critic Malek Bennabi, who attended his lectures and at-home salons in Algiers during the 1960s and 1970s. I investigate these ethico-political practices as challenging the assumed boundaries of colonial-modern secular epistemology: the separation of ethics and politics, the bifurcation of rational thought and habitus/practice, and prevailing assumptions about the subject-self in relation to non-human Others—the divine, as well as the earth, plants, animals, and other celestial beings—and in relation to anthropos across various levels of existence (marātib al-wujūd).
By situating these concept-practices within the intellectual and activist traditions of Islamic anticolonialism in 20th-century Algeria, I inquire into the alter-epistemic and counter-hegemonic forms of life they sought to generate. In particular, I explore how such concept-practices relate to taḥrīr (emancipation, from the root ḥ-r-r, meaning "freedom") as it emerges from the problem-space of anti-colonial struggle in the context of French settler colonialism in Algeria (1830–1962).
Rather than treating takwīn and its correlates as stable or self-evident concepts, I investigate the conditions of possibility that enabled their emergence under colonial rule, as well as the discursive tradition through which they have been transmitted and debated. By examining how takwīn functioned as a response to colonial subjectification and how it was institutionalized through the work of my interlocutors, I engage with archival sources, publications, institutional practices, and contemporary inheritors of the islāh (Islamic reform) tradition. I highlight my interlocutors’ relationship to the islāh tradition as it developed in the 19th and 20th centuries, largely in response to European colonialism across the Muslim world. At the same time, I emphasize its endurance as part of a longer sharī‘ah discursive tradition, to which many of my interlocutors were directly connected—whether through their education in local madrasas across Algeria, or the renowned Zaytuna and al-Azhar Universities in Tunis and Cairo.
As a genealogy of a set of concepts and practices, my research draws on a range of sources spanning different temporal and spatial contexts: archival materials from the AOMA (1931–1956), interviews with AOMA graduates and former students, the writings of Malek Bennabi (published between 1947 and 1972), and oral histories from students who attended his lectures in central Algiers during the 1960s and 1970s. These sources inevitably emerge from distinct yet overlapping intellectual and political contexts, as the concepts and practices I seek to illuminate traverse multiple historical and geographical frames.
I discuss these traveling theories and practices (to borrow Edward Said's felicitous term) as they emerge at key sites of takwīn—as I encounter them and as they are narrated by my interlocutors: the madāris (independent schools), masājid al-ḥur (“free mosques”), the Ibn Badis Institute of the AOMA, as well as the at-home salons, public lectures, and Multaqa Fikriyya (Intellectual Forum) of Malek Bennabi. While I analyze these as distinct spaces where takwīn was cultivated and socialized, I also treat them as heuristic distinctions—conceptual lenses through which I explore how ideas, sensibilities, and modes of critique took shape through the people who inhabited them, the texts that circulated within them, and the practices that animated them.
This paper conceptually aligns with the broader questions of my dissertation, considering takwīn (and islāh more broadly) as a form of re-membering in the wake of the epistemic ruination and epistemicide wrought by settler colonialism. As part of my dissertation’s broader framework, I think through re-membering—a concept I borrow from Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o—in relation to dhikr, which literally means "remembrance" but often refers to the remembrance of God as an act of repetition (repeating upon the tongue). In this sense, dhikr is the practice of a cultivation of a subject-self that blurs the line between acting and being acted upon by an Other power. Building on this, I approach takwīn as a historical practice of re-membering—an effort to reconstruct a subjectivity, epistemic framework, and ethico-political community that colonial violence sought to dismember. Through this lens, I explore how takwīn sought to articulate alternative forms of life in response to colonial subjugation—one that French colonial rule sought to render into a state of submission (El-Ibrahimi).
Finally, the paper ask how anticolonial struggle for political liberation was tied to other forms of liberation: the liberation of the subject-self in its relation to the non-perceptible and non human world. By foregrounding the endurance of takwīn across colonial and postcolonial contexts, my work contributes to critical discussions on how theological grammars of freedom are transformed, contested, or reclaimed in response to the secularizing logics of empire and the modern nation-state.
This paper thinks through the concept-practice of takwīn al-nafs (formation of the subject-self) as a form of ethico-politics among a group of anti-colonial writers and actors in the years surrounding the Algerian Revolution (1954-1962). I investigate how takwīn al-nafs troubles the assumed secularity of freedom (and its correlates, liberation, emancipation) as a category of political modernity in its troubling of the boundaries of the ethical/political, as well as the self-contained subject self in the relationship of the anthropos to other living beings: the Divine, as well as animals, plants, the earth, and other celestial beings. Drawing from archival material, publications, and ethnographic fieldwork with students of the Association of Algerian Muslim Scholars and the philosopher and critic Malek Bennabi, I explore how takwīn functioned as a response to colonial subjectification and as an enduring mode of re-membering a dismembered epistemic and ethical-political horizon.