Malek Bennabi (Mālik b. Nabī, 1905-73) was an Algerian intellectual, anticolonial activist, and Islamic reform thinker. He was born in 1905 in Constantine (Qusanṭīna), the major city in eastern Algeria and, at the time, the capital of the French département of the same name. During his studies of Islamic law at the new madrasa in Constantine after 1920, he became interested in anticolonial nationalism and in the Islamic reformist (iṣlāḥ) movement around ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd Ben Bādīs (1889-1940) that centred around Bennabi's home town. After having served