Results You Will Not Live to See
Bennabi counts four terms and everyone drops the third. Civilisational work takes generations, which means those who start it are structurally guaranteed not to see it.
Bennabi trained as an electrical engineer in Paris, and it shows in the strangest place: in how he counts.
His formula for a civilisation is four terms. Man, soil, time, catalysed by a religious idea. Remove any one and nothing is produced.
Three of those are familiar enough. It is the third that I cannot stop thinking about, because it is the one everybody leaves out of the calculation entirely.
Soil first, since it is the one people reach for. Territory, resources, position, infrastructure. The Muslim world has an abundance of it: land, oil, minerals, chokepoints, arable ground, a quarter of the planet's surface.
So the soil is not the problem, and any argument that begins from deprivation is arguing against the evidence.
Man, in his sense, is not population. It is the human being equipped to build: carrying ideas, discipline, and some sense of what he is for. Not the man who possesses things. The man who possesses direction.
And the catalyst is the religious idea, which converts the other three from inert stock into something that produces. His example is the obvious one and still lands: seventh-century Arabia had man, soil and time in quantity and generated nothing for centuries. It was marginal. What changed was not the resources.