In 1949, the Algerian religious intellectual Malek Bennabi (1905-1973) formulated a lengthy series of questions and concerns deeply attuned to the coming socio-cultural challenges of decolonization. In Les conditions de la renaissance (Conditions of the Renaissance), Bennabi originally points to Algeria’s “problem of civilization” as its main impediment to parity with Europe. Like the other occupied nations of the Maghreb and Fertile Crescent, Algeria by the end of World War II had experienced the contradictions of colonial development. While urban centers and their agricultural environs prospered—administered by Southern European settlers, the Pied-Noir—Algeria’s majority of Arab-Berbers had sunken into crushing illiteracy, poverty, and backwardness. Given these conditions, Bennabi critically asks: how were we defeated? While in the Middle Ages a center of learning and cultural sophistication, Algeria had failed to enter a new “cycle” of civilization that transcended the heights of its Golden Era. Like his pre-modern forebear Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406), Bennabi had again subjected Maghrebi society to immanent criticism—Algeria and other nations were not conquered simply by force of arms, but instead by their insufficient experience of civilization. What was necessary was for the Arabo-Islamic world to develop what G.W.F. Hegel calls a “systematized reality” unique to its “geographic and anthropological existence.” Drawing from Bennabi’s call for a renewed “Islamic Civilization” in the twentieth century, I argue for the significance of his critique for those interested in the legacies, failures, and triumphs of the anti-colonial era in Algeria and elsewhere. An Islamist intellectual, his interventions nonetheless offer conclusions worthy of consideration across sectarian boundaries. Specifically, his prescient realization of the coming failures of the postcolonial nation-state as insufficiently ambitious and global. As early as 1955’s L’afro-asiatisme (Afro-Asianism), Bennabi pointed to the necessity of an alternative, third-worldist “civilization” to challenge the dominance of the world-system erected by former colonizers—then already locking newly independent nations into exploitative socio-economic structures and relationships. This civilization would create genuinely new institutions, civic structures, and economic systems without constant recourse to an essentially alien universe of European values and symbols. Finally, I ask if Bennabi’s strand of “civilizational” thought might prove a fruitful point of entry into the numerous points of contact between religious and secular ideas in the revolutionary Middle East. For Bennabi and others, the threat of neo-imperialism made common cause between the Left and Islam, unified in their shared rejection of the commercialist and technocratic “developmentalism” foisted on nations like Algeria.