As early as 1963, Abdel-Malek wrote an essay entitled 'L'Orientalisme en Crise', in which he

critically examined Western approaches to the study of non-Western societies, and the Muslim
World in particular. Written in French it never received the same exposure as Edward Saids'
more extensive and illustrative Orientalism, but Abdel-Malek's examination has impacted on
Said's own investigations into this field.

In the course of the 1960s and 1970s, Abdel-Malek became one of the foremost commentators
and critics of social and socio-political developments in the Arab world, including his
native Egypt. One of his most famous books is a study on the role of the military in Egypt
(Egypt: Military Society). Against the background of the aftermath of last year's Arab Spring,
the subject has not lost any of its currency and relevance.

As indicated by his study of Orientalism, Abdel-Malek's interests were much wider;

encompassing the Third World-at-large. In that sense his work formed part of the now obsolete
discourse of Tiers-Mondisme, somewhat awkwardly translated as 'Third-Worldism'. This strand
of thinking emerged from the 'Spirit of Bandung', set free at the 1955 Asian-African
Conference in Bandung. Tiers-Mondisme found its political translation in the Movement of Non-
Aligned Countries, which -- aside from the conference host, Indonesian President Sukarno --
also included among its founders, Egypt's Gamal Abdel-Nasser, the Indian Prime Minister
Jawaharlal Nehru, Yugoslavia's Marshal Tito, and China's Zhou En Lai.

Syed Hussein Alatas

In the early eighties, Abdel-Malek worked together with Syed Hussein Alatas (1928-2007), an
Indonesian-born scholar of Hadhrami (southern Yemeni) descent who later worked at
universities in Singapore and Malaysia (he is the brother of Syed Naguib al-Attas, the scholar of
Islam who established the Institute of Islamic Thought and Civilization, ISTAC, see also post
of 21 January 2012). Trained in Amsterdam as a sociologist of religion, Alatas' interests were
more in the domain of intellectual history. During his student years he edited and published a
periodical called Progressive Islam. Later he made name with The Myth of the Lazy Native, a
study of Javanese, Malay and Philipino intellectual traditions, and a book on the role of
intellectuals in developing societies.

What united Abdel-Malek and Alatas was a critical attitude towards the overeasy dismissal of
non-Western ways of thinking as intellectually less rigorous than the European tradition of
reason which began its global spread from the Enlightenment Era onwards. The fruits of the
collaboration led to the introduction of a notion of 'endogenous intellectual creativity' (For a
comparative study of Abdel-Malek and Alatas, see Mona Abaza's Debates on Islam and
Knowledge in Malaysia and Egypt).