The most uncomfortable idea in this book is not that the West is failing. Plenty of people enjoy that one.
It is Malek Bennabi's, and it goes the other way: that being colonised is not simply something that was done to you.
He called it colonisability. The condition a society develops that makes colonisation possible, and then, once it has happened, keeps it going after the soldiers have gone home.
Handled carelessly this becomes victim-blaming, and it is worth being precise about why it is not. Bennabi is not saying the conquest was deserved or that the conquerors were owed anything. He is asking a different question, and a more useful one: why, a century after independence, with the flags changed and the garrisons withdrawn, does so little appear to have moved?
His answer is that a society can be emptied of its own ideas while keeping all its things.
It imports an educational model and gets graduates who can recite European theory fluently and cannot analyse their own street. It imports an economic model and gets an economy that works, efficiently, in someone else's interest. It imports a political model and gets states with the correct shapes and none of the functions.
Muslim economists think in categories developed to describe European industrial capitalism. Muslim sociologists apply methods designed for European societies to societies organised on entirely different principles, and then report the mismatch as a deficiency in the society rather than in the instrument.
The result is a civilisation that analyses itself in a language built to describe somebody else, and is then perpetually surprised that the analysis does not quite fit.
And it will not fit. Not because the Western tools are bad, they are often excellent, but because every analytical framework carries assumptions about what a person is, what a society is for, and what counts as progress. Import the framework and you have imported the assumptions.
What makes Bennabi's diagnosis worth the discomfort is that it is the only one that leaves anything to do.
If the whole condition is external, imposed by force from outside, then nothing changes until the outside changes, and that is a position that feels righteous and licenses waiting indefinitely.
Colonisability says the opposite. The internal conditions are internal. They were produced, they are being maintained, and they are therefore in reach.
Bennabi's other line is the one that ought to sting. The sick man is not the one illness has struck. The sick man is the one who has grown accustomed to his illness.
A century is a long time to get used to something.