Prof. Malik Badri

When people today discuss Muslim contributions to modern psychology, the Western schools usually come first and the Muslim pioneers last. That is precisely why Malik Badri belongs among the Forgotten Heroes. He was not only a major psychologist but a man who showed, as a Muslim, that professional excellence, intellectual independence, and deep Islamic grounding do not contradict one another but rather sustain one another.

Born in 1932 in Rufaa, Sudan, he studied at the American University of Beirut, earned his doctorate in 1961 at the University of Leicester, and pursued clinical training in London. Later he served as a professor, clinician, and university administrator, as a UNESCO expert in Ethiopia, and as an adviser to the WHO, and at the International Islamic University Malaysia he held the Ibn Khaldun Chair. This is exactly what gives his critique its weight: he turned against Western psychology not out of ignorance but as someone trained within it, who had mastered it academically and knew its reach as well as its limits from the inside.

Therein lay his pioneering achievement. Badri was among the first to say openly that Western psychology is not a value-free universal science. It presents itself as objective and universally valid, yet it is in truth deeply embedded in Western paradigms, value systems, and populations, and therefore culturally bound. As early as the 1960s he had worked on the cultural bias of psychological tests and adapted assessment procedures to Sudanese children. His famous early work “The Dilemma of Muslim Psychologists” of 1979 was therefore more than a specialist book. It was an intellectual intervention that warned against the uncritical adoption of secular Western theories and described them as a “colonization of the mind.”

He turned especially sharply against Freudian psychoanalysis and behaviorism. Freud reads the human being as a creature driven by instinct, while behaviorism reduces him to stimulus and response. In both cases the human being is stripped of his true depth, appearing either as the sum of his drives or as a product of his environment. For Badri this was not scientific maturity but an anthropological failure: a psychology that forgets consciousness, the soul, and the spiritual essence of the human being simply because only what can be measured is allowed to count.

Yet Badri was no wholesale rejecter. He criticized what was false, adopted what was useful, and placed it within a more comprehensive vision of the human being. He took up again the classical concepts of Islamic anthropology, nafs, qalb, ʿaql, and rūḥ, and through his edition of Abū Zayd al-Balkhī’s “Sustenance of the Soul” he made visible that Muslim scholars had possessed elaborate insights into stress, anxiety, and spiritual suffering centuries before the modern era. Islamic civilization, he showed, possesses its own genealogy of knowledge about the soul, a genealogy that was suppressed but never refuted.

One key to his work is his well-known threefold division of the path of Muslim psychologists: first, an uncritical infatuation with secular Western approaches; then the attempt to reconcile Islam with Western theory; and finally emancipation, that is, the realization that an independent Islamic paradigm must be developed. This is far more than an academic typology. It describes the spiritual path of many Muslims in general: first admiration, then compromise, and, if Allah wills, intellectual liberation.

For Badri, however, this emancipation did not mean isolation but a reordering. He did not want Muslims to take leave of science but to pursue it from a different foundation. And he embodied this himself: one tribute calls him a man of deep faith, for whom Islamic contemplation was no secular technique but flowed from the instructions of the Qurʾān and aimed at a knowing turn toward Allah as Creator and Sustainer.