Ben Bādīs, ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd (1889-1940) ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd ibn Muṭafā ibn Makkī ibn Bādīs (Ben Bādīs), was an Algerian scholar, exegete, educator, Islamic reformer and spiritual figurehead of cultural nationalism. He was born in 1889 into an ancient, landowning family of urban notables and ʿulamā in Constantine (Qsanṭīna), the principal inland city of eastern Algeria. His family, descended from the fifth/eleventh-century Zirid rulers of Ifrīqiya (modern Tunisia and east/central Algeria), had maintained considerable cultural prestige and an influential social position in the city since its conquest by the French in 1837. His grandfather, Si Makkī ben Bādīs (d. 1889), retained his post of qāḍī, was decorated with the légion d’honneur by Napoleon III in 1864, and served on the French administration’s Council of Public Education in the 1870s. His father, Muḥammad Muṭafā (b.1868), was an adjunct judge and member of the colonial parliament, the Délégations financières; his younger brother Mawlūd “Zubayr” passed the French baccalauréat and became a lawyer, local politician, and director of a francophone newspaper. The education of ʿAbd al-Hamīd, the eldest son, in Arabic and the Islamic sciences, first in Constantine and then (1908-1912) at the Zayṭūna in Tunis, therefore held particular importance not only for his own socialisation but also for the family’s investment in both established (Arab-Islamic) and emerging (French) forms of élite cultural capital and professional training. But, coming into public life in the tumultuous years after the First World War, ʿAbd al-Hamīd would find his own vocation not simply in the familial preservation of an older cultural prestige, but in a new vision of Arab-Islamic culture and education as a means of religious revival, social reform, and, ultimately, national emancipation. As a young man, his intellectual ability was already remarked upon. In late 1912, he went on pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina; in the latter city, he visited his former teacher,