He pursued his university studies in literature at the Faculty of Letters and Human Sciences, Dhar Mehraz, Fez, from where he graduated as a Bachelor of Arts in Arabic literature in 1972. At the Faculty of Letters and Human Sciences of the Mohammed V-Agdal University, Rabat, Bennis defended his PhD thesis, supervised by Abdelkebir Khatibi, on the "Phenomenon of Contemporary Poetry in Morocco" in 1978. In 1988, at the same faculty, he defended a second doctoral thesis, supervised by Jamel-Eddine Bencheikh, on "Modern Arabic poetry, structures, and mutations".