Sufism in the Contemporary Arabic Novel

Sufism in the Contemporary Arabic Novel PDF Author: Ziad Elmarsafy
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 0748655662
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 185

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Book Description
This book will present close readings of three contemporary Arabic novelists - an Egyptian (Gamal Al-Ghitany), an Algerian (Taher Ouettar) and a Touareg Libyan (Ibrahim Al-Koni) - who have all turned to Sufism as a literary strategy aimed at negotiating i

Sufism in the Contemporary Arabic Novel

Sufism in the Contemporary Arabic Novel PDF Author: Ziad Elmarsafy
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 0748655662
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 185

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book will present close readings of three contemporary Arabic novelists - an Egyptian (Gamal Al-Ghitany), an Algerian (Taher Ouettar) and a Touareg Libyan (Ibrahim Al-Koni) - who have all turned to Sufism as a literary strategy aimed at negotiating i

Islam on the Street

Islam on the Street PDF Author: Muḥsin Jāsim Mūsawī
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9780742562066
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
Islam on the Street deals with the popular side of Islam, as described not only in tracts and manuals written by Sufi shaykhs and Islamist thinkers from among the more militant groups in Islam, but also in writings by other, more secular thinkers who have also influenced public opinion. A scholar of Arabic literature, Muhsin al-Musawi explains the growing rift that has occurred between the secular intellectual--the forerunner of Arab and Islamic modernity since the late nineteenth century--and the upsurge of Islamic fervor in the street, at the grassroots level, and what these secular intellectuals can do to reconnect with the masses. Using some of the most important Arabic and Islamic poetry, prose, and fiction to come out of the twentieth century, Al-Musawi provides context for the complex images of Arab and Islamic culture given by the various social, religious, and political groups, providing the motivations. Readers interested in the influence of religion and secularism within modern Islamic Arabic literature will find that the author addresses the presence of Islam and Sufism in ways that secular commentators have been incapable of doing.

Sufism in the Contemporary Arabic Novel

Sufism in the Contemporary Arabic Novel PDF Author: Ziad Elmarsafy
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 0748655646
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
Although Sufi characters - saints, dervishes, wanderers - occur regularly in modern Arabic literature, a select group of novelists seeks to interrogate Sufism as a system of thought and language. In the work of writers like Naguib Mahfouz, Gamal Al-Ghitany, Tahar Ouettar, Ibrahim Al-Koni, Mahmud Al-Mas'adi and Tayeb Salih we see a strong intertextual relationship with the Sufi masters of the past, including Al-Hallaj, Ibn Arabi, Al-Niffari and Al-Suhrawardi. This relationship becomes a means of interrogating the limits of the creative self, individuality, rationality and the manifold possibilities offered by literature, seeking in a dialogue with the mystical heritage a way of preserving a self under siege from the overwhelming forces of oppression and reaction that have characterized the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Ibn Arabi's Small Death

Ibn Arabi's Small Death PDF Author: Mohammad Hassan Alwan
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 1477324321
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 522

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Book Description
Ibn Arabi’s Small Death is a sweeping and inventive work of historical fiction that chronicles the life of the great Sufi master and philosopher Ibn Arabi. Known in the West as “Rumi’s teacher,” he was a poet and mystic who proclaimed that love was his religion. Born in twelfth-century Spain during the Golden Age of Islam, Ibn Arabi traveled thousands of miles from Andalusia to distant Azerbaijan, passing through Morocco, Egypt, the Hijaz, Syria, Iraq, and Turkey on a journey of discovery both physical and spiritual. Witness to the wonders and cruelties of his age, exposed to the political rule of four empires, Ibn Arabi wrote masterworks on mysticism that profoundly influenced the world. Alwan’s fictionalized first-person narrative, written from the perspective of Ibn Arabi himself, breathes vivid life into a celebrated and polarizing figure.

Literary Autobiography and Arab National Struggles

Literary Autobiography and Arab National Struggles PDF Author: Tahia Abdel Nasser
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 1474420230
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
In memoirs, Arab writers have invoked solitude in moments of deep public involvement. Focusing on Taha Hussein, Sonallah Ibrahim, Assia Djebar, Latifa al-Zayyat, Mahmoud Darwish, Mourid Barghouti, Edward Said, Haifa Zangana, and Radwa Ashour, this book reads a range of autobiographical forms, sources, and affinities with other literatures.Taking a comparative approach, Nasser shows the local sources of contemporary Arab autobiography, adaptations of a global genre, and cultural exchange. She also examines different aspects of the contemporary autobiography as it has evolved in the Arab world during the past half-century, focusing on the particularity of the genre written in different languages but pertaining to one overarching Arab culture. Drawing on memoirs, testimonies, autobiographical novels, poetic autobiography, journals, and diaries, she examines solitude and national struggles in contemporary Arab autobiography.

Unmaking of the Arab Intellectual

Unmaking of the Arab Intellectual PDF Author: Zeina G. Halabi
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 1474421407
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
In this book Zeina G. Halabi examines the figure of the intellectual as prophet, national icon, and exile in contemporary Arabic literature and film. Staging a comparative dialogue with writers and critics such as Elias Khoury, Edward Said, Jurji Zaidan, and Mahmoud Darwish, Halabi focuses on new articulations of loss, displacement, and memory in works by Rabee Jaber, Elia Suleiman, Rawi Hage, Rashid al-Daif, and Seba al-Herz. She argues that the ambivalence and disillusionment with the role of the intellectual in contemporary representations operate as a productive reclaiming of the 'political' in an allegedly apolitical context. The Unmaking of the Arab Intellectual offers the critical tools to understand the evolving relations between the intellectual and power, and the author and the text in the hitherto uncharted contemporary era.

War and Occupation in Iraqi Fiction

War and Occupation in Iraqi Fiction PDF Author: Ikram Masmoudi
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 1474403522
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 189

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Book Description
The last three decades in Iraqi history can be summarized in these words: dictatorship, war and occupation. After the fall of Saddam's regime Iraqi novelists are not only writing about the occupation and the current disintegration of Iraq but are also revisiting previous wars that devastated their lives. This book examines how recent Iraqi fiction about war depicts the Iraqi subject in its relation to war, coercion, subjugation and occupation. The theoretical medieval concept of the homo sacer, the killable, as defined by Giorgio Agamben is used to explore the lives and the experiences of different war actors such as the soldier, the war deserter, the camp detainee and the suicide bomber depicted in their "e;bare life"e; as men doomed to death in the necropolitical context. War and Occupation in Iraqi Fiction is an exploration of fictional works by a new generation of leading Iraqi authors such as Ali Badr, Shakir Nuri, Najm Wali, Hdiya Hussein and others. It brings to light the overarching continuum in the production of homines sacri in Iraq. Instances of homo sacer under the dictatorship are complemented by new instances found in the camp and under the state of exception of the occupation and the war on terror.

Writing Beirut

Writing Beirut PDF Author: Samira Aghacy
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 0748696253
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
Presents a geographical/spatial approach to Beirut seeking to understand how the city is imagined in fiction. This book focuses on the urban/rural divide, the city through panoramic views and pedestrian acts, the city as sexualised and gendered, and the city as a palimpsest. It provides a thorough overview of Beirut in the modern Arabic novel.

Women, Writing and the Iraqi Ba'thist State

Women, Writing and the Iraqi Ba'thist State PDF Author: Al-Hassan Hawraa Al-Hassan
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 1474441785
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
In an effort to expand its readership and increase support for its pan-Arab project, the Iraqi Ba'th almost completely eradicated illiteracy among women. As Iraq was metaphorically transformed into a 'female', through its nationalist trope, women writers simultaneously found opportunities and faced obstacles from the state, as the 'woman question' became a site of contention between those who would advocate the progressiveness of the Ba'th and those who would stress its repressiveness and immorality. By exploring discourses on gender in both propaganda and high art fictional writings by Iraqis, this book offers an alternative narrative of the literary and cultural history of Iraq.

Libyan Novel

Libyan Novel PDF Author: Olszok Charis Olszok
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 1474457487
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 341

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Book Description
Analysing prominent novelists such as Ibrahim al-Kuni and Hisham Matar, alongside lesser-known and emerging voices, this book introduces the themes and genres of the Libyan novel during the al-Qadhafi era. Exploring latent political protest and environmental lament in the writing of novelists in exile and in the Jamahiriyya, Charis Olszok focuses on the prominence of encounters between humans, animals and the land, the poetics of vulnerability that emerge from them, and the vision of humans as creatures (makhluqat) in which they are framed.