Introduction: Religion and the Novel

This chapter introduces the topic of religion and literature, theorises the novel as a secular genre, and develops a concept of religion as the other in the Arabic novel. It begins with a discussion of the relationship between religion and literature, identifying imagination, metaphorical language and mythos as areas of overlap, before turning to the question of religion and the Arabic novel as a modern form which eschews faith and dogma but is nevertheless packed with religious themes, images, characters, language and intertextuality. This is accounted for by the form’s secularism, which is theorised in terms of Charles Taylor’s conditions of belief. Literary secularism is not static and stable however, thus religion emerges as the other in the Egyptian novel, with all the ambivalence which alterity characteristically entails. This religious other calls into question postcolonial studies’ over-valorisation of the East/West binary insofar as it has obscured the critical role of religion in Arab postcolonial literature and identity.

Intertextual Dialogues

This chapter explores religious intertextuality in works by Jamal al-Ghitani, Najib Mahfuz and ‘Abd al-Hakim Qasim. It examines how al-Ghitani reworks elements of Ibn ‘Iyas’ Badaʿiʾ al-Zuhur fi’l-Waqaʿiʾ al-Duhur to bring out themes relating to the collusion of religion and power in Al-Zayni Barakat (1971) and how messianic thought and prophetic myth are deconstructed in Mahfuz’s Malhamat al-Harafish (1977). It analyses the reimagining of Christ’s crucifixion in ‘Abd al-Hakim Qasim’s short novel Al-Mahdi (1984) as a comment on modern-day religious violence and the practice of scapegoating, and discusses religious conflict in the text as an example of René Girard’s mimetic rivalry leading to communal self-purification through sacrifice. It also explores the dialogue with Islamic eschatology and dream narrative in Qasim’s Turaf min Khabar al-Akhira (1984), examining how the scene of the interrogating angels and pattern of judgement in the afterlife are transformed to communicate social and religious themes.

Introduction: Religion, the Egyptian Novel and the New Literary Sensibility

Having discussed the religious/secular dialectic at length in Part One, this chapter sets the scene for the Egyptian novel’s engagements with religion post-1967. It discusses literary developments in the Egyptian novel from the late 1960s, specifically the turathi trend and ascendance of experimental narrative strategies, in the context of wider cultural shifts around this time, including the religious resurgence, and considers how these literary and cultural developments affected the representation of religion on the pages of the Egyptian novel.

Conclusion

This chapter looks back at the findings of the preceding chapters. The story of religion and the Egyptian novel is one of ambivalent coalescence. While the characteristic vision of the novel is antithetical to religion on one level (sceptical, rational, immanent, humanist, secular), the relationship between religion and the Egyptian novel is long and enduring. The conclusion reviews the question of the Egyptian novel’s secularity a century on, against a backdrop of religious revival and ideological fragmentation, using ‘Ala al-Aswani’s Imarat Ya’qubiyyan (2002) to confirm that it remains the form’s worldview but one that is short through with contradictions given its ongoing dependence and power struggle with religion and its inescapable trace. The conclusion ends with a consideration of postsecularity and what the Egyptian novel’s relationship over the past hundred years contributes to the postsecularity debate.

Feminist Perspectives

This chapter explores feminist engagements with religion in works by Nawal Sa’dawi and Salwa Bakr. It reads Sa’dawi’s Suqut al-Imam (1987) and Jannat wa Iblis (1992) as feminist dystopias which employ unconventional narrative techniques to augment the dystopic effect and take issue with the founding texts of monotheism as historic vehicles for female oppression. It discusses Salwa Bakr’s rehabilitation of Zulaykha in Wasf al-Bulbul (1993) and explores Al-ʿAraba al-Dhahibiyya la Tasʿad ila al-Samaʾ (1991) by the same author as a critique of religion via the trope of madness, paying attention to how religion, as belief, custom, institution and law, is implicated in the plight of women in the text. The discussion also takes in the Alifa Rifʿat’s stories as a rare example of Islamic literature admitted to the canon. Each of these four chapters begins with a contextual introduction.

The Coptic Theme

This chapter explores literary engagements with Coptic Christianity in works by Baha’ Tahir, Idwar al-Kharrat, Salwa Bakr and Yusuf Zaydan. It explores Baha’ Tahir’s Khalati Safiyya wa’l-Dayr (1991) as a complex allegory of religious tolerance and reads Idwar al-Kharrat’s Turabuha Zaʿfaran (1986) as an example of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of minor discourse whilst paying attention to Christian scriptural reference and themes of religious tolerance and Coptic identity. It then examines how Salwa Bakr’s Al-Bashmuri (1998) and Yusuf Zaydan’s ‘Azazil (2008) rewrite history from a Coptic perspective in order to redress the historical marginalisation of Egypt’s Christians and to destabilise certain myths of history and nation. Religious tolerance, religious violence and religious criticism as represented in these works are also examined.

Mystical Dimensions

This chapter explores Sufi dialogues in works by Najib Mahfuz. It begins by revisiting Mahfuz’s trilogy, rereading Kamal’s infatuation with ʿAyda in terms of the Sufi’s love affair with God. It explains the turn to Sufism post-1967 in terms of Sufism’s symbolism and identity as marginalised discourse and of certain overlaps in Sufi vision and the new literary sensibility before exploring in detail the mystical content of two further works by Mahfuz. Hikayat Haratina (1975) is read as an inversion of the Sufi path and exploration of mysticism as a solution to social ills and metaphysical angst, and Asdaʾ al-Sirat al-Dhatiyya (1995) is read as a reimagining of spiritual autobiography and embodiment of the limits and possibilities of Islamic mysticism. The structure, language and intertextual dialogue with Sufi writing in these two works are considered as ways of challenging unitary discourse and communicating postmodern themes.

The Secular Scripture

This chapter continues to explore the interdependence and co-imbrication of the religious and secular, focusing now on mature Egyptian novels from the mid twentieth century. It explores Mahfuz’s famous trilogy (1956-7) and al-Sharqawi’s Al-Ard (1954) and Muhammad Rasul al-Hurriyya (1962) as different culminations of the secularisation process implied by nation formation, and the conflict and tension inherent therein, examining methods of religious displacement and othering, strategies of demystification, lines of religious critique, symbolic trajectories, as well as spiritual yearning, apologetics and theological conundrums as they appear in these works. The evidence is that, into maturity, as the secular aesthetic in the Egyptian novel stabilises, religious themes endure and religion remains a contested site.

The Religious Other

This chapter identifies religion as a key problematic in early examples of the Arabic novel in Egypt before embarking on an in-depth discussion of the religious/secular opposition in seminal words by Haykal, Taha Husayn and Tawfiq al-Hakim. It examines how texts like Zaynab (1914), Al-Ayyam (vols 1 and 2; 1929, 1933), ‘Awdat al-Ruh (1933) and ‘Usfur min al-Sharq (1938) promote national and secular values on the level of story and character yet undermine these same values through self-contradiction and slippage, and how religious patterns remain deeply embedded in characters’ thought and behaviour even as formal religion is subjected to harsh critique on the surface of the plot and theocentrism is displaced as ideology.