Carnivals of Heterodoxy in Abdelwahab Meddeb’s Talismano

Chapter 2 analyzes Tunisian writer and critic Abdelwahab Meddeb’s (1946–2014) wildly experimental 1979 novel Talismano. The labyrinthine text takes the reader on a hallucinatory journey through Tunisia’s topography—historical and contemporary, imagined and mythical—through a multitude of languages, temporalities, and religious discourses. The story presciently traces the evolution of a popular rebellion as it winds its way through the cityscape of Tunis’s medina bearing a retinue of prophets, artisans, sorceresses, alchemists, and prostitutes. The chapter examines Meddeb’s polemical attack on Bourguiba-era Tunisia, in which hegemonic power is simultaneously concentrated in state and religious institutions. Talismano subsequently demonstrates the co-constitutional nature of religious and state epistemologies, as well as their attendant institutions and discourses. The novel counteracts these forces in its rescripting of the Qurʾan, as well as its invocation of Sufi figures, texts, and rituals. The chapter contextualizes Talismano’s Sufi poetics within the Meddeb’s polemical critical writings against “orthodox” Sunni Islam.

Existential Poiesis in Maḥmud al-Masʿadī’s Mawlid al-nisyān

Chapter 1 examines Tunisian intellectual Maḥmūd al-Masʿadī’s 1945 mythical novella Mawlid al-Nisyān [the Genesis of Forgetfulness] about a physician on a spiritual quest for a drug to defeat time. Maḥmūd al-Masʿadī (1911–2004) was a prolific writer, educator, editor, trade unionist, and government official. The novella integrates Sufi philosophy, existentialism, and humanism in its exploration of the relationship between the human and divine. The chapter frames these concerns within the novella’s Qurʾanic intertextuality and al-Masʿadī’s broader philosophical writings on Islam and literature. Across his critical and literary oeuvre, al-Masʿadī explores literature as a creative praxis that speaks to broader existential and humanist concerns. Crowned the founder of “Muslim Existentialism,” he theorizes Islam as a philosophy of existence intimately connected to the artistic process. The chapter reads his novella Mawlid al-Nisyān as a Sufi spiritual journey that explores creation as an ethical imperative of human existence.

Threads of Transmission in Muḥammad Barrāda’s Luʿbat al-nisyān

Literary critic and novelist Muḥammad Barrāda’s (b.1938) experimental 1987 Luʿbat al-Nisyān [the Game of Forgetting] is considered the Arabic postmodernist novel par excellence. The “nuṣ riwāʾī” [novelistic text] oscillates between historical, narrative, and meta-narrative time, as well as between diegetic and meta-textual narrators. Rather than aligning its authorial decentering and rhizomatic narrative structure with the collapsing of theological discourse as a totalizing force, this chapter reads Luʿbat al-Nisyān through Qurʾanic narratology and intertextuality. It situates the novel, on the one hand, in relation to Barrāda’s extensive critical writings on literary experimentation [tajrīb] and translation of Mikhail Bakhtin. On the other, it theorizes the work through narrative and formal modes and inflected by the Qurʾan—such as iltifāt, or rhetorical code-switching. Moreover, Luʿbat al-Nisyān’s use of multiple narrative perspectives and genealogies critically interrogates the hermeneutical practices surrounding the documentation, verification, and transmission of the apostolic tradition of hadith.

Politics, Poetics, Piety

The Epilogue returns to novelist and critic Maḥmud Al-Masʿadī, to discuss his 1957 epistolary exchange with the Egyptian critic and writer Ṭāhā Ḥusayn—the figurehead par excellence of the nahḍa [Arab ‘Renaissance’] and Arab Modernist movement. Ḥusayn transposed al-Masʿadī’s fiction into the politically charged debates on literary commitment [engagement] and existentialism that preoccupied intellectuals across the decolonizing world. The exchange sheds light on the ways in which the elision of cultural production from the Maghreb in critical literature on the nahḍa works in concert with the framing of Arab modernity as a secular project. The chapter argues that al-Masʿadī’s literary and critical writings—like those of Abdelwahab Meddeb, al-Ṭāhir Waṭṭār, Assia Djebar, Driss Chraïbi, and Muḥammad Barrāda—invite us to reimagine the relationship between culture, politics, and ethics. Their works envision the public intellectual as an ethical subject engaged in narrative acts of creation.

The Quʾran as (Inter)text: Embodiment, Praxis, Critique

The introduction outlines the history of the Maghreb as it pertains to the ideological and methodological biases of Maghrebi Studies, particularly around the bifurcation of Francophone and Arabophone literatures. Arguing for the multilingual accenting of Maghrebi literature both within and across languages, it connects the lack of critical attention to Qurʾanic intertextuality to the privileging of Francophone literatures. The introduction further parses out the ways in which the term secular is often deeply inflected with its own orthodoxies, as well as how the secularization narrative has impacted the study of literary practices and forms—particularly the genre of the novel. It proposes that the classical Arab-Islamic concept of adab provides a valuable corrective, by offering a more expansive model of literature. Bringing in scholarship on the anthropology of Islam, Islamic philosophy, and Qurʾanic studies, the chapter interrogates the ethical, literary, and hermeneutical dimensions of Qurʾanic and Sufi aesthetics. Theorizing the Qurʾan as a literary object, process, and model, introduces ethical ways of approaching questions of writing, reading, and literary hermeneutics. Finally, the introduction explicates the book’s organizational logic of placing canonical Francophone novels into conversation with lesser-known Arabophone ones.

The Polyphonic Hermeneutics of Assia Djebar’s L’amour, la fantasia

Chapter 4 examines Assia Djebar’s (1936–2015) celebrated 1985 novel L’amour, la fantasia [translated as Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade]. The work is a palimpsest of texts that weaves together: French archival records and eyewitness accounts of the occupation of Algeria in the 1830s, oral histories recorded in Algerian dialect and Tamazight by women involved in the war of independence from 1954 through 1962, as well as Djebar’s personal memories and reflections. The chapter argues that Djebar models a practice of ethical reading [ijtihād] in her re-narration of official histories and archives—colonial, national, as well as Islamic. It resituates L’amour, la fantasia, outside of the postcolonial, feminist, and Francophone critical paradigms that dominate the copious scholarship on her work. However, rather than reading gender and language as external to Qurʾanic intertextuality, the chapter emphasizes how they inform and shape Djebar’s narrative ethics—largely through the novel’s insistence on orality and embodiment.

Apocalyptic Aftershocks in al-Ṭāhir Waṭṭār’s Al-zilzāl

Chapter 3 explores the use of Qurʾanic imagery and intertextuality in al-Ṭāhir Waṭṭār’s (1936–2010) apocalyptic 1974 novel al-Zilzāl [the Earthquake]. The novel follows the misanthropic Shaykh ʿAbd al-Majīd Bū al-Arwāḥ as his capitalist aspirations are thwarted by Algerian socialist reforms and increasingly prescient images of the earthquake of the Day of Resurrection. Its satirical portrayal of Bū al-Arwāḥ calls attention to the complicity of the religious elite with French colonialism. By reworking the symbols and mythology of Islamic eschatology, al-Zilzāl challenges hegemonic discourses of Arabism and Islamism in Algerian nationalist discourse. The chapter reads the novel against the grain of Waṭṭār’s own false binary of Arabic (national) and Francophone (non-national) literature. It does so by examining the work’s generic hybridity, conscious manipulation of narrative time and space, as well as its incorporation of the Qurʾan alongside various registers of the Arabic language.

Tense Eruptions in Driss Chraïbi’s Le passé simple

Chapter 5 analyzes Driss Chraïbi’s (1926–2007) controversial 1954 novel Le passé simple [the Simple Past], which traces the rebellion of nineteen-year-old Driss Ferdi against his seemingly pious wealthy father Haj Ferdi. Readings of the novel as an orientalist portrayal of Moroccan culture and a heretical attack on Islam resulted in a decades-long controversy known as l’affaire Chraïbi, as well as a government ban until 1977. The novel stages a double-critique against colonial and nationalist teleologies—a tension that emerges most explicitly in its engagement with the Qurʾan. The chapter investigates the novel’s critique of imbricated modes of genealogical historical inscription under Protectorate Morocco: French imperial discourses of civil society and the Moroccan monarchy’s, and Hajj Ferdi’s, filiation with the Prophet Muhammad. It argues that Chraïbi offers an alternative mode of ethical agency in the recurring image of la ligne mince [the thin line]: a hallucinatory apparition with Qurʾanic and Sufi valences that haunts the narrator throughout the novel.