Ensouling Agential Praxis in A Secular World: A Sufi Spiritual Turn in Leila Aboulela’s
            <i>the Kindness of Enemies</i>

Chaoui, Saleh

doi:10.1080/00111619.2023.2178284

Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction

2023

DOI: 10.1080/00111619.2023.2178284

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Ensouling Agential Praxis in A Secular World: A Sufi Spiritual Turn in Leila Aboulela’s the Kindness of Enemies

Saleh Chaoui

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2024

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Finding Home Beyond Borders: Sufism and Homelessness in Leila Aboulela’s Writing

Zorluoğlu Akbey

2024

Temaşa Erciyes Üniversitesi Felsefe Bölümü Dergisi

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The romantic urge for home, to which one belongs but where one can no longer be, recalling the longing for the lost Garden of Eden, may have different origins for different writers. Yet the impulse to write about one’s homeland is inevitable for immigrant writers, and Sudanese-British writer Leila Aboulela is no exception. While themes of exile, faith, identity, and belonging are central throughout Aboulela’s body of work, this analysis will focus specifically on her novels Minaret (2005), The Kindness of Enemies (2015), and Bird Summons (2019). By engaging in comparative analysis and tracing thematic threads and stylistic shifts across a broader spectrum of Aboulela’s writing, this paper explores how Sufism serves as both a thematic and structural foundation, offering a lens through which homelessness, belonging, and spirituality are reimagined. It examines how Aboulela creates spaces of fresh promise where both her protagonists and Aboulela herself feel at home again, highlighting the progression of Sufi influences across her three novels. The analysis demonstrates how her engagement with Sufi principles deepens over time, culminating in a unique hybrid narrative mode—situated at the intersection of novel and masnavi traditions—that employs magical realism to destabilize Western logic and bridge Eastern and Western literary traditions.

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Finding Home Beyond Borders: Sufism and Homelessness in Leila Aboulela’s Writing

Zorluoğlu Akbey

2024

Temaşa Erciyes Üniversitesi Felsefe Bölümü Dergisi

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show abstract

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Ensouling Agential Praxis in A Secular World: A Sufi Spiritual Turn in Leila Aboulela’s the Kindness of Enemies

Cited by 1 publication

References 23 publications

Finding Home Beyond Borders: Sufism and Homelessness in Leila Aboulela’s Writing

Finding Home Beyond Borders: Sufism and Homelessness in Leila Aboulela’s Writing

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