The Literary Qur'an

Abstract

The Literary Qurʾan: Narrative Ethics in the Maghreb mobilizes the Qurʾan’s formal, narrative, and rhetorical qualities, alongside its attendant embodied practices and hermeneutical strategies, to theorize Maghrebi literature. Challenging the canonization of secular modes of reading that occlude religious epistemes, practices, and intertexts, it attends to literature as a site in which the process of entextualization obscures ethical imperatives. To that end, the book engages the classical Arab-Islamic tradition of adab—a concept demarcating the genre of belles lettres, as well as the moral dimensions of personal and social conduct. Reading Islam through its intersecting ethical and epistemological dimensions, it argues that the critical pursuit of knowledge is inseparable from the spiritual cultivation of the self. Foregrounding questions of form and praxis, The Literary Qurʾan stages a series of pairings that invite paratactic readings across texts, languages, and literary canons. Reflecting both critical methodology and argument, it places twentieth-century novels by canonical Francophone writers (Abdelwahab Meddeb, Assia Djebar, Driss Chraïbi) into conversation with lesser-known Arabophone ones (Maḥmūd al-Masʿadī, al-Ṭāhir Waṭṭār, Muḥammad Barrāda). Blending literary and theological methodologies, conceptual vocabularies, and reading practices, the study builds upon an interdisciplinary body of scholarship across literary theory, Islamic and Qurʾanic studies, philosophy, anthropology, and history.

Moroccan subaltern voices narrated: the historical imaginary of race and the legacy of slavery in Rabbaj’sLe Lutteur[The Wrestler] and El Hachimi’sDhākirat al-narjis[The Daffodil’s Memory]

“…Both works, we argue, invoke the longstanding historical amnesia perpetuated by the hegemonic structures which overshadow plurality and diversity, and summon the ‘decolonial’ as an alternative conceptualization to rethink difference in Moroccan subaltern identities, and they do so despite being written in different languages. Here, we build on recent critical perspectives with regard to the dominant reading practices based on linguistic determinism in the Maghreb (Dobie, 2003 ; El Shakry, 2019 ), and we take up ‘reading together’ (Laachir, 2016 ) the Francophone novel Le Lutteur and the Arabophone Dhākirat al-Narjis to ‘she[d] light on the interwoven aesthetics and politics of Moroccan postcolonial novels of Arabic and French expression’ (Laachir, 2016 , p. 32). Rather than privileging language categorization, then, our comparative reading considers the shared historical, cultural, geographical, political and aesthetic interweaving(s) between Moroccan novels written in French and Arabic.…”