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The Salving Mystic in Arabic Aesthetics: The S/Place of Sufi’s Malady and Madadin/From al-Ghitany to Ashour and Bassiouny
Abstract by Dr. Riham Debian On Session XIII-26  (Rumi)

On Sunday, November 5 at 1:30 pm

2023 Annual Meeting

Abstract
This paper engages with the question of salving mystic in Arabic Aesthetics and their linguistic expression and narrative revelation and mediation across textual spaces. The paper particularly deals with thesufi’scouplet malady (aala:sickness) and madad (provision) in their interface with the space and place of selves’ habitation and habituationand intersection with questions of identity—the historical spaces and geographical places one inhabits and embodies. Opening a repertoire between contextualized stylistics and poetics semiology (Boise-Bier2011; Jackobson 1960), the paper examines the space and place of malady and madadin al-Ghitany’s Kitab al-Tagiliat (The Book of Revelation1983), Ashour’s ThulathiatGhirnata (Granada Trilogy 1995)Bassiouny’s Sabil Al-Ghareq (Fountain of the Drowning 2018; 2022).The paper examines the stylistic and poetical encoding and recoding of the selves’ maladies and slaving madads from Ghitany to Bassiouny and their entanglement in the questions of Egyptian identity-politics. The latter are enacted through the enchanted embodiment of special historicity and temporal geographicity that traverses the boundaries of time and place to the salving atemporality of the perpetual madad providing for the selves’ continual pursuit to incarnation and habituation. The paper ultimately argues for the intergenerational intertextuality of Arabic aesthetics that stylistically and poetically enacts theslaving mysticism of Sufi Madad through historical and geographical semioticization of the Egyptian character continuity across space, time and places of habituation—redeeming the malaise of unhomeliness in the body through belonging and homliness. The three writers engage with the historical novel as a form of delivery of their Egyptian mystical relation with space and place across the fleeting and floatation of time and the maladies of the bodied selves. The three novelist-historians are involved with the question of place and the life-worlds that spaces generate providing for healing incantations to effect social and psychological wellbeing across time and gender.
Discipline
Language
Geographic Area
All Middle East
Sub Area
None