In this paper I am wrestling with an unsettling problematic - the privileging of theology and philosophy over literature within Islamic culture; the opposition (and paradoxically the inter-play) between the sacred book and secular writing. Although the primary initial concern of my argument is the flash point to which ‘Abbasid literary modernism, for example, may have pushed Muslim hermeneutic culture – I will attempt, from the outset of my paper, to bring to bear the significance of a revisionist critique of classical literary tradition of the 'Abbasids established by three major contemporary intellectuals: Mohammed Arkoun, Abdelfattah Kilito and Muhammad al-Jabiri. By engaging with their critical responses to this inquiry I will underscore an Islamic genealogy of the key installments in the conflict of interpretation (theology and/as/ against literature) in the poetic and philosophical works of al-Jahiz and Abu Hayyan al-Tawhidi. I will examine in paticular the interface between the literary and philosophical formations in Al Jahiz's Kitab al-Bukhala' (Book of Misers), and al-Tawhidi's Al-Hawamil wa al-Shawamil. Taking specific examples from these two authors’ diversified and “multi-disciplinary” texts, I shall argue that this Islamic genealogy of tension between theological and literary traditions, as outlined particularly by Mohammed Arkoun in his major work, The Unthought in Contemporary Islamic Thought (2002), transforms the way "Islamic studies" or what Arkoun calls “Applied Islamology” is/ or ought to be perceived today as a discipline. By thinking through what classical literary and philosophical texts share as “aporetical moments” (of inter-play and leakage) in terms of allegories, conceits, irony, wit, satire, mockery, humor, epiphanies and rhetorical speeches a long side, methodical reasoning, duplication, division, and scientific demonstration, I suggest that this history of mutual disputation between theology/philosophy and literature is also a history of an “anxiety of influence”. I will argue that the literary texts of al-Tawhidi and al-Jahiz are not unitary in meaning, or antithetical to philosophical sylistic or rhetorical claims. The relationship between these, most often than not operates according to a polymorphous tradition of a classical “modernism”, and within the “boundaries” of a certain persistent literary imaginary, sensibility and style. Al-Jahiz and al-Tawhidi, "the modernists" of their time developed a rhetorically sophisticated style and intellectual, humanistic attitude that had always remained interested and even driven by deeply creative philosophical concepts of truth.