Moroccan born photographer Lalla Essaydi (1956- ), whose portraits of Arab women incorporate layers of Islamic calligraphy applied by hand with henna on the women’s bodies and clothing, is representative of a new artistic reclamation movement that positions her art outside the contested frames of nation and religion. Combined with poses directly inspired by nineteenth century Orientalist paintings of Jean Ingres, Jean Gérôme and Eugène Delacrois, Essaydi’s portraits are both provocative and revolutionary. Her world-wide installations relocate Muslim gendered bodies in ways that contest earlier orientalist depictions as well as Pierre Cachia’s modernist claims of a “faintness of Islamic inspiration,” thereby engendering a dialogue and a recasting of the Arab nation and its citizens in global locales. Essaydi’s work thrives on the disruption of visual and ideological stereotypes created through an intense engagement with contradictions of present and past, private and public spaces, and the oral and the written in Islamic cultures. The reclamation of private harem spaces, traditionally places of female confinement, is accomplished through an active engagement of her models in creating their own written history by inscribing their henna script on their veils, bodies, garments, and even the backdrop composition. Moreover, her interrogation of the intersections of religion and nationalism incriminates both local and global politics. My readings of Essaydi’s portraits will be informed by Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (1993) and Marianne Hirsch’s Family Frames (1997). I articulate the ways in which the “umbilical” connection to the mother tongue, to native culture, to “first-and second generation remembrance, memory and postmemory” are invoked in Essaydi’s works by recasting the harem and the veil in a nuanced, anti-national way. In my research, I plan to compare her visual interrogation of Muslim culture with other Arab women writers such as the Moroccan sociologist Fatima Mernissi, and the Arab-American poet Mohja Kahf whose prosaic and poetic portrayal of Muslim women’s representations in Western culture complements Essaydi’s pictures. The fascinating aspect of Essaydi’s artistry originates from the stretching of personal and cultural borders, thereby relocating politics through the “intersection with the presence and absence of boundaries; of history, gender, architecture, and culture; that mark spaces of possibility and limitation.” Situating Essaydi’s artwork in the context of her fellow Arab women writers articulates her role as an active member of a vibrant Muslim women’s movement intent on bridging discordant cultures by initiating a much needed, though often, uncomfortable dialogue.

In 1908, at the age of 25, ‘Af?fa Karam (1883-1924) published her riveting second novel, F??ima al-Badawiyya (Fatima the Bedouin). Written by a Maronite Christian Arab woman living in America, the novel is an inaugural Arabic text inspired by the encounter of Islam and the West in the era of imperialism. Fatima, the novel’s heroine, is a Muslim Bedouin woman who falls in love with a Christian officer and elopes with him to America, thus causing her family dishonor. Abandoned by her husband in New York City with their infant child, Fatima is rescued by a wealthy American heiress named Alice. It is through the friendship between Fatima and her American host that the author explores the dynamics of exchange between “oriental” and “Western” worldviews at the onset of the twentieth century. This paper will investigate the complex dynamics between individual liberties and religious dogma, whereby Islam is represented as an alien other (both to a Christian author and the fictitious America the protagonist inhabits). It will also explore the intricate imbrications of religious identity and gender, as reflected in one of the earliest Arabic literary treatments of interreligious romances and honor killings. F??ima al-Badawiyya is a ground breaking Arabic text that speaks to one of the most fervid debates of the Nah??, namely the “woman question” (qa?iyat al-mar’?). The author’s contention seems to be that all women, whether Muslim or Christian, Arab or American, educated or illiterate, cosmopolitan or Bedouin, are victims of oppression in male-dominated societies where religion, tradition, or metropolitan fashion and consumer culture become mere tools to subordinate, objectify, and reduce them to second-class citizenship. F??ima al-Badawiyya illustrates Karam’s innovative, literary venture, which aimed to raise awareness among her readers about gender inequalities present in both Arab and American societies, depicting the oppression and abuse of women as a universal phenomenon occurring across religions and cultures. In the novel, it is the act of storytelling (and by extension, novel writing) that strengthens and solidifies the bonds between women and empowers them to move from victims of their own oppression to actors with agency and the power to shape their own destinies. In Karam’s literary imagination, humanism and love can ultimately transcend the boundaries of language, nation, race, class, culture, and religion.

The modern genres of Arabic literature in Egypt – fiction, post-Romantic poetry, and drama – have been for the most part thoroughly secular in tone and orientation. Many prominent authors have explicitly espoused the value of artistic freedom from religious, ideological and social constraints. This value has generally been recognized as a central feature post-Romantic aesthetic theories since their emergence in early nineteenth century Europe. It is indeed a value that is often regarded as intrinsic to modern literary expression. Nevertheless, there have been frequent attempts to modify the fundamental notions of post-Romantic aesthetics so as to contain them within a social and political ideological framework. This is seen, for example, in a number of varieties of Marxist aesthetics. Surprisingly, such attempts to fashion an Islamic aesthetic theory are relatively rare among Muslim intellectuals who call for an Islamic social order. This is surpising because such intellectuals have taken post-Romantic aesthetic concepts as the basis of their critiques of European modernity and their visions of an Islamic order. A case in point is the prominent Egyptian Islamist, Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966), who was a widely-published literary writer in the 1930’s and 1940’s and avowed disciple of the major Egyptian literary figure Abbas Mahmud al-Aqqad. Sayyid Qutb fashioned his aesthetic notions into a radical Islamist political and social vision, but did not elaborate any worked-out Islamic aesthetics. He left this task to his brother, Muhammad Qutb (b. 1919), a key disciple of Sayyid Qutb and a prominent Islamist figure in his own right. Muhammad Qutb’s work Manhaj al-Fann al-Islami (The Method of Islamic Art), and his later literary critical writings, represent one of the few comprehensive attempts to elaborate an Islamic aesthetics. This paper examines Qutb’s aesthetic theory and the manner in which it seeks to fashion a purported Islamic world-view that comprehends and at the same time delimits Romantic aestheticism. The paper will argue that Qutb’s Islamic aesthetic theory is a modification of mainstream secular aesthetic theories and thus attempts to gain legitimacy through its common basis with these theories.

This paper explores the role of Islam in Robin Yassin-Kassab’s 2008 novel The Road From Damascus. This novel address the role of Islam in the Arab and Muslim identity in the West. Contrary to Pierre Cachia’s argument, this novel illustrates the role of Islam in the configuration of Arab Muslim identity. Specifically, I will trace how this novel challenges Islam as a construct and dogma and offers a reconfiguration of Islam that mirrors the multiple manifestations of Muslim identity and of Islam as a lived faith. The novel engages the question of identity through the use of Islam as a framing device. In the novel, Islam emerges as an important factor in the constitution of individual and collective identity. However, it challenges the configuration of Islam as a construct that is employed in the service of political and social aims and does not reflect the lived experiences of the faith. The Road From Damascus traces multiple manifestations of the faith and the way in which it is negotiated and renegotiated across time and in response to the life experiences of the various characters. The Road From Damascus revolves around questions of representation in the contemporary setting where globalization has brought different cultural worldviews into contact, at times producing dialogue and constructive exchange and at other times leading to discernible violence, engendering a more pronounced sense of alienation and exclusion. Arabs and Muslims living in the West, in particular, face this challenge. In the novel, Islam, as a religious identity, offers a space to configure a narrative of self that addresses this sense of alienation and produces a more complex sense of belonging. This text expresses the ways in which one aspect of an identity, in this paper a religious identity, is part of a larger constellation of relationships, to borrow from Margaret R. Somers. Examining identity through this lens provides a conduit to explore and deconstruct boundaries and to call for a process of mutual recognition. I will trace how this novel utilizes Islam as an organizing principle to negotiate and construct narratives of self that counter those that have been constructed for and against Arabs and Muslims.

When ‘Al? A?mad B?k?th?r’s novel al-Th?’r al-A?mar [The Red Revolutionary] was published in Egypt in 1949, the author added the anachronistic subtitle “A Tale of Conflict between Capitalism and Communism in K?fa,” thus confirming the political underpinnings of his text. Written at a time of conflicting views over Egypt’s political future as the country nears decolonization and approaches self-rule, B?k?th?r’s novel dwells on a specific event in Islamic history, namely, the Qar?mita movement of 899/278. The novel revisits the historical event and stages it as a narrative tool for critiquing/ironizing existing Western ideologies as optional systems of government in Egypt. This paper investigates both the textual and contextual significance of B?k?th?r’s work, with particular reference to the use of the novel genre as a vehicle for political critique as well as propaganda for an altogether different ideology. Situating the novel in the sub-genre tradition of the Bildungsroman, which focuses on the growth of the individual through a series of mistakes and disappointments, this paper interrogates the political development of B?k?th?r’s protagonist, ?amd?n Qarmat, and his final discovery. At the end of the novel, ?amd?n, who begins his journey as a communist ideologue, comes to the realization that both Capitalism and Communism are inadequate political systems on all levels, politically, economically, and socially, and that Islam is the only successful solution. Peppered with Quranic verses that B?k?th?r uses as epigraphs and not necessarily as semantic agents to advance the plot or inform the narrative, the novel ends with Islam prevailing the land as the most suitable governing system for comprehensive justice on earth. Some of the questions this paper will address include the following: How persuasive is B?k?th?r’s narrative in debunking those particular systems of rule vis a vis Islam? To what extent does the novel succeed in promoting Islam as a triumphant imaginary and a more valid system of government, especially in relationship to questions of social equity and comprehensive justice? Is B?k?th?r alone in this inspirational call for the application of Islam as a system of rule, as Cachia remarks in his essay on the “Faintness of Islamic Inspiration in Modern Arabic Literature”? Or does the novel instead constitute a socially symbolic act in a larger meta-narrative of competing ideologies in Egypt in the age of decolonization?