Early in 2013 Ibrahim ??ssa published his Booker prize winning novel Mawl?n? depicting a controversial image of the figure of the shaykh. ??ssa’s novel tackles important themes about the relationship between religious authority and the media in post-revolutionary Egypt. It illustrates a drastic transformation in the role of a figure such as that of the shyakh in the age of satellite channels. Although the relationship between intellectuals, the religious establishment and the public sphere in modern Egypt extends back to the19th century when the printing press was introduced, in ??ssa’s novel this relationship is complicated by the intervention of satellite channels and mass mediation. The novel’s themes and treatment of the figure of the shaykh raises questions about the role of mass media in forging the relationship between religious authority and public intellectuals. ??ssa’s award winning novel is representative of a new trend in literary writing in post- revolutionary Egypt that exploit the relationship between religious authority, mass media and the public sphere. In my presentation I will give an analysis of ??ssa’s award winning novel by situating it in relation to a long tradition of writing where religious and literary authority were not necessarily conflicting forces in the public sphere. For it was in the nineteenth and early twentieth century that the shyoukh of al- azhar played a major role as public intellectuals whose work synthesized religious and secular themes. I will illustrate how ?Issa’s novel exposes the transformations that occurred as a result of the expansive reach of mass media into the public sphere in Egypt. Bearing in mind that Ibrahim ??ssa’s novel is representative of a recent trend in literary writing I will attempt to answer the following questions: What rhetorical conventions does ??ssa use in his novel to reflect the social transformation that occurred to figures of authority in Egypt? And what are the forces behind the novel’s remarkable success in post-revolutionary Egypt?

Though he was writing more than fifty years earlier, the Tunisian littérateur Mahmud al-Mas'adi (d. 2004) offers an intriguing answer to the question posed by Edward Said in his penultimate Reith Lecture in 1993, namely, how to ‘speak truth to power.’ Much earlier, Taha Husayn weighed in on a discussion that emerged around al-Mas'adi’s play Al-Sudd (The Dam), written during the years 1939-1940. He called the work an example of the ‘Islamicization of existentialism,’ driven by resistance to colonialism and influenced by the French thinkers Albert Camus (d. 1960) and Jean-Paul Sartre (d.1980). However, al-Mas'adi denied these claims, attributing Husayn’s response to a willful misreading of the text. I investigate this debate through a reading of not only the directly related sources (Husayn’s initial review, al-Mas'adi’s response, and Husayn’s final retort, along with Al-Sudd itself) but also al-Mas'adi’s other literary works from the period, Haddatha Abu Hurayrah qal (Thus Spake Abu Hurayrah) and Mawlid al-nisyan (The Birth of Forgetting). Additionally, I integrate al-Mas'adi’s later critical work into this reading because it offers further explanation of the philosophical project put forward in al-Sudd. This investigation suggests an alternative source of influence on al-Mas'adi located in the work of the Russian Christian existentialist Nikolai Berdyaev (d. 1948) and defined by two necessary elements: idrak (consciousness) and fi'l (action). These two elements are directly represented by the characters of al-Sudd, each of them fully embodying one and completely refusing the other. Previous critical work has primarily focused on the role of the main character in the play, a man named Ghaylan, who is a champion of action, creation (khalq), and renewal (tajdid) in the world. However, scholars have neglected to investigate the opposing role of Ghaylan’s female companion, Maymunah, who exemplifies the other necessary element of productive existence, consciousness. In addressing al-Mas'adi’s additional literary and critical work, it becomes clear that he believes the path of resistance and growth can only be taken by one who operates with both of these essential elements. Al-Mas'adi explains his philosophy most clearly in his closing address to the 1964 Symposium on the Role of the Intellectual in a Developing Society entitled Risalat al-muthaqqaf fi al-mujtama' al-nami (“The Mission of the Intellectual in the Developing World”). Throughout the paper, I offer translations of key passages of this talk that guide my analysis of al-Sudd’s philosophical framework.

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.

In the last 15 years, Nazan Bekiroglu has captured the attention of Turkish literary critics and soul-searching readers with her poetic reworking of Qur’anic stories key to classic Sufi literature and her exploration of key spaces in Ottoman and ancient Anatolian history via unusual narrative perpectives. Bekiroglu’s best-selling version of the story of Yûsuf and Züleyha, first published in 2002, draws upon a long tradition of tasavvuf literature, including Molla Câmi’s Yusuf u Züleyha; however, I will argue in this paper that this text’s guiding structure, multiplicity of perspective, meta-narrative elements, and reliance upon word play render it a highly self-referential postmodern text, one that engages the contemporary reader by placing him/her alternatively “inside” and “outside the moment”. In other words, Bekiroglu’s Yûsuf ile Züleyha’s resonance with Turkish readers today derives not only from the text’s re-exploration of “timeless themes” – dreams, fate, love, death, beauty, treachery, sorrow, jealousy, estrangement and homecoming, separation and union, etc. – but also from the way in which already known paths of exploring those themes are referenced and classical motifs, varied and played upon in order to highlight commonalities and differences in historical and contemporary human experience. My analysis of Bekiroglu’s use of narrative frame(s), shifting perspectives, imagery, poetic word play, and historical and literary references will cross-reference Qur’anic and Biblical versions of the Yusuf/Joseph story as well as selected, influential Persian and Turkish versions of the tale, focusing primarily on differences in narrative structure, sequencing and symbolic loci, in an attempt to show what is original and striking in this contemporary Turkish author’s work. In closing, I will briefly discuss the related challenges to translating Bekiroglu’s novels and essays to English.

A constant feature of the literary history of Iran has been the enduring relationship between poetry and political power, something that has manifested itself across different historical epochs. The continuing political influence of poets throughout recorded history is what makes Iran a unique case study in the study of the social history of Middle Eastern literatures. During the medieval era, court poets often appeared as the close companions of the king, trading patronage for cultural legitimization insofar as their elegies and prosodies formed a source of counsel and moral guidance to the king. In the course of Constitutional Revolution, however, the role of poet dramatically changed from the companion of the king to his critical opponent. In contrast to the medieval period during which the poets were isolated from their social context and confined in the court, the literati of the late Qajar and the early constitutional period not only sought to re-connect with broader Iranian society, but also were the first generation to take on more cosmopolitan influences by travelling widely throughout Europe and the greater middle east. The trend of poet as critic continued up to the rise of the Islamic revolution. In the post-revolutionary period, the relationship between poetry and politics changed again due to the emergence of a new revolutionary poetic trend on one side and the poetic interests and background of the two main revolutionary leaders on the other. In contrast to the Pahlavi era -when the Shah had shown no interest in the possibilities of poetry- the revolutionary leaders redefined literary commitment towards their own ideological interests through the founding of a state-run literary institution to promote ‘revolutionary literature’. The present paper attempts to offer an ethnographical study of the newly-emerged literary phenomenon in the post-revolutionary Iran, called ‘Annual Poetry Nights with the Supreme Leader’. After a brief introduction on the emergence of this annual literary feast and based on the interviews with organizers and attendants of these sessions, it will be argued that the institutionalization of poetry in post-revolutionary Iran, has given birth to a semi-court poetic trend both in terms of content and form. It will be further argued that the constant affinity displayed by leaders of the revolutionary state towards poetry, has made poetry a powerful tool both of resistance against and propagation of the current regime.