The modern Arabic novel developed during a century of regional political disasters that impelled Arab authors to write novels with apocalyptic themes. My paper examines the apocalyptic elements that the Saudi writer ‘Abd al-Rahman Munif (1933-2004) and the Libyan writer Ibrahim al-Kuni (b. 1948) employ in their novels Mudun al-Milh: al-Tih (Cities of Salt, 1984) and Nazif al-Hajar (The Bleeding of the Stone, 1990). These novels depict the cataclysmic changes that the oil boom brought to traditional Arab societies; the fall of old social and natural orders and the rise of new ones; and messianic figures sacrificed as the new orders arise. Arab novelists such as Jabra Ibrahim Jabra and Najib Mahfuz used Christlike figures to convey self-sacrifice in an urban revolutionary context. I argue that Munif and Kuni repurposed the Tammuzis’ death-and-rebirth figure for the desert to accord with the oil boom’s transformation of traditional societies. Munif’s Cities of Salt tells of the catastrophic effect that the discovery of oil has on the people of Wadi al-‘Uyun, a village in an unnamed Arab country on the Persian Gulf. Four of the novel’s many characters announce the imminent end of the world. The character Mufaddi al-Jaddan, whose name means “redeemer,” is a local folk healer murdered by the new authorities who reappears to his followers in dreams and leads them in a final battle against the Americans. Kuni’s The Bleeding of the Stone tells of Asuf, a Bedouin boy whose family lives in the southern Libyan desert and has a sacred pact with the waddan, an endangered mountain sheep native to North Africa. Due to overhunting, the gazelle of the plains inhabits the waddans’ mountains, and locals interpret this reversal of the natural order as a sign of the apocalypse. The one waddan remaining is revealed to be the anthropomorphic Asuf, crucified and then ritually beheaded at the end of the novel. Mufaddi and Asuf must be understood in light of Arab writers’ use of Christian conceptions of Jesus. While Islamic eschatology understands Jesus as a conqueror whose return signifies the closeness of the Hour, Munif and Kuni employ a distinctly Christian Jesus: a savior and redeemer who “buys back” the community held captive by corrupt, foreign hands with his sacrifice. Mufaddi and Asuf must die so that their communities can be reborn. Munif and Kuni have thus repurposed the Tammuzis’ redeemer figure for the desert.

From its earliest examples in the nineteenth century onwards, the Turkish novel has always been concerned with social issues. As is generally known, the very emergence of the novel genre itself is interwoven with questions of modernisation practices and the “correct” way to become modern. Among the gamut of crises that the pursuit of modernity instigated, the problematic and unsettling individuation process is a key component of the narratives of Turkish modernisation. As Sibel Irz?k argues in “Allegorical Lives,” Turkish novelistic imagination has often been preoccupied with the lack of separation between public and personal selves. She provides a general psychoanalytical reading of novels such as Ahmet Hamdi Tanp?nar’s Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü (1954, The Time Regulation Institute, 2014), O?uz Atay’s Tutunamayanlar (1970-71, The Disconnected), and Adalet A?ao?lu’s Ölmeye Yatmak (Lying Down to Die, 1973). Many other novels portraying such entanglements of the public and personal selves can be similarly read from a psychoanalytical perspective. However, my intention is not to pursue such a line of inquiry. Instead I will focus on psychoanalysis itself as a contact point for the paralleling narratives of the encounters between societal modernisation and the traditional perceptions of selfhood. In some of the novels of the mid-twentieth century, certain concerns with the “self” in turmoil become manifest in portrayals of psychoanalysis as a subject of investigation and critique, particularly in regards to the tensions between the collective and the individual, the spiritual and the psychological senses of selfhood. I will examine works by Ahmet Hamdi Tanp?nar and Peyami Safa as representatives of a literary moment that epitomises the epistemological parley around the self-in-crisis along the lines of tradition vs. modernity. These two writers share similar critical perspectives on the problem of the modernising self. Yet, they follow differing paths that reveal a complex picture. The irony in Tanp?nar’s and the angst in Safa’s works, both equally invested and critical, convey how psychoanalysis becomes a significant topic of intellectual engagement. Their perspectives and stylistic choices on similar themes through psychoanalysis provide a valuable outlook on the intricate encounters between tradition and modernity. I will, thus, examine psychoanalysis as a key ideational contact zone in literary discussions of modernity and the self-in-crisis and discuss why psychoanalysis emerges as a potent counterpart of the discourses in “modernity vs. tradition.”

The fifth chapter of Sa‘di’s Golest?n, “On Love and Youth”, is arguably the most thought-provoking and aesthetically appealing section of the entire book: it is the virtual venue in which all the images, mores, and representations of human society—with its hierarchies of power and rules, along with the values that Sa‘di promotes—intersect and conflate to give birth to a dynamic representation of the possibilities of love and desire as anthropological overarching axes. With this paper I wish to analyze the intersections between poetry and prose in one particular story of the Golest?n’s fifth chapter as a means to investigate the relationship between geography and seduction in Sa‘di’s representations of desire from the perspective of the premodern literary tradition of Iran. The languid pseudo-biographical account of the encounter between Sa‘di and a young student of Arabic grammar in Kashgar has not yet received the critical attention that it deserves, not only because of the homoerotic content of the story, but also as a consequence of the misleading debates on the historiographical veracity of Sa‘di’s “confessions”. By combining the theoretical paradigms of Geocriticism, the performativity of the lyric voice, and Baudrillard’s theory on the reciprocity of seduction, I set out to explore the interaction between verse and prose in the story leading to the chaste farewell between the poet and his young object of desire.

Literature, poetry specifically, has always been a powerful tool in exploring the emotional and personal impact of tragedies in the lives of survivors. Poetry can play a significant role in sensitizing our ethical consciousness, through the rhetorical devices that poets use to convey their moral points of view as well as the historical events and horrors that occasioned their poetic imagination and reflection. In her book, The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt describes poetry as “the most human and the least worldly of the arts.” In light of the refugees crisis and the human tragedy unfolding in the Middle East and North Africa, and in Syria specifically, these few words about what poetry is, invite us to think about the relationship between poetry and human rights. One cannot but ask the question, how poetry, the most human of the arts, communicates human rights? And how it, as the least worldly of the arts, approaches them? Drawing upon the work of Hannah Ardent and scholars such as Ian Ward, Kerry Bystrom, among others, I propose to read the work of Jehan Bseiso and Becky Thompson, Making Mirrors: Writing/Righting by and for Refugees (2019) to show how poetry sheds light on moral, social, and historical tragedies. I will discuss the form, relevance, and timeliness of the book which comes as a plea against historical amnesia and inertia. In respect to the form of this collection, I will examine the way in which Arabic poetry, in particular, is making its way into world literature and, thus, transcending the geographical and national boundaries, in other words becoming both transnational and translational at once. I argue that, through their poetry, poets contribute to the goal of human rights education by heightening our awareness, increasing our sensibility, and challenging narratives that do not recognize the experiences of a common humanity. In this way, poetry can become a force to foster change.

Anthropologists of Islam (Samuli Schielke, Lara Deeb, and Saba Mahmood) recommend that in studying Muslim societies we need to examine “everyday” life experiences, “notably the ambivalence, the inconsistencies and the openness of people’s lives that never fit into the framework of a single tradition.” Drawing on such pluralistic interpretations of religiosity and community norms, this paper examines the way quotidian lives of young Middle Eastern couples, characterized by their ambivalences, tensions, and disillusionment, are dramatized in three plays from Egypt, Iran, and Syria. These plays indeed destabilize the stereotypes we often receive about the well-grounded modest Muslims who are capable of living a re-assured, self contented self (Nafs Al-Mutmainnah). My three case studies: Egyptian Products by Laila Soliman (Egypt, 2008), Dance on Glasses by Amir Reza Koohestani (Iran, 2001), and Withdrawal by Mohammad Al Attar (Syria 2008) all dramatize a true portrayal of tensions and vulnerabilities of young Middle Eastern men and women in their domestic setting and in moments of decision-making. Value crises, anxiety, miscommunication, sexual oppression, sense of entrapment, hesitation, ethical dilemmas, and withdrawal are common threads woven in the storyline of these plays that are all written by the new generation of Middle Eastern playwrights. Moreover, the plays’ new, vivid, and sharp language along with their unique poetic realism, pose important questions about what it means to live in today’s Middle East as a young artist and what ethical responsibilities artists have in caring for their selves and their societies. A comparative examination of the thematic and aesthetic features of these three plays also sheds light on the particularity and universality that young dramatists reveal in their artistic visions and practices. 1. Schielke, Samuli. “Second Thoughts about the Anthropology of Islam, or How to Make Sense of Grand Schemes in Everyday Life.” ZMO Working Papers 2, 2010.