The rise of authoritarianism today requires a comparative investigation of the tropes of political authority and models of subjectivity. From Cronus to the Leviathan, from the rise of fascism in Europe in the Twenties to the taghawwul (becoming ghoul) of contemporary Arab regimes, no understanding of current transformations could do away with myth, the literary, iconography, and technologies of the self, the other, and the state. Moreover, the digital age has opened a portal into rare and ancient texts and searchable medieval lexicons (digital humanities) but has also unleashed mythical creatures, video games, and drone warfare. In both cases, modes of interpellation and acts of reading and viewing have generated unparalleled anxieties and fears of losing oneself in the text or the screen, and of losing one’s life or freedom. It is in this light that I turn to the figure of the ghoul, tracing its development in Arabic folk tales and literary narratives from pre-Islamic Arabia to its usages today. I engage the ghoul simultaneously as a shape-shifting demon that lured and devoured travelers in ancient Arabia, as a process and a function of perverse fascination that characterizes contemporary viewing and reading practices, and as an embodiment of political transformations in the Arab world from the devouring state to the revolution that devours its children.

The siege of al-Fil [The Elephant], recounted in Qur’an 105, presents a cornucopia of encounters between marvelous strangers (beasts and foreign peoples) upon a holy land. It is spectacularly rendered in a manuscript illustration, today in the Special Collection of Oriental Manuscripts of the University of Saint Andrews (Ms. 32O). This Persian language manuscript, a compilation of two books translated from Arabic on the wonders of creation, was probably illustrated in India in the late seventeenth century. The illustration of the battle is organized concentrically, centering around a black square which we recognize as the Ka‘aba within a monumental Persianate mosque. Circumambulating around the mosque are eight elephants, their gaze fixedly upon the Ka‘aba. The elephants are surrounded by birds, some of them translucent rendering them particularly other-worldly. Surat ‘Al-Fil’ represents a telling episode in the history of Pre-Islamic Arabia, and in the history of the Ka‘aba as a building and as a central image in the Islamic faith. With the sole exception of the Elephant all recognizable land animals in the Qur’an are native to the varied geographies of the Peninsula. The Elephant’s exceptional nature is central for its operation as a marvelous animal, destabilizing meanings and assumptions. The Elephant illustration from this manuscript potentially invites the viewer to reflect upon meanings of devotion and obedience to the divine sovereign whilst simultaneously evoking the horrible consequences and high penalty of apostasy.

The paper examines the proliferation of monsters, human-animal hybrids, and physical and mental deformity in the recent dystopian fiction of three Egyptian authors: Ahmed Naje, Mohammad Rabie, and Youssef Rakha. In three novels – Book of the Sultan’s Seal (2011), Year of the Dragon (2012), and Using Life (2014) – anti-heroes with attitudes stand as hapless witnesses to the destruction or disfigurement of the city of Cairo. In addition to their shared reliance on apocalyptic narrative structures, vulgarisms of vocabulary and style, and tropes of conspiracy, the novels visualize extremities of urban decay and social and political corruption through striking, if sometimes cliched, images of monsters, humans, and creatures in-between. Three types of monsters loom large in these works: figurations of the state (the lion, the Leviathan, the dragon, rat), figurations of the public (zombies, animals, dogs, oversexed freaks), and figurations of external enemies. The paper analyses the process of figuration not merely as a strategic intertextual gesture (the borrowing of tropes from other works), but as a semi-conscious expression of anxieties related to personal and political agency. Many of these monstrosities, it is argued, channel what has been described as a “paranoid” (Sedgwick), “critical” (Felski), or suspicious concept of agency as a force that is wielded either in full and without obstruction (the omnipotent antagonist), or not at all (the browbeaten anti-hero). In other instances, hybrid creatures appear to offer alternative, more complex, entangled, or reparative conceptions of agency similar to the figurations (cyborgs, companion species, actor-networks) championed in recent theories of post-humanism.

This paper tracks the theme of inexplicable and unwanted inner compulsions in a sequence of Abbasid literary texts that claim to present a reasoned approach to life. In all three cases, irrational compulsions exceed the explanatory power of humoral ethics, and are intertwined with the distinction between humans and animals. This suggests an element to the Abbasid conception of human psychology that extended beyond the humoral and ethical categories that have been so far understood. 1) Kalila wa-Dimna uses animals to naturalize an ethics governed by self-interest and instrumental reason. This stands in contrast to the idiosyncratic, self-defeating, and irrational behavior of humans that needs to be corrected by taking animals as a model. The use of animal characters in animal scenarios serves to highlight the irrationality of the distinctively human behaviors they perform, positing what we might call “animal reason” as normative. 2) al-Jahiz’s animal dramas play out against this backdrop of ethical thought. He cites an anonymous party who argues that self-destructive animals are monstrous and terrifying - and linked to category exceptions. This view follows the logic outlined in Kalila wa-Dimna, that compulsions and idiosyncracies ought to be the exclusive domain of humans. But this question of self-destructive behavior seems to be less of an issue for al-Jahiz himself, who rejects these claims of monstrosity and doesn't engage in questions about deviations from “animal reason.” For him, the exceptional behaviors of individual animals are comparable to the exceptional behaviors and features of species, all of which contribute to Creation’s balance between pattern and exception. Instead, the frightening and uncontrolled element in human behavior lies, for al-Jahiz, in language. This analysis draws on and expands T?riq al-Nu?m?n’s comments on the introduction to al-Jahiz’s Kit?b al-Bay?n wal-Taby?n. 3) Al-Tanukhi recounts the story of the courtier who stole a yellow carpet from the caliph and got away with it because he suffered from a compulsive kleptomania for all things yellow. This is one of several stories of astonishing compulsions recounted by al-Tanukhi, making it a particular theme in his work. Al-Tanukhi, however, reverses the relation of compulsions to the human from the approach taken in Kal?la wa-Dimna, for al-Tanukhi’s compulsives become animal-like when pushed to the extreme. Yet this is not the animality of herd animals or wild beasts, but rather the monstrous animality of the too-human creatures described by al-Jahiz's anonymous party.