To Venerate Ruins or Remains

Incarnations Sufi and Secular in a Modern Egyptian Novella

Bibliographic Data

ID9251012
AuthorsSara Nimis Sara Nimis, Sara Nimis (corresponding author)
Year2017
Volume48
Issue2
Pages53
Publication date2017-01-01
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueResearch in African Literatures (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0034-5210 • E-ISSN: 1527-2044
PublisherIndiana University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.2979/reseafrilite.48.2.05
OpenAlexW2690361190
LanguageEN
References cited18

Salwa Bakr's novella Maqām 'Atiyya [The Shrine of 'Atiyya] (1986) dramatizes tensions between secular and religious appropriations of Egyptian heritage through a fictional dispute over rights to a burial site containing both ancient and modern remains. Read as engaging emancipatory elements of Islamic hagiographical traditions, and in light of theoretical concepts from philosophies of taṣawwuf (Sufism, or Islamic mysticism), the story presents antique devotional traditions of sainthood and mysticism not as constraining the critical imagination of believers, but as expressive of embodied modes of critique unimaginable from within a secular episteme. The disgust that bodies that transgress cultural categories and expectations inspire in modern sensibilities is inverted in Sufi philosophy, in which "unnatural" bodies are imagined as "supernatural," associated not only with bounty and community welfare, but with creativity and with independent moral action. Through this recasting of the relationship between individual agency and religious belief and practice, the novella repudiates the claim that secular institutions alone can protect individual creativity and agency

Aesthetics · Agency (philosophy) · Art · Epistemology · Islam · Literature · Mysticism · Novella · Sufism · Theology · Architecture and Cultural Influences · Education and Islamic Studies · History · Islamic Studies and History · Philosophy

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