In this paper we will examine how religious literature in Ottoman Egypt (16th–19th century), in continuity with the production of the Mamluk period, contributed to celebrate the geographical boundary in order to claim the lost centrality of Egypt, at that time a province of the Ottoman Empire. We will focus on genres and themes of this literature, which has intensified a feeling of belonging to the land that has influenced the nationalist thought emerged in the Nahḍa. In particular we will draw attention to Sufi literature, such as ṭabaqāt, manāqib and devotional treatises. These genres enhanced the strength of Egypt by celebrating the unicity of its religious landscape and the utmost powers of its saints. How has the geographical boundary been rewritten in the religious literature of the Ottoman period?
In a large part of his literary production, the Egyptian novelist Jamāl al-Ghīṭānī (1945-2015) aimed at rewriting the Arabic literary heritage in order to contest the Western novel hegemony and criticising Gamal Abdel Nasser (Jamāl ʿAbd al-Nāṣir) and Anwar Sadat’s (Anwar al-Sādāt) authoritarianism. In this study we will analyse his novel Khiṭaṭ al-Ghīṭānī (1981), in which the author narrates the police state and the free market economy applying the spatial organization of the Arab-Islamic genre of topographical history (khiṭaṭ). The novel is built around the theme of journalism as one of the most powerful means of a totalitarian regime. We will focus upon some relevant features of this work, such as the relation with its premodern architext, the postmodern dimension, the construction of spatial politics in the novel, the dystopian lens through which the author criticises Sadat’s policies, the revolutionary role of Sufism and art. All of these strategies are instrumental to the representation of the oppressive power and also present a challenge to it. Through this novel the author deconstructs the dominant view of history as objective and factual. Keywords: Khiṭaṭ, Jamāl al-Ghīṭānī, urban geography, authoritarianism, turāth, dystopia, Sufism
Al-Ḥusayn b. ʿAlī is a hero of the Islamic history who stands against the oppressor for the sake of justice. His tragic death has been a major theme in Shiʿi literature, but he is highly esteemed also in Sunni Islam, especially in Egypt. This paper aims to present the other – less known – al-Ḥusayn through the literary representations made by Egyptian writers of the 20th and 21st centuries, who have read this transhistorical figure according to the political and social environment that they lived in. The martyr has become eternal symbol of resistance and struggle and a narrative lens to talk freely about the political events that upset Republican Egypt.
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