The Literary Qur'an

Winner 2020 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies Modern Language AssociationThe novel the literary adage has it reflects a world abandoned by God. Yet the possibilities of novelistic form and literary exegesis exceed the secularizing tendencies of contemporary literary criticism. Showing how the Qurʾan itself invites and enacts critical reading Hoda El Shakry’s Qurʾanic model of narratology enriches our understanding of literary sensibilities and practices in the Maghreb across Arabophone and Francophone traditions.The Literary Qurʾan mobilizes the Qurʾan’s formal narrative and rhetorical qualities alongside embodied and hermeneutical forms of Qurʾanic pedagogy to theorize modern Maghrebi literature. Challenging the canonization of secular modes of reading that occlude religious epistemes practices and intertexts it attends to literature as a site where the process of entextualization obscures ethical imperatives. Engaging with the Arab-Islamic tradition of adab―a concept demarcating the genre of belles lettres as well as social and moral comportment―El Shakry demonstrates how the critical pursuit of knowledge is inseparable from the spiritual cultivation of the self.Foregrounding form and praxis alike The Literary Qurʾan stages a series of pairings that invite paratactic readings across texts languages and literary canons. The book places twentieth-century novels by canonical Francophone writers (Abdelwahab Meddeb Assia Djebar Driss Chraïbi) into conversation with lesser-known Arabophone ones (Maḥmūd al-Masʿadī al-Ṭāhir Waṭṭār Muḥammad Barrāda). Theorizing the Qurʾan as a literary object process and model this interdisciplinary study blends literary and theological methodologies conceptual vocabularies and reading practices.