(Re-)Configurations of Islam in the Development of the Arabic Novel: Case Studies from Egypt and Kuwait

Abstract

: The existence of Islam in the Arabic novel is bound within epistemo-logical constraints inscribed in the very form of the genre, and therefore trans-cends the contents of specific works. As one of the most distinctive expressions of modernity in the Arab world, the novel constitutes a meaningful locus to study the way Islam has been re-configured in relationship to some of the major intellectual debates that have swept through the Arab territories during the 20 th and the beginning of the 21 st century. This chapter examines the synchronic, diachronic and translocal dimensions of this process of reconfiguration, with a particular focus on the relationship between Islam and nationalism in Egypt and Kuwait. In the same way that society came to be understood as a distinct and abstract field of hu-man knowledge constructed around a subject/object relationship, so the act of narration itself came to reproduce the split implied in this new ontology. The narrator was no longer the custodian and transmitter of an accumulated civilization or turath (…). The new narrator was rather an individual standing ‘outside’ the collectivity, observing it, describing it, narrating it, not as a communal historian but from a position that embodied a subjective but nonetheless authoritative and hegemonic point of view (…). The act of narration thus came to embody a slippery relationship between the narrating subject and the ambiguous, abstract collectivity defined as ‘society’ which represents a putative national reality. 10