Postsecular Pilgrimage in Malek Bennabi’s Lebbeik: pèlerinage de pauvres and Abdelkébir Khatibi’s Pèlerinage d’un artiste amoureux

Abstract

This paper explores representations of the Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca in two North African literary texts, Malek Bennabi’s Lebbeik (1947) and Abdelkébir Khatibi’s Pèlerinage d’un artiste amoureux (2003). It considers the divergent ways in which pilgrimage is used to explore the place of both literature and religion, as well as their interrelation, when it comes to working out ethics and values on individual and collective levels in Bennabi’s late-colonial Algeria, and Khatibi’s postcolonial Morocco. Drawing on Alain Badiou’s notion of the event as an occurrence that is retrospectively determined to have disrupted the status quo, and contrasting this with Derek Attridge’s idea of literature as a disruptive event with indeterminate outcomes, I consider the different ways in which both the pilgrimage and the narratives representing it can be seen as events, implicitly imparting reflections and even teachings on life and how to approach it in both texts.