Politics, Poetics, Piety

The Epilogue returns to novelist and critic Maḥmud Al-Masʿadī, to discuss his 1957 epistolary exchange with the Egyptian critic and writer Ṭāhā Ḥusayn—the figurehead par excellence of the nahḍa [Arab ‘Renaissance’] and Arab Modernist movement. Ḥusayn transposed al-Masʿadī’s fiction into the politically charged debates on literary commitment [engagement] and existentialism that preoccupied intellectuals across the decolonizing world. The exchange sheds light on the ways in which the elision of cultural production from the Maghreb in critical literature on the nahḍa works in concert with the framing of Arab modernity as a secular project. The chapter argues that al-Masʿadī’s literary and critical writings—like those of Abdelwahab Meddeb, al-Ṭāhir Waṭṭār, Assia Djebar, Driss Chraïbi, and Muḥammad Barrāda—invite us to reimagine the relationship between culture, politics, and ethics. Their works envision the public intellectual as an ethical subject engaged in narrative acts of creation.