{"id":35538,"date":"2026-02-12T14:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-02-12T13:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pluriel.fuce.eu\/videos\/sufi-ethics-and-dystopian-aesthetics-in-naguib-mahfouzs-the-journey-of-ibn-fattouma\/"},"modified":"2026-07-25T08:11:05","modified_gmt":"2026-07-25T07:11:05","slug":"sufi-ethics-and-dystopian-aesthetics-in-naguib-mahfouzs-the-journey-of-ibn-fattouma","status":"publish","type":"videos","link":"https:\/\/pluriel.fuce.eu\/en\/videos\/sufi-ethics-and-dystopian-aesthetics-in-naguib-mahfouzs-the-journey-of-ibn-fattouma\/","title":{"rendered":"Sufi ethics and dystopian aesthetics in Naguib Mahfouz’s The Journey of Ibn Fattouma"},"content":{"rendered":"

Paper presented at the 5th international congress of the University Platform for Research on Islam (Pluriel)<\/a>, held in Cordoba from 10 to 14 February 2026 on the theme “Ethics and Aesthetics in Islam”. Siham Amraoui<\/strong> (Graduate Center, City University of New York, CUNY) spoke as part of Strand 2, Aesthetics, ethics and everyday life: prohibitions, representations and practices.<\/em><\/p>\n

Summary of the paper<\/h3>\n

In Naguib Mahfouz’s The Journey of Ibn Fattouma<\/em>, Quindil undertakes an initiatory crossing through different kingdoms, each claiming to embody a model of the ideal society. This quest towards Dar al-Jabal, a utopian city never reached, belongs both to a Sufi Islamic imaginary and to a literary structure borrowing from the philosophical fable and the travel narrative.<\/p>\n

Through this fiction, Mahfouz builds a critique that is at once ethical and political: the societies Quindil explores each turn out to be corrupt utopias, where power appropriates the languages of virtue, freedom or faith the better to entrench its domination. The hero’s spiritual quest, inspired by the Sufi maq\u0101m\u0101t<\/em>, is diverted at every stage by dysfunctional institutional logics. Drawing on al-Ghazali’s teaching on inner purification (in I\u1e25y\u0101\u02be \u02bful\u016bm al-d\u012bn<\/em>) and Ibn \u02bfArabi’s on the progressive unveiling of truth (kashf<\/em>), the journey can be read as an allegory of the tension between ethical wayfaring and political obstruction. The aesthetics of the narrative, allegorical, symbolic and circular, allows the classical Islamic heritage to converse with the modern forms of the dystopian novel, and gives the text its critical force: it reveals how political institutions divert or betray the spiritual finalities of Islam.<\/p>\n

\nRead the panel synthesis by Chadia Gueddara<\/summary>\n
\n

This synthesis was written in the aftermath of the congress by Chadia Gueddara<\/strong> (EHESS), under the Pluriel student-fellowship programme. It covers all three papers of the panel.<\/em><\/p>\n

Ethics, aesthetics and Islamic heritage in literature<\/h4>\n

Held on Thursday 12 February 2026 in Hall 2 and chaired by Ren\u00e9 Hattar, this panel displaced the reflection from the theological and mystical field towards the literary domain, by questioning the way in which fictional or poetic texts inherit, mobilise and sometimes subvert the ethical and aesthetic categories of Islam. Three transversal lines structure the papers taken together.<\/p>\n

The first is that of the tension between ethical ideal and institutional or political reality. Siham Amraoui (City University of New York), working from Naguib Mahfouz’s The Journey of Ibn Fattouma<\/em>, shows how Quindil’s initiatory itinerary \u2014 structured on the model of the Sufi maq\u0101m\u0101t<\/em> and oriented towards the utopian city of Dar al-Jabal \u2014 collides at each stage with societies that pervert the very values they proclaim. The spiritual quest, nourished by al-Ghaz\u0101l\u012b’s teaching on inner purification and by Ibn \u02bfArab\u012b’s on progressive unveiling (kashf<\/em>), thus becomes an allegory of the tension between ethical wayfaring and the corruption of the structures of power. This dialectic between mystical elevation and political dystopia constitutes the narrative engine of the novel. The second axis is literature as a space of transmission and interrogation of Islamic heritage. Noureddine Fadily (Settat University), through Najib Redouane’s Under the Sky of Oran<\/em>, approaches the novelistic space as a place where the religious practices, the rituals and the search for spiritual well-being of the characters are made visible. Anchored in the history of Algeria before and after colonisation, the novel makes Islamic heritage a guiding thread that allows the evolution of a society and its struggle to restore its values in the face of political crises to be grasped. Narrative aesthetics here becomes a mode of inquiry into the durability and the transformations of Islamic practices in a turbulent historical context. The third axis, more theoretical, is set out by Mohamed Ben Mansour (ENS Lyon): that of the relation between ethics and aesthetics in the medieval Arab critical tradition. Drawing on the theorists of poetry \u2014 Tha\u02bflab, Qud\u0101ma b. Ja\u02bffar, al-\u02bfAskar\u012b, \u02bfAbd al-Q\u0101hir al-Jurj\u0101n\u012b, Hazim al-Qartajann\u012b \u2014 and on the philosophers \u2014 al-Kind\u012b, al-F\u0101r\u0101b\u012b, Averroes, Avicenna, Miskawayh \u2014 Ben Mansour brings to light a permanent oscillation between the submission of aesthetic judgement to moral considerations and the affirmation of an autonomy of the poetic grounded in its own efficacy. This tension between ethical normativity and verbal pragmatics offers an illuminating theoretical framework for the two other papers.<\/p>\n

The papers mobilise distinct but complementary corpora. On the Sufi tradition side, one finds the maq\u0101m\u0101t<\/em> as an initiatory structure, Ibn \u02bfArab\u012b’s kashf<\/em> and al-Ghaz\u0101l\u012b’s inner purification. On the side of medieval Arab literary criticism, Ben Mansour draws on the notion of “normative fractals” \u2014 religious, logical, rhetorical \u2014 to give an account of the tensions underlying poetic theories. The notion of dystopian utopia, borrowed from literary modernity, is articulated in Amraoui with the classical Islamic imaginary to produce an original crossed reading. Finally, the question of Islamic heritage as an aesthetic object and vector of identity runs through the three papers, referring back to contemporary debates on memory, cultural transmission and resistance.<\/p>\n

Taken together, the three papers make a common question emerge: that of the status of Islamic heritage in the literary text \u2014 is it a normative horizon that the work illustrates or interrogates, or is it a living matter that writing reconfigures? In Mahfouz, the Sufi heritage functions as a critical counter-model: the maq\u0101m\u0101t<\/em> and the kashf<\/em> are not illustrated but turned around, brought into tension with the repeated failure of the hero. In Redouane, Islamic heritage is more a space of fragilised continuity, which the narration strives to preserve and transmit in a colonial and then postcolonial context. Ben Mansour, for his part, shows that this tension is already inscribed in the medieval theoretical tradition itself: Arabic poetic heritage was never monolithic, but was traversed throughout by the debate between moral law and the effectiveness of language. The panel thus draws an unexpected continuity between the medieval quarrel of the poetic and the ethical and the contemporary uses of Islamic heritage in the novel. The main contribution of this panel is to articulate two temporalities of reflection \u2014 medieval theory (Ben Mansour) and contemporary novelistic practice (Amraoui, Fadily) \u2014 thus showing the long duration of the tensions between ethics and aesthetics in Islamic culture. The question of reception \u2014 how contemporary readers, Muslim or not, read these texts in the light of Islamic heritage \u2014 remained open, and points to a track of research in the sociology of reading.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/details>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"date_tournage":"","lieu":"","nature_evenement":"","vt_type":"Conf\u00e9rence","vt_yt_views":133},"video_collection":[854],"class_list":["post-35538","videos","type-videos","status-publish","hentry","video_collection-congres-de-cordoue-2026"],"date_tournage":"","yoast_head":"\nSufi ethics and dystopian aesthetics in Naguib Mahfouz's The Journey of Ibn Fattouma - Pluriel<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/pluriel.fuce.eu\/en\/videos\/sufi-ethics-and-dystopian-aesthetics-in-naguib-mahfouzs-the-journey-of-ibn-fattouma\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Sufi ethics and dystopian aesthetics in Naguib Mahfouz's The Journey of Ibn Fattouma - Pluriel\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Paper presented at the 5th international congress of the University Platform for Research on Islam (Pluriel), held in Cordoba from 10 to 14 February 2026 on the theme “Ethics and Aesthetics in Islam”. 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