{"id":35669,"date":"2026-02-13T15:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-02-13T14:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pluriel.fuce.eu\/videos\/hospitality-power-and-interreligious-dialogue-in-naguib-mahfouzs-children-of-the-alley\/"},"modified":"2026-07-25T08:10:57","modified_gmt":"2026-07-25T07:10:57","slug":"hospitality-power-and-interreligious-dialogue-in-naguib-mahfouzs-children-of-the-alley","status":"publish","type":"videos","link":"https:\/\/pluriel.fuce.eu\/en\/videos\/hospitality-power-and-interreligious-dialogue-in-naguib-mahfouzs-children-of-the-alley\/","title":{"rendered":"Hospitality, power and interreligious dialogue in Naguib Mahfouz’s “Children of the Alley”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Paper presented at the fifth 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”. Gabriel Khairallah<\/strong> (Saint Joseph University, Beirut) spoke as part of Theme 3 \u2014 Aesthetic and ethical heritages: tensions, dialogues and hospitality.<\/em><\/p>\n

Summary of the paper<\/h3>\n

In Children of the Alley<\/em>, Naguib Mahfouz uses allegory in creating an artistic work that interrogates the tensions between aesthetics, power and ethics in a plural religious context. The work \u2014 at once “religious” and political \u2014 proposes a rereading of the monotheisms through the figure of the father (Gabalawi, who represents God) and of his descendants, who represent in turn prophetic figures (Gabal \/ Moses, Rifaa \/ Jesus and Qassim \/ Muhammad). This narrative structure offers a space of symbolic hospitality in which Judaism, Christianity and Islam coexist.<\/p>\n

The novel thus becomes a place of interreligious encounter: by drawing on the “sacred books” of the monotheistic religions, Mahfouz establishes between them a kind of common denominator, particularly around the questions of justice and violence. Literary aesthetics is thus used as an ethical tool that criticises politico-religious dominations and calls them to be questioned. This transgression is highlighted by the revolts led by the three major prophetic figures of the novel in order to liberate the population of the Medina from the yoke of political tyranny, embodied by the figures of the steward and of the futtuwas<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Mahfouz’s novel thus articulates ethics and aesthetics in a quest for a more just Arab-Muslim society that protects its most vulnerable citizens. This articulation also aims at the writing of history in order to provide citizens with a living and interpretative memory capable of making them masters of their destiny. Mahfouz’s novel thereby reveals that the interlacing of aesthetics and ethics appears, more than ever, as a duty and a necessity for Arab-Muslim societies.<\/p>\n

\nRead the panel synthesis by Fr. Mina-Athanase Abdelmeseh Said O.P.<\/summary>\n
\n

This synthesis was written in the aftermath of the congress by Fr. Mina-Athanase Abdelmeseh Said, O.P.<\/strong>, under the Pluriel student-fellowship programme. Originally written in Arabic, it covers all three papers of the panel.<\/em><\/p>\n

Literature, Sufi journey and interreligious dialogue: the barzakh as a third space<\/h4>\n

The panel, gathering the papers of Beate Bengard, Gabriel Khairallah and Maria Gracia L\u00f3pez Anguita, examined the way in which ethics and aesthetics are interwoven within Islamic heritage through the study of the contemporary novel and of the Sufi travel narrative, underlining the capacity of these literary productions to foster interreligious dialogue and the understanding of shared values. Literature emerged there as a means of expression for grasping the human being, his relation to the world in which he lives, his position in relation to the divine and the universal, as well as for exploring questions of social justice, of collective historical memory and of spiritual contemplation. These works open onto a rereading of history, onto a reflection on violence and hospitality, and thus permit an integrated reading of the ethical and aesthetic dimensions that weave the relation between God, the human being and the world.<\/p>\n

The scientific coherence of the panel rests on a common approach that refuses to reduce religious traditions to a strictly doctrinal reading and that on the contrary values the analysis of literary forms as bearers of theological and ethical meaning. Despite the diversity of the corpora studied \u2014 from the contemporary novel through modern literature and on to the pre-modern Sufi travel narrative \u2014 the three papers converge on a single question: that of the critical, dialogical and hermeneutic potentialities of aesthetics in societies marked by religious and communal plurality and by historical conflicts. All three brought to light the decisive role of aesthetics as an intermediate space linking ethical reflection and theological questioning. In D\u017eevad Karahasan, eschatological symbolism serves to grasp historical catastrophes such as the siege of Sarajevo: places become “reservoirs of souls” gathering the dead in a scene reflecting the duty of ethical and spiritual memory, and reveal the barzakh<\/em> as a space of communication between the living and the dead, as a third place of spiritual knowledge. Likewise, in Awl\u0101d \u1e24\u0101ratin\u0101<\/em> (Children of the Alley<\/em>) by Naguib Mahfouz, allegorical narrative becomes a philosophical and literary tool for thinking power, justice and aggression: Gabalawi represents the higher authority in the world, violence and injustice remain objects of moral meditation, while symbolism allows one to explore indirectly the relation between the human and the divine world. As for the travels of \u02bfAbd al-Ghan\u012b al-N\u0101bulus\u012b, they bring nature and religious architecture \u2014 in their confessional diversity \u2014 to appear as texts open to Sufi contemplation, linking the sensible and the metaphysical and opening the horizon of a spiritual experience reflecting the unity of being (wa\u1e25dat al-wuj\u016bd<\/em>) and the possibility of grasping the divine truth through aesthetics.<\/p>\n

The rereading of history and of violence forms one of the panel’s transversal axes. The papers mobilised symbolic forms to analyse historical crises. In Karahasan’s philosophy, catastrophes are understood as moments of suspension of time for the dead, and memory becomes the only means of preventing the spiritual and social decomposition of the city, connecting personal and collective history to the spiritual world. In Mahfouz, narrative metaphors become a critique of political and religious dominations: they show how each generation reproduces the same conflicts, insisting on the ethical challenges of the practice of justice. Through N\u0101bulus\u012b’s travels, landscapes and edifices are reinterpreted as stations of teaching and spirituality, and collective history is revisited according to a symbolic perspective that mingles Sufi experience and ethical experience.<\/p>\n

The papers converge in recognising that aesthetics open a space of dialogue between religions, not at the level of doctrinal comparison but through shared hermeneutic experience. Biblical and Christian figures and the common sacred appear, in the literary works, as means of transcending confessionalism while preserving difference \u2014 which opens the possibility of a spiritual dialogue that transcends explicit theological opposition. The papers showed the difficulty of dialogue on the “last things” because of the gap between Islamic and Christian conceptions of the hereafter: for example, the understanding of the Last Judgement or of the soul, in which the position of Protestant Christianity differs from the Islamic conception of the last reality. Yet the three works affirm the possibility of reaching a mutual respect and recognition between these two visions, and present a vision of the other as an integral part of an ethical and aesthetic understanding of the world and of the hereafter.<\/p>\n

The exchanges brought to light the fact that the dialogical efficacy of these literary productions is not only a cognitive or pedagogical function: it is a continuous hermeneutic experience that places the reader before ethical and spiritual questionings bearing on justice, memory and the relation to the other \u2014 while reinforcing mutual respect between the Christian and Islamic visions of the hereafter, without seeking to reduce or to efface the theological differences. Beyond a descriptive presentation, the panel produced important theoretical conclusions: an anthropology of place (the city, in Karahasan, redefined as a spiritual entity, a “reservoir of souls” that exceeds mere material existence); a philosophy of narrative (the symbolism of Mahfouz transforms the alley from a mere geographical space into an axiological laboratory for examining the dialectic of justice and power); and an aesthetic dialogue as an alternative to doctrine (the Sufi experience in N\u0101bulus\u012b as a path of civilisational communication with the other, through the aesthetic and spiritual common ground rather than direct doctrinal confrontation). Its limits lie in a focus on hermeneutic and philosophical dimensions without addressing the articulation of these texts with the everyday of today’s reader, and in the restriction of the corpus to chosen examples (Bosnian, modern Arabic, classical travel literature).<\/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":45},"video_collection":[854],"class_list":["post-35669","videos","type-videos","status-publish","hentry","video_collection-congres-de-cordoue-2026"],"date_tournage":"","yoast_head":"\nHospitality, power and interreligious dialogue in Naguib Mahfouz's "Children of the Alley" - 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\/hospitality-power-and-interreligious-dialogue-in-naguib-mahfouzs-children-of-the-alley\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Hospitality, power and interreligious dialogue in Naguib Mahfouz's "Children of the Alley" - Pluriel\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Paper presented at the fifth 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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