Narrating Transcendence in the Modern Novel
This chapter analyzes novels of Islamic spirituality written since 1960 through the lens of the barzakh, a Qur'ānic trope that signifies a third space where opposites meet yet remain separate. Several authors—the Libyan Ibrāhīm al-Kūnī, the French J.M.G. Le Clezio, the Egyptian Gamāl al-Ghītanī, the Turkish Elif Shafak, Sinan Yagmur, and Sadik Yalsizucanlar, and the American Irving Karchmar—have all turned the barzakh into a spiritual habitus for their characters. This chapter focuses in particular on two novelistic approaches to Islamic spirituality: hagiographical and experiential. In both cases, the novels gesture beyond their endings to new openings, which are also persistent searches for meaning. These novelists have sacralized the secular novel genre in order to explore the spiritual experience through biographies of Muslim spiritual exemplars and also through quest narratives. How do these contemporary Islamic novels resist the kind of closure characteristic of the genre?
