Writing as Re-enchantment: The Arabic and Turkish Novel’s Neo-Sufi Response to Secular Modernity

This study examines the revival of Sufism in the Arabic and Turkish novel during the second half of the 20th century. A picture is drawn where Sufism forms a main source of literary inspiration and becomes a mode to establish continuity with the past. Sufism is in this context not solely a passively transmitted cultural artifact; it quite the contrary becomes a major instrument to construct identity and meaning to a post-industrial society. In this respect, the act of writing becomes prayer of a sort; storytelling enables the Self to rest from the dreary political realities of authoritarian modernist ideologies. Thus, writing, in contrast to reason-driven, materialist, modernity becomes meaningful and enables the Self to connect with something beyond immanent reality; in one word, writing becomes “re-enchantment”.