Ghurba & Gendered Piety in Popular Religious Novels by Arab Women | Dr Hawraa al-Hassan
Ghurba & Gendered Piety in Popular Religious Novels by Arab Women | Dr Hawraa al-Hassan
This paper argues that the feeling of ghurba or is essential to the emergence of a pious consciousness in two popular religious novels of Arab women: Virtue Prevails (1969) by Amina al-Sadr and When a Man Thinks by Khawla al-Qazwini (1993). It contends that the disconnect felt by religious characters in Islamic novels vis a vis their families and society at large, is a necessary step towards forging a new identity established through personal and political connections with the wider Muslim umma. As a feeling of ‘unbelonging-ness’, rather than strictly a place, ghurba in one’s homeland can only be transcended (according to the texts) through the transnational bonds of brotherhood/sisterhood, allowing the individual to be embraced by a new and expansive family.
The ghurba felt by pious individuals often came as a direct result of the secularization of Arab society in the first half of the twentieth century, often through a direct political will that threatened religious establishments and the clerical elite. In Iraq, Amina al-Sadr, sister of Ayatollah Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr, was the first author to write didactic religious novels aimed at a newly literate female audience in an effort to combat what she saw as the threat of foreign ideas and values propagated by the Ba‘th. Other women authors, inspired by al-Sadr expanded on the themes of personal/political morality and capitalized on the demand for religious fiction after the Iranian revolution of 1979. Khawla al-Qazwini, a Kuwaiti author of Iraqi origin became prolific in her own right, and her 1993 novel was banned for its propagation of political Islam.
The paper ultimately argues that the feeling of ghurba is inseparable from the notion of political freedom, rather than being an exclusive symptom of religiosity in a modern secular world. Dr. Al-Hassan is an affiliated researcher with the University of Cambridge specializing in the modern Arab novel as a form of cultural history that intersects with the discourses of religion and nationalism. She is the author of Women, Writing and the Iraqi Ba’thist State (Edinburgh University Press, 2020) and recently contributed a piece on popular religious novels to an edited volume entitled Narratives of Dislocation in the Arab World: Rewriting Ghurba (Routledge, 2023). 0:00 Introduction: Modernity, Literature, and the Question of God 0:54 The Novel as a Modern Tool for Shaping Religious Perception 1:15 Iraq Under the Baʿth: Modernization, Secularization, and Women 2:04 Religious Fiction as Female Resistance 2:54 Origins of Shiʿi Religious Novels in Iraq 3:31 Ghurbah: Alienation and Not Belonging in a Modernized Society 5:02 Bint al-Huda and Virtue Prevails 8:57 Gender, Morality, and Reform Through Narrative 11:24 Post-1979 Shift: Political Religious Fiction and Exile 15:25 Conclusion: Ghurbah, Community, and the Novel as Counter-Modernity The views expressed in ICAIR’s public lectures do not necessarily reflect the views of ICAIR or the WFKSIMC.
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