e-Guest Lecture: Ewa Lukaszyk

Islamic legacies in the contemporary Euro-Mediterranean literature

Prof. Ewa Lukaszyk is fellow-in-residence at CY AS, invited by laboratory AGORA

L'Insoumise de la Porte de Flandre, a novel published by Fouad Laroui in 2017, features Fati, a university student who rebels against the gender constraints imposed upon her as a young female. In order to legitimise her transgression, she returns, among other instances, to the figure of Rābiʿa al-ʿAdawiyya, an 8^th c. Sufi mystic, to whom the tradition attributes the endeavour of questioning the validity of gender identities and rigid, automatised behaviours derived from male-female identifications. The novel exemplifies the contemporary Euro-Mediterranean literature, a complex, multilingual body of writings created at the crossroad of diverse North-African / Middle-Eastern origins and European modernity. Not infrequently, the return to Islamic legacies implies a privileged vision of mystical Islam, or Sufism, treated as a pacifist counterweight to aggressive, political understanding of Islam. The specific rules of literary fiction justify a frequent revalorisation of heritages and distortion of historical facts, that tend to contradict the thesis on the essential divide between mystical Islam and politics.

Date: January 7, 2021 from 12:30 to 14:00

The video is online on  CY AS YouTube Channel