![]() ![]() Drawing from the 19th century Darwin debates in the Arabic-language journal, al-Muqtataf, I focus on Mahfouz's re-reading of these episodes in his novel. The richly philosophical novel unravels the problem of understanding, torn between the authority of the Quran and the literacy of a modern education. ![]() This discussion highlights alternate conceptions of knowledge and authority, not all of which are based on an empirical observation of the world, and it questions not only how to read properly, but how to critique and correct what is supposedly misunderstood. My analysis addresses the terms of a tense debate within a family about how to understand the son's publication of an article on Darwin. While literary scholars have discussed realism in relation to what George Levine describes as "natural theology" or as part of a larger secularizing discourse of Victorian England, I consider how Mahfouz’s novel stages the tension between natural science and Islamic conceptions of the world's origin. The article focuses on a passage from Palace of Desire, a realist novel by the Egyptian writer, Naguib Mahfouz, and investigates how realism mediates the relation between scientific universalism and religious knowledge. ![]()
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