The Secular Scripture

Abstract

This chapter continues to explore the interdependence and co-imbrication of the religious and secular, focusing now on mature Egyptian novels from the mid twentieth century. It explores Mahfuz’s famous trilogy (1956-7) and al-Sharqawi’s Al-Ard (1954) and Muhammad Rasul al-Hurriyya (1962) as different culminations of the secularisation process implied by nation formation, and the conflict and tension inherent therein, examining methods of religious displacement and othering, strategies of demystification, lines of religious critique, symbolic trajectories, as well as spiritual yearning, apologetics and theological conundrums as they appear in these works. The evidence is that, into maturity, as the secular aesthetic in the Egyptian novel stabilises, religious themes endure and religion remains a contested site.