Several surveys conducted over the past few years by the U.S.-based Pew Research Centre show a growing appeal of Islamist extremism in Malaysia. While absolute numbers may still point to Malaysian Muslims being generally unattracted to radical notions of Islam, some figures pointing in the opposite direction appear staggeringly high when compared to similar figures for Indonesia, particularly since the general impression, in view of the greater number of terrorist attacks in Indonesia, is that Indonesian Islam is much more radical than Malaysian Islam.

These figures have in fact been quoted by several commentators as a warning against the possibility of Malaysian Muslims gravitating towards Islamist violence as manifested by the likes of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS, also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), or simply the Islamic State (IS) or as Daesh, after its Arabic acronym) and Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) (cf. Raj 2015, Abuza 2016). Already hundreds of Malaysians are known to have joined Katibah Nusantara, the Malay-speaking chapter of ISIS in the Middle East (Chalk 2015, pp. 10–11, Muhammad Haziq and Jasminder 2016, Farrah Naz and Aliza 2016).

Much of the statistics is surprising. For example, proportionately fewer Malaysian Muslims (8 per cent) express worry about Muslim extremist groups than do Indonesian Muslims (53 per cent); the former are concerned more, at 31 per cent, about Christian extremists. And at 18 per cent, the proportion of Malaysian Muslims approving suicide bombing as justifiable is more than double the comparable figure of their Indonesian co-religionists, which is at 7 per cent (Pew Research Center 2013a: 68–71).

A later survey put Malaysian Muslims’ support for suicide bombing as often or sometimes justified at 27 per cent, as compared with the Indonesian figure of a mere 6 per cent (Pew Research Center 2013b). More Malaysian Muslims (11 per cent) also express a favourable view of ISIS than do Indonesian Muslims (4 per cent) (Poushter 2015). It is also telling that Malaysian Muslims greatly surpass their Indonesian counterparts in messianic fervour, with 62 per cent of the former in comparison to only 23 per cent of the latter expecting the redeemer Imam al-Mahdi's advent during their lifetime (Pew Research Center 2012, p. 65).

It is now time to draw together some of the main threads of this study, and to attempt a brief, overall summary and evaluation of Sonallah Ibrahim's novels to date. (I use the words ‘to date’ advisedly, as Sonallah Ibrahim is still writing and undoubtedly still has it in his power to surprise us – even though, realistically speaking, it may be doubted whether any future novels would be likely to radically change our overall evaluation of his work.)

We may first observe, by way of background to the forthcoming discussion, that if there is one single value that he himself regards as having dominated the whole of his literary activities, it is the devotion to ‘truth’ (‚idq), as exemplified in the quotation from Yawmiyyat al-Wahat at the head of this chapter. As Samia Mehrez observes, it was the question of ‘truth’ in relation to the writer that formed the central underlying theme of the George Antonius Lecture that he delivered in Oxford in April 2005;1 and it also figures prominently in the acceptance speech that he gave on receiving the Ibn Rushd Prize for Freedom of Thought for the year 2004 in Berlin2 – a speech that stands in marked contrast to the words with which he had rejected the Egyptian State novel prize the previous year. This devotion to ‘truth’ as the artist's prime motivation has also been clearly linked in the case of Sonallah Ibrahim himself with a strong and explicit political commitment, carried through into his writing career from his early years as a member of the Egyptian Communist Party – a motivation that forms a mirror image, as it were, to the ‘negative characteristics’ that he applied in Yawmiyyat al-Wahat to his definition of the role of the writer in contemporary Egypt as follows:

It is something of a truism to observe that the history of modern Egyptian literature, as indeed of modern Arabic literature more generally, has been intimately bound up with political and social developments in the region. General histories of modern Arabic literature traditionally began their accounts of the nah∂a, or ‘revival’, from the politically charged date of 1798, the date of Napoleon's invasion of Egypt, and although more recent critics have been more nuanced in their approach, this date still (rightly) retains a prominent place in most accounts of the Arab literary and cultural revival. During the twentieth century, the 1919 Egyptian revolt against the British occupation provided inspiration for Tawfiq al-Hakim's seminal novel ʿAwdat al-Ruh (Return of the Spirit; 1933), and we can point to a subsequent series of political events that punctuated the region and whose significance is reflected in the works of Arab writers, in both poetry and prose. Of these events, the most significant are perhaps the nakba (the ‘disaster’), the 1948 conflict leading to the founding of the State of Israel, with wide-ranging repercussions through much of the Arab world; the Egyptian Free Officers’ Revolution of 1952, leading to the establishment of the Nasserist regime; and the naksa, the ‘great setback’, embodied in the humiliating defeat of the Arabs in the June (Six-Day) War of 1967, which resulted in a period described by one commentator as one of ‘anguished self-criticism, [and] a searching reappraisal of post-war Arab culture and political practice’. The 1967 War is of particular significance in the present context, for it sparked a new generation of writers, often known as the ‘Generation of the Sixties’ (Jil al-sittinat), who began to react more outspokenly than before, accusing their predecessors of contributing to the defeat by their silence, and embarking on a re-evaluation of literary forms, the role of the writer in society and the representation of reality in fiction. Many of these writers were associated with the short-lived but influential magazine, Gallery 68, published in Egypt between 1968 and 1971, which brought together a number of leading Egyptian and non-Egyptian writers, and although Sonallah Ibrahim did not form part of this group as such, commentators on this critical period frequently cite his short novel Tilka al-Ra ʾiha (first published in 1966) as a seminal work in ushering in the new mood.

During the pre-modern period, pilgrimage constituted one feature of Islamic religiosity that formulated a sense of belonging and authenticity for Muslims. For the Sino-Muslim community, the hajj embodied several central elements of religious substance. Most broadly, the pilgrimage conveyed a sense of communal identification, which intensified Muslims’ collective memory of cultural heritage, brought with it religious and social authority, and united all Muslims under the banner of Islam as a single transcultural congregation (Ar. umma). Praising or participating in the pilgrimage allowed Muslims at the geographic periphery of the Islamicate world to move to the umma's centre. Their physical distance from the sacred heart of Islamic geography did not prevent them from connecting with their coreligionists through their perceptions, beliefs or practices.

This chapter focuses on religious pilgrimage and sacred space as a universal category of Islamicate societies and of religious traditions more generally. Through an analysis of Sino-Muslims’ attitudes towards pilgrimage, as they have been expressed in Sino-Islamic intellectual production, we may view their thoughts as part of the broader Muslim world, presaging future comparative inquiry.

All three authors studied here – Wang Daiyu (1590–1658), Liu Zhi (1670–1724?) and Ma Dexin (also called Ma Fuchu) (1794–1874) – cherished the pilgrimage as a religious duty, but authors in successive generations gave it greater weight. As Sino-Muslims entered the global context in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, their writings increasingly underlined the hajj as an indispensable and obligatory Islamic practice. Other authors also considered the hajj, and a number of Sino-Muslims actually performed the pilgrimage (Wang and Liu did not), but these three represent attitudes reflected in Sino- Islamic scholarship in general and the Han kitāb specifically.

Overall, the perception of the hajj changed from a symbol of true belief to a potentially critical practice, and in the late nineteenth century it finally became an essential observance and religious duty. Wang Daiyu described the theological foundations of the pilgrimage, its role as a link to the time of Creation and union with God. Liu Zhi underlined the physical practice of pilgrims, stressing the ceremonial and experiential aspects of the pilgrimage by detailing the practices associated with it. Ma Dexin emphasised the performative aspect of the journey itself, while arguing for its power to rectify and renew religious understanding and asserting its doctrinal necessity.

Introduction

While scholars have investigated the impact of Arabic and Persian sources on the development of Chinese textual scholarship on Islam, we still lack scholarly analysis of Chinese Muslims’ reaction to norms developed outside the Chinese legal framework. This chapter attempts to fill this void by exploring the commitment of Chinese Muslim scholars to the task of articulating and legitimising their own interpretation of Islamic law. Their efforts had the potential to separate Chinese Muslim legal thought from its Arabic and Persian matrix of origin. Thus, our core question will be, how did Chinese scholars justify and legitimate their own interpretation of Islamic law vis-à-vis the legal thinking of other areas of the Muslim world?

This chapter thus examines the implications of the legal discourse set forth in a Chinese primer for Muslims, the Tianfang sanzijing (Three Character Classic of Islam), regarding local notions of Islamic ‘legitimacy’ and ‘orthodoxy’. Credited to the author of the Norms and Rituals of Islam (Tianfang dianli), Liu Zhi (1662–c. 1736) (see Frankel, Chapter 2, and Petersen, Chapter 4, this volume), and animated by that book's purpose of reconciling Islamic law with the legal culture of the Qing, Liu's concise primer on the main tenets of Islam spoke to a broader audience than its textual antecedent. As argued below, the Muslim Sanzijing laid the ground for an independent development of Islamic law in the Chinese context, one that had the power to detach China from conventional Islamic jurisprudence outside its frontiers, while remaining consistent with the overarching legal principles of Sunni Islam.

The Muslim Sanzijing and its Audience

Sonallah Ibrahim's third published novel, al-Lajna (The Committee; 1981), is regarded by many critics as his most successful work to date. In terms of length and overall conception, it has more in common with Tilka al-Ra ʾiha than with Najmat Aghustus, being constructed on a rather small scale, with little, if any, of the expansiveness of the latter work. Indeed, it arguably has more in common with Tilka al-Ra ʾiha than with any other of the author's works, both because of its comparatively short length (it covers only a little over a hundred pages of print, or some 25,000 words) and also because of certain stylistic characteristics (as well as some of the general social and political ambience) that it shares with the earlier work.

Publication and Translations

The first chapter of the novel, which describes the narrator's initial confrontation with the Committee (‘lajna’) from which the book takes its name, originally appeared as a self-contained short piece in the magazine al-Fikr al-Mu ʿasir (Contemporary Thought) in May 1979, some two years before the publication of the full work. The complete work was published in Beirut by Dar al-Kalima in 1981 and reissued in Cairo the following year (1982) by Matbuʿat al-Qahira; it has since gone through numerous editions, being reprinted or republished not only in Cairo and Beirut but also in Tunis and Marrakesh. In addition to the English translation by May St Germain and Charlene Constable, the work has been translated into French, German and a number of other European languages.

Background

As it is impossible to appreciate the thrust of Sonallah Ibrahim's satire in al-Lajna without some knowledge of the Egyptian economic and political context, it will be necessary to sketch the background to the work in some detail. Thematically, the novel represents an important new stage in the author's writing career, for the most conspicuous element is provided by the author's comments on President Anwar Sadat [al-Sādāt]’ s policy of infitāª (‘opening [up]’) – the term used to designate the ‘open-door’ economic policy of President Sadat, which, together with his policy of rapprochement with Israel, was to become one of the principal targets of political criticism not only for Sonallah Ibrahim but also for many other writers and intellectuals of his generation.

The Edinburgh Studies in Modern Arabic Literature is a new and unique series which will, it is hoped, fill in a glaring gap in scholarship in the field of modern Arabic literature. Its dedication to Arabic literature in the modern period, that is, from the nineteenth century onwards, is what makes it unique among series undertaken by academic publishers in the English-speaking world. Individual books on modern Arabic literature in general or aspects of it have been and continue to be published sporadically. Series on Islamic studies and Arab/Islamic thought and civilisation are not in short supply either in the academic world, but these are far removed from the study of Arabic literature qua literature, that is, imaginative, creative literature as we understand the term when, for instance, we speak of English literature or French literature, etc. Even series labelled ‘Arabic/Middle Eastern Literature’ make no period distinction, extending their purview from the sixth century to the present, and often including non-Arabic literatures of the region. This series aims to redress the situation by focusing on the Arabic literature and criticism of today, stretching its interest to the earliest beginnings of Arab modernity in the nineteenth century.

The need for such a dedicated series, and generally for the redoubling of scholarly endeavour in researching and introducing modern Arabic literature to the Western reader has never been stronger. The significant growth in the last decades of the translation of contemporary Arab authors from all genres, especially fiction, into English; the higher profile of Arabic literature internationally since the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature to Naguib Mahfouz in 1988; the growing number of Arab authors living in the Western diaspora and writing both in English and Arabic; the adoption of such authors and others by mainstream, high-circulation publishers, as opposed to the academic publishers of the past; the establishment of prestigious prizes, such as the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (the Arabic Booker), run by the Man Booker Foundation, which brings huge publicity to the shortlist and winner every year, as well as translation contracts into English and other languages – all this and very recently the events of the Arab Spring have heightened public, let alone academic, interest in all things Arab, and not least Arabic literature.

Few in the People's Republic of China (PRC) question the legitimacy of identifying the Chinese-speaking Muslims as the Huizu ethnic minority. This status has been enshrined in the policies of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) since it started to formulate its nationality discourse in the 1930s. The officially produced scholarship on Huizu history, culture, sociology and so on hardly ever omits the Huizu paradigm, and scholars in China discuss the Sino-Muslims outside it only with difficulty. The minzu definitions produced in the PRC have proved to be so alluring that even foreign scholars have employed them as handy tools to describe the ethno-cultural landscape of the country, though most of them have noted their Procrustean rigidity. The ethnic status of the Huizu is particularly problematic, however, even from the orthodox Marxist–Leninist point of view, as they do not meet the so-called Stalinist criteria of defining a nationality (minzu).

Yet the CCP was not the first political force in Chinese history to find the Muslim question hard to approach. The omnipresence of Muslims in the Chinese culture area has created difficulties of perception and policy for most regimes since the Ming dynasty. Before the advent of the PRC's minzu paradigm many scholars, both Chinese and foreign, found the Sinophone Muslims perplexing and ambiguous. Chinese Muslims have been a vexing cognitive problem especially for Euro-Americans, since they tested the boundaries of understanding of both China and Islam, often treated in their ‘pure’ forms in the Orientalist tradition. The central question was whether the Muslims inhabiting the Chinese culture area were a foreign element, both culturally and racially; a culturally distinct yet racially local population; or a special form of ethno-religious community, formed through the assimilation of outside ethnic elements into Chinese people. Many modern foreign observers have tended to favour the last option: seeing the Sino-Muslims as a somewhat transitional phase between being fully non-Chinese and fully Chinese, exhibiting traits of both local genes and foreign admixtures. Writing in 1936, the Swedish explorer Sven Hedin judged the Chinese-speaking Muslims, called Dungans in Xinjiang, to be ‘Chinese who have embraced Islam and are probably also separated from the Chinese by certain racial differences’.

Sonallah Ibrahim's most recent full-length novel, al-Jalid (Ice), was published towards the end of January 2011, at the precise moment of the mass protests centred on Cairo's Tahrir Square that forced the resignation of the then Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak on 11 February 2011 – a move that prompted the transfer of power to the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, and everything that has followed since. According to the author's note at the end of the work, the novel had been completed in Heliopolis (Sonallah Ibrahim's home) in December 2010.

Publication and Translations

Al-Jalid was published in Cairo by Dar al-Thaqafa al-Jadida and in Beirut by Dar al-Adab in January 2011. To my knowledge, there have so far been no foreign-language translations of the work.

Background

The work, which contains an opening page reading simply ‘Moscow 1973’, clearly derives from Sonallah Ibrahim's own stay in Moscow during that same period, the circumstances of which were described in Chapter 2 above. As is the case with many of Sonallah Ibrahim's novels, few specific dates are given in the text, but there are discussions about, and occasional references to, a number of significant (mainly external) political events, enabling the reader to establish an at least approximate chronology in his or her mind; the novel closes with a New Year party, which provides a firm closing date for the work. The external events referred to include significant developments in a number of different parts of the world, including US involvement in Vietnam, and the overthrow of the Marxist Chilean President Salvador Allende on 11 September 1973; but from the viewpoint of an Egyptian spending the period in question abroad, the most significant is unsurprisingly the October 1973 Arab–Israeli War (also known as the Ramadan, or Yom Kippur, War), which began on 6 October 1973 when Egyptian and Syrian forces launched surprise attacks on Israeli positions in the occupied Sinai Peninsula and Golan Heights.

Five years separate the publication date of Dhat (1992) from that of Sonallah Ibrahim's eagerly-awaited next novel, Sharaf, completed at the end of 1996 and published in 1997. The novel, which occupies some 470 pages in the Arabic edition, returns us to the prison environment of Tilka al-raʾiha with which the author had begun his novelistic career to develop a number of disparate themes encountered in his previous works, including those of corruption, hypocrisy, sexual deviancy and globalisation. At the same time, the work carries forward and further develops the novelistic techniques already noted in previous chapters, most obviously in Dhat. Although several of the themes of Dhat find an echo in Sharaf, and the protagonists of the two works are linked by their humble backgrounds, however, their situations are quite different: for unlike Dhat (whose social status and situation as an Egyptian housewife is a wholly unexceptional one) that of the protagonist of Sharaf (an Egyptian youth consigned to prison for killing a foreigner who has tried to rape him) is both extraordinary and desperate –much of the narrative, indeed, being occupied with his discussions with his lawyers in an attempt to find a way of escaping from his predicament.

Publication and Translations

The full text of Sharaf was published in Cairo in book form by the state-run Dar al-Hilal in 1997, as part of the long-established Riwayat al-Hilal literary series, which had been founded in 1949. This represented a departure from Sonallah Ibrahim's normal publishing practice. Unusually also, some material from the opening chapters had already been serialised in the Egyptian literary weekly Akhbar al-Adab, edited at the time by the equally eminent Egyptian novelist Gamal al-Ghitani, who contributed an editorial entitled ‘Sharaf sunʿ Allāh’ in which he summed up Sonallah Ibrahim's career as marked by dedication and asceticism and characterised Sharaf as

Sonallah Ibrahim's next novel, Bayrut, Bayrut (Beirut, Beirut), published in 1984, picks up and develops, in the context of the Lebanese Civil War of 1975–90, a number of themes and techniques that had been hinted at in his previous works. The geographical setting of the work is itself of some interest, for Egyptian writers in general have not been notable for their interest in other parts of the Arab world. Indeed, it is probably little exaggeration to say that, with the conspicuous exception of the Palestine-Israel dispute, Arab writers in general have shown a marked reluctance to interest themselves in the problems of the region outside their own particular countries. Although the Lebanese war itself provides a proportion of the material for the novel, however, this is by no means the only theme running through the work, and problems of publishing in the Arab world (a subject on which the author could bring to bear significant personal experience) clearly emerge as one of the narrator's other main preoccupations.

Publication and Translations

The novel was written during the period April 1982 to December 1983 and first published in Cairo in 1984 by the author's favourite Cairo publishing house, Dar al-Mustaqbal al-ʿArabi; it was subsequently reprinted in 1988 and on several subsequent occasions. An English translation by Chip Rossetti was published by Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Publishing in September 2014 under the title Beirut, Beirut; to my knowledge, there are no other foreign-language translations.

Background

Sonallah Ibrahim's interest in the Lebanese Civil War appears to have been initially sparked by the difficulties of publishing his work in Egypt – a situation that had plagued him since the writing of Tilka al-raʾiha, and which prompted him to visit Lebanon in 1979. Then as now, the country enjoyed a reputation as one of the most liberal publishing centres in the Arab world, but for some four years had been in the grip of a complex civil war that was to last until 1990. Finding himself in the middle of the conflict, and in an attempt to understand what was happening, the author began to research and document the events around him, and it was this research that formed the basis for his subsequent novel.