Creative Ritual: Embodied Faith And Secular Reason In Contemporary Muslim Fiction

Abstract

This project argues that recent literary representations of Muslim faith practices portray the productive interplay between mindful reason and embodied habit. Drawing upon critical theories in philosophy, anthropology, and cultural studies that explore how secular rhetoric marshals a narrative where the Enlightenment subject distances himself from his somatic experience, my project focuses on authors who by contrast depict Muslim characters actualizing themselves through dedication to physical faith commitments. The project examines novels about Muslims that evoke how the cultivated body and its structured experiences can construct social agents in a way that diverges from liberal humanist models of self-realization. "Creative Ritual" then discusses the implications that such an attention to embodiment may have for aesthetics and the study of literature. Taking to task the idea of reading as a solitary, notional practice that operates only in the mind through linguistic signification, I attend to what I call "habituated reading": the internalization of story and rhetoric into a subject's body, the embodied experiences the reader recalls in order to understand narratives, and the normalizing effect of habitual exposure to sets of narratives. Habituated reading, I argue, has ethical and political ramifications for generating productive multicultural cohabitation in our contemporary age.