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- Title
Bā Kathīr's Hārūt wa-Mārūt: Can the Qur'an Have an Alienating Effect?
- Authors
Amin, Dina
- Abstract
The relationship between religion and theatre is an ancient one; in fact this relationship has been the essence and raison d'être of theatre from ancient Egypt and Greece until the present day. However, in today's world, to borrow from, or be inspired by, a holy scripture is not only to debate issues pertaining to faith, but rather to aim for a dialectics between the dramatic work and the modern-day readers/spectators and their contemporary sociopolitical conditions. Indeed, it was his recourse to a Qur'anic story as plot for Ahl al-kahf ('Sleepers of the Cave', 1933) that helped Tawfīq al-Ḥakīm to initiate drama as an intrinsic genre into the literary canon, theatre having long been deemed an unessential art form within the Arabo-Islamic world. The subject of the current article, ʿAlī Aḥmad Bā Kathīr (1910-69), likewise wrote a substantial number of works for the stage derived from Islamic history and tradition. As a member of the cultural sector of the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1940s and 1950s and a major contributor to al-masraḥ al-dīnī ('the theatre of religion') in Egypt, it is no surprise that Bā Kathīr devoted a large portion of his prolific dramatic writing to narratives inspired by the Qur'an and other religious sources. His play Hārūt wa-Mārūt ('The Angels Hārūt and Mārūt', 1962) is a very good example of this vein in his writing. Based in the Qur'anic story mentioned in Sūrat al-Baqara, it recounts the story of the two angels, who are transformed into humans and descend to earth, to demonstrate that sin can be combated by the practice of chastity, willpower, and self-restraint.
- Subjects
ISLAMIC literature; ISLAM &; literature; DIALECTIC in literature; ISLAMIC historiography; JAMIYAT al-Ikhwan al-Muslimin (Egypt)
- Publication
Journal of Qur'anic Studies, 2014, Vol 16, Issue 3, p157
- ISSN
1465-3591
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.3366/jqs.2014.0171