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Feeling the words: Sayyid Qutb's affective engagement with the Qur'an in Al‐Taswir al‐Fanni fi al‐Qur'an
Author(s) -
Osborne Lauren E.
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
religion compass
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.113
H-Index - 1
ISSN - 1749-8171
DOI - 10.1111/rec3.12338
Subject(s) - affect (linguistics) , poetry , feeling , style (visual arts) , psychology , politics , extension (predicate logic) , literature , aesthetics , social psychology , art , law , computer science , political science , communication , programming language
Twentieth‐century Egyptian thinker Sayyid Qutb has been studied most extensively with respect to his political thought. In his early career, however, he published works of literary criticism, poetry, and works on the Qur'an in which he takes a literary approach. Among these is his 1945 work Al‐Taswir al‐Fanni fi al‐Qur'an ( Artistic Imagery in the Qur'an ), in which he presents a unified theory of Qur'anic style called artistic imagery ( al‐taṣwīr al‐fannī ). This paper argues that Qutb's engagement with the Qur'an in this work is one that relies on affect as a nondiscursive interpretive framework. In so doing, it suggests that Qutb's early artistic works, particularly those on the Qur'an, deserve more extended scholarly attention than they have received, as well as an extension of affect theory to consider encounters with textual traditions.