أخبار كلّيّة اللغة العربيّة :
قائمة الروابط
Abstract :
The Fantastic in the Qur’an; A Structural Approach to Study
The Story of Moses and al-Khidr (18:60-82)
It is possible to understand the text of the Qur’an through the use of different several approaches. Each approach has the potential to uncover single or multiple dimensions of the Qur’an and common characteristics represented include syntactic and thematic dimensions.
The fantastic is a structural approach to a literary text which reveals both of the above dimensions. The term ‘fantastic’ is used to describe any event that happens in our world that seems to be supernatural. In literature, the term ‘fantastic’ originated in the structuralist theory of critic Tzvetan Todorov in his work The Fantastic. He describes the fantastic as being a liminal state of the supernatural. A truly fantastic work is subtle and leaves the reader with a sense of confusion as to whether or not a particular phenomenon is real. Todorov compares this with two other ideas; the ‘uncanny’ and the ‘marvelous’. The uncanny involves a phenomenon that turns out to have a rational explanation such as in the gothic works of Ann Radcliffe: while the marvelous describes a truly supernatural explanation for a phenomenon.
The aim of this paper is to look at the fantastic in one of the Qur'anic stories using the fantastic theory of Todorov. This kind of study has the potential to shed light on the composition of the Qur'an in order and to produce new meaningful readings of its stories. Moreover, using western theory to explore the uniqueness of the Qur’anic composition could offer another aspect for proving the inimitability of the Qur’an.
In order to consider these ideas, I have chosen for the following reasons the story of Moses and al-Khidr in Surat al-Kahf (18:60-82). This story is particularly suited to this purpose for several reasons. Most importantly the story consists of intensive truly uncanny events. The text of these events is characterized by a certain composition, by a certain style. The reader looking at the paradigm of the story hesitates between a natural or supernatural explanation of the events described. This hesitation is also experienced by Moses in the text. A closer scrutiny of the workings of language and the fantastic elements in the text will reveal not only the fantastic context, as I shall demonstrate, but also the value of the specific composition, or structure, of this text in the context of the fantastic.