Ecocriticism and Sufi Mysticism in The Wedding of Zein and Other Stories: an Eco-Mythological Approach
Samar Maatouq
Transcultural Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences/Transcultural Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences October 30, 2022 DOI: 10.21608/tjhss.2022.279173 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Theoretical or philosophical paper Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Topics | Mysticism |
| Key points | Argues that Sufi mysticism in Tayeb Salih's The Wedding of Zein and Other Stories can be read together with universal mythological archetypes and with ecocriticism, an approach the author terms "Eco-Mythological." The article contends that this combined lens illuminates the collection's treatment of the nurturing of nature, maldevelopment, and social unity amid modernity, areas it says prior criticism of the text left largely unexamined. |
Abstract
This article attempts to explore how the Mythological and Ecocritical approaches can coalesce to offer an insight into the north Afro-Arab Sudanese village world represented in Tayeb Salih’s collection The Wedding of Zein and Other Stories. Considering that it is mostly understudied as compared to other literary works by Salih, previous critiques on The Wedding of Zein focused separately on either the Sufi interpretation of the text and the distorted figure of Zein, the postcolonial gothic, or the preservation of the African identity in a changing world. This article, however, investigates two main notions: first taking the regular religious Sufi analysis into another level of combining Sufi mysticism and shared universal mythological archetypes on the one hand, and Sufi mysticism and Ecocriticism on the other hand. Second, applying the perceptions of Ecocriticism that has seldom been applied to Sudanese literature in general and Salih's in particular. Concepts of the nurturing of nature, maldevelopment, and social unity in face of modernity are inspected though the lens of the coined Eco-Mythological approach.
Comparable studies
Other theoretical and historical papers on mysticism, most cited first.
| Study | Year | Design | Participants |
|---|---|---|---|
| The mystical mind: probing the biology of religious experience | 2000 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| Religious and Mystical Experiences as Artifacts of Temporal Lobe Function: A General Hypothesis | 1983 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| The Problem of Pure Consciousness: Mysticism and Philosophy | 1993 | Edited collection of essays | |
| Irreducible Mind: Toward a Psychology for the 21st Century | 2020 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| Mysticism and schizophrenia: A phenomenological exploration of the structure of consciousness in the schizophrenia spectrum disorders. | 2016 | Theoretical or philosophical paper |