A sociopragmatic account of religiosity and secularity in fictional narratives
Kamel Abdelbadie Elsaadany | Gulf University for Science and Technology
This paper investigates the religiosity/secularity dichotomy in Naguib Mahfouz’s novels, which is shaped by
cultural narratives that convey his ideas. It analyzes a defined corpus of Mahfouz’s narratives that articulate his notions of
religiosity/secularity. Through an interdisciplinary methodology combining the application of pragmatics, interactional
sociolinguistics, and contextual analysis, it aims to determine Mahfouz’s potentiality for perceiving and narrativizing
religiosity and secularity in twentieth-century Egypt. It discusses how Mahfouz adopts sociopragmatic techniques to give a bright
picture of the secularist discourse but a negative one for the Islamist one presented as inevitably incapable, crude,
schizophrenic and idiosyncratic. Mahfouz openly destabilizes the religious/secular dichotomy by juxtaposing religious and secular
discourses in his early and later narratives, where he scrutinizes secularity, advocating it as the only way out of and uprooting,
religiosity. The adoption of an interdisciplinary framework proves to be theoretically and empirically motivated in order to show
how Mahfouz’s narratives reflect their originator’s own beliefs and those of the narrated society, including its value
systems.
Keywords: religiosity, secularity, narrative discourse, sociopragmatics, interactional sociolinguistics, twentieth-century Egypt, Naguib Mahfouz
Article outline
- 1.Introduction and background
- 2.Rationale and study questions
- 3.Theoretical framework
- 3.1Interactional sociolinguistics
- 3.2The pragmatics framework
- 4.The dichotomy of religiosity and secularity in Mahfouz’s narratives
- 4.1Religiosity and secularity in Mahfouz’s early narratives
- 4.2Religiosity and Secularity in Mahfouz’s later narratives
- 5.Discussion and conclusion
- Notes
-
References
Published online: 21 March 2022
https://doi.org/10.1075/ps.19070.els
https://doi.org/10.1075/ps.19070.els
References
Abdullah, Mohammad H.
Afridi, Mehnuz M.
2008 Naguib Mahfouz and Modern
Islamic Identity. Unpublished doctoral
dissertation, Department of Religious Studies, University of South Africa. Retrieved from: http://uir.unisa.ac.za/bitstream/handle/10500/2745/dissertation_afridi_%20m.pdf?sequence=1
Al-Ghitani, Jamal
Al-Shaykh, Ibrahim
Al-Sharuni, Yusuf
Enani, Mohammed M.
Farag, Al-Sayyed A.
Geer, Benjamin
Ghorab, Mohammed I.
2013 One Text, Two Receptions:
Mahfouz’s Children of the Alley. Unpublished Master
Thesis. The American University of Sharjah, College of Arts and Sciences.
Greenberg, Nathaniel
2013 Naguib
Mahfouz’s Children of the Alley and the Coming Revolution. The
Comparatist 371: 200–218. Retrieved
from: https://www.jstor.org/stable/26237340?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
Grice, Herbert P.
1957 Meaning. Philosophical
Review 671: 377–88. Retrieved
from: http://semantics.uchicago.edu/kennedy/classes/f09/semprag1/grice57.pdf. 
Milson, Menahem
Moqbel, Rashad M.
Najjar, Fauzi M.
Nijland, C.
1984 Naguib
Mahfouz and Islam. An Analysis of Some Novels. Die Welt des Islams, New
Series, 23/241, 136–155. Retrieved
from www.jstor.org/stable/1570668. 
Peled, Mattityahu
Qutub, Mohammed
Sabra, Ahmed
Saeid, Fatima al-Zahra M.
Shukri, Ghali
Tarabishi, George