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Paper short abstract

I am proposing Sufism, a Maghrebi mystical philosophy, to grasp the existential question that marked modernist texts and the conceptualization of the New Man across cultural and literary boundaries.

Paper long abstract

This paper explores Sufism as a potential epistemological framework for analyzing literary text. Within the broader context of strengthening African and Maghrebi knowledge systems, it presents a comparative reading of a selection of modernist Maghrebi texts, where I investigate the reactivation of Sufi archetypes, such as the Perfect man, the child, the rebirth, and the journey, in Abdallah Laroui’s El Ghorba and Mohamed El Khaldi’s Awtad. Though written in different settings, these narratives share an articulation of disillusionment and estrangement, experienced essentially by the male characters who struggle in modernist times with a sense of the self. I am proposing Sufism, a mystical philosophy, to grasp the existential question that marked modernist texts and the conceptualization of the New Man across cultural and literary boundaries. Ultimately, by situating Sufism with African and Maghrebi intellectual and ancestral tradition, this project proposes spiritual revitalization as a reading for literary texts that not only fosters intercultural and interdisciplinary knowledge production but also enriches alternative knowledge systems and epistemologies, highlighting the transformative power of embodied mysticism in confronting modern alienation and reconstructing selfhood.