Paper long abstract:

The aim of the presentation is to compare the national and the religious experiences of political imprisonment in the Palestinian context. One way to tackle this issue is to compare the Palestinian national and Islamic prison literatures. And by this comparison I will try to locate the differences in the form and the formation processes in the narrative structure of the Islamic narrative and the national one. I will argue that there are different textual apparatuses that resituate the religious subjectivity vis a vis the colonizer and the national ones.

The presentation will focus on the analysis of a novel written in the prison by Walid al Hodaly. Walid is one of the prominent Palestinian political prisoners who is affiliated with the Islamic movements in Palestine. He has written many novels and collections of short stories. And his novels, stories, and essays are circulated and read widely in the Islamic as well as the national reading public in Palestine as well as in parts of the Arab worlds. Although one could locate previous and more hybrid forms of narrativity that could be classified as Islamic, it seems that Walid has been part of a new generation of Palestinian Islamic writers who gave this type of narration structure its final shape.