Abdelwahab Meddeb | |
|---|---|
.jpg) Abdelwahab Meddeb at the 'Comédie du Livre' ofMontpellier in 2011 | |
| Born | (1946-01-17)17 January 1946 |
| Died | 5 November 2014(2014-11-05) (aged 68) Paris, France |
Abdelwahab Meddeb (Tunisian Arabic:عبد الوهاب المدب; 17 January 1946 – 5 November 2014) was aFrench-language writer and cultural critic, and a professor ofcomparative literature at theUniversity of Paris X-Nanterre.[1]
Meddeb was born inTunis,French Tunisia, in 1946, into a learned and patrician milieu. His family's origins stretch fromTripoli andYemen on his mother's side, to Spain andMorocco on his father's side. Raised in a traditionally observantMaghrebi Muslim family, Meddeb began learning theQur'an at the age of four from his father, Sheik Mustapha Meddeb, a scholar ofIslamic law at theZitouna, the great mosque and university of Tunis. At the age of six, he began hisbilingual education at the Franco-Arabic school that was part of the famousCollège Sadiki. Thus began an intellectual trajectory nourished, in adolescence, by the classics of both Arabic and French and European literatures.[2]
In 1967, Meddeb moved toParis to continue his university studies at theSorbonne inart history. In 1970-72, he collaborated on the dictionaryPetit Robert: Des Noms Propres, working on entries concerning Islam and art history. From 1974-1987 he was a literary consultant at Sindbad publications, helping to introduce a French reading public to the classics of Arabic and Persian literatures as well as the greatSufi writers. A visiting professor atYale University and theUniversity of Geneva, Meddeb has been teaching comparative literature since 1995 at theUniversity of Paris X-Nanterre. Between 1992 and 1994 he was co-editor of the journalIntersignes, and in 1995 he started the journalDédale.[citation needed] His first novel,Talismano, was published in Paris in 1979 and quickly became a founding text ofavant-gardepostcolonial fiction in French.[citation needed] At the time, he was "considered in France as one of the best young writers from North Africa".[3]
After9/11 Meddeb's work, informed by his self-described "double genealogy", both Western and Islamic, French and Arabic, included an urgent political dimension. An outspoken critic ofIslamic fundamentalism, he lamented the rise ofIslamic fascism, which he noted was both exploitative of traditional Islamic values and given to the glorification of totalitarian dictators that sought "to colonize every last corner of private life...and that dream of exterminating whole sectors of the population" (as opposed to authoritarian dictators whose main goal is to preserve their own power.)[4] Meddeb, then, was a staunch proponent ofsecularism ("la laïcité") in theFrench Enlightenment tradition, as the necessaryguarantor of democracy that would reconcile Islam withmodernity. His vigilant point of view derived from what he called the "in-between" space ("l’entre deux") that he occupied as a North African writer based in France, and from the responsibility of being a public intellectual. His erudite historical and cultural analyses of world events led to many publications, interviews and radio commentaries. His carefully researched and well-argued 2002 study,La Maladie de l’Islam (translated and published in English asThe Malady of Islam) traces the historical and cultural riches of medievalIslamic civilization and its subsequent decline. The resulting posture, "inconsolable in its destitution", writes Meddeb, gave root to modern Islamic fundamentalism, a fact embodied by the modern Arab states' attachment to the archaic, Manichaean laws of "official Islam." The book also explores the tragic consequences of the West's exclusion of Islam.[5]
From editorials in the French newspaperLe Monde on theIsraeli invasion of Gaza (i.e.,13 Jan. '09),[6] to Obama's"Cairo Speech" (4 June 2009), to his two weekly radio programs, "Cultures d’islam" atRadio France Culture and "Point de Vue" atMédi 1 (broadcast fromTangiers, Morocco), to his television appearances and his online interviews, Meddeb uses the media as a forum for exploration and debate. After his death, the radio programme "Cultures d’islam" is led byAbdennour Bidar. His work juxtaposes writers and scholars from East and West, engaging subjects that are historical, cultural, religious, political, and thereby challenging the stereotypes that Muslims and Europeans hold about each other. A voice of tolerant Islam, Meddeb is no stranger to controversy from militant Muslim quarters and some left-wing journalists, who accuse him of complacency towards theBen Ali regime.[7]
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From his earliest essays, novels, poems and editorial work in the mid-1970s onward, Meddeb's writing has always been multiple and diverse, forming an ongoing literary project that mixes and transcendsgenres. His texts are those of apolymath.
The movement and rhythms of his French sentences are commensurate with the meditations of a narrator who is aflâneur, a walker in the city, and a poet without borders. Associative imagery allows the writing to nomadize across space and time, to dialogue with writers such asDante andIbn Arabi, theSufi poets andStéphane Mallarmé,Spinoza,Aristotle andAverroes (Ibn Rushd), along with the poets of classical China and Japan. Formally, Meddeb practices what he calls an "esthetics of theheterogeneous,” playing with different literary forms from many traditions, including the European modernist novel,pre-IslamicArabic poetry, the medievalmystical poets of Islam, JapaneseHaiku, and so on.[8] Although he writes only in French, his work as a translator of medievalArabophone poets, as well as his conscious literary ambition to "liberate the Islamic referent from its strict context so that it circulates in the contemporary French text" marks his writing with enigmatic traces of 'otherness". His privileging of these Arabic and Persian literary precursors explores archaic cultural resources inpostmodern forms, emphasizing the esthetic, spiritual and ethical aspects of Islam. His work, translated into over a dozen languages, opens onto and enriches the dialogue with contemporaryworld literature.
He translated works ofSufis such as, in particular,Suhrawardi orAbû Yazid al-Bistami.[9]
2002 – PrixFrançois Mauriac,La Maladie de l’Islam
2002 – PrixMax Jacob,Matière des oiseaux
2007 – Prix international de littérature francophoneBenjamin Fondane –Contre-prêches
Available in French
(in periodicals, online, and in collections)
(All translations below by Charlotte Mandell)
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