The Reader-"Another Production": The Reception of Haykal's Biography of Muhammad and the Shift of Egyptian Intellectuals to Islamic Subjects in the 1930s

Abstract

This paper is an attempt to rethink the much-discussed topic of the so-called of among, or shift of, Egyptian intellectuals who turned to Islamic subjects in the 1930s. Those intellectuals who, during the 1920s, had adhered to the principles of Westernization and secularization were said to have abandoned these principles to embrace Islam and Arabism a decade later. The commonly ventured historical account of this shift attempted to describe and explain it from the top down, that is, from the perspective of the intellectual producers, either on the basis of content analysis of their texts or through the reconstruction of authorial intentions. It was assumed that the impact of this shift on the culture and politics of contemporary society could be extracted from the meanings invested by the authors in their texts or from the context of the act of writing. This paper approaches the subject from a different perspective, namely, from the bottom up. While not ignoring authorial intentions or the meanings with which authors invested their texts, I emphasize the ways in which readers reinterpreted intellectual literature on Islam as they consumed it and argue that a proper understanding of the social and political impact of literary products cannot be attained without also understanding the reception of these products. I concentrate especially on one of the major representative texts My special thanks are due to Ursula Wokoeck for her thoughtful comments and valuable suggestions on earlier drafts of this paper. Poetics Today 15:2 (Summer 1994). Copyright ? 1994 by The Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics. CCC 0333-5372/94/$2.50. This content downloaded from 207.46.13.101 on Sat, 08 Oct 2016 05:29:15 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 242 Poetics Today 15:2 of this shift, Muhammad Husayn Haykal's biography of the Prophet, and reconstruct the different interpretations of this work's major communities of contemporary readers in the discursive context of their different horizons of expectations. Through recontextualizing the crisis of orientation debate in the paradigm of reader-response criticism and reception theory, the paper is intended to show that each of readers produces an autonomous interpretation, another reading. Despite differences among the various reading communities, some common features emerge from their interpretations of Hayat Muhammad, which are, in many respects, different from both authorial meanings and authorial intentions. These readers viewed Haykal's intellectual reorientation as a fundamental shift from a Western to an Islamic one, yet they did not experience this as crisis, disorientation, or confusion. They perceived Haykal's new orientation, expressed in Hayat Muhammad, not as a shift to orthodox or traditional Islam, but as Haykal's attempt to adapt Islam to modern conditions and to present the life of the Prophet as a model for contemporary society. Finally, for its readers, Hayat Muhammad represented an effort to construct a collective identity, an Islamic form of an ideal imagined community which would be both progressive and authentic.