Aymani Bugzâr-o-Jâye Khawf Bâsh: Addressing Disciplinary Crisis in Comparative Literature the Sufi Way
Author : 10.6184/TKR.201006_40(2).0007
Keywords : comparative literature, academic crisis, Su¯fı¯ poetics, Ru¯mı
The paper argues that Su¯fı¯ discourse, with its long established literary
tradition, offers insights that could address the disciplinary challenges facing
literature in general, and comparative literature in particular, in the present
cultural scenarios of unpredictability and uncertainty. The argument proceeds
first by an inquiry into the nature and the possible causes of the “crisis”
in which the discipline finds itself and then employs the Su¯ fı¯ discourse of
Ru¯mı¯ to suggest an accommodative strategy for the academic practice of literature
at the present time.
The disciplinary identity of literature, this paper argues, was from its
liberal humanist inception doomed to crisis. This was because the “Arnoldian
consensus” under which the discipline first established itself, saw literature
somewhat as a surrogate religion, but at the same time the critical practice that
regulated the disciplinary dynamics remained highly analytical, rational, in
ways that were “philosophical” (despite the untenable denials of the likes of
Leavis). The present crisis in comparative literature could be seen as a continuation
of the crisis that beset the earlier disciplinary identity of literature.
Comparative literature did play its part in the fall of the liberal humanist
paradigm, but one could say that it did not significantly detach itself from the
Euro-centricity that governed the earlier institutional practice.
Ru¯mı¯ provides us with an opportunity, an opportunity that is made
available by the nature of the discipline itself, to see criticism not simply as a “philosophical” activity that seeks to comprehend and neutralize the unboundedness
of the creative. Ru¯mı¯ rejects any feeling of security, closure and
completeness that is afforded by a criticism that hasn’t been able to go beyond
mimesis. Such a critical acumen Ru¯mı¯ wants us to let go of and “clutch at
madness”: “I have tried far-thinking intellect; henceforth I will make myself
mad.” The critical activity in Ru¯mı¯ is rather governed by the epistemology
of ı¯mân (faith) which prioritizes a certain “hermeneutics of faith” over a “hermeneutics
of suspicion” (Deconstruction or Lacanian psychoanalysis, for instance).
In a cultural context where one needs to possess a certain Keatsian
Negative Capability, of being “in doubts, uncertainties and mysteries without
any irritable reaching after fact or reason,” Ru¯mı¯’s “hermeneutics of faith”
may become one way in which we can approach literature.