Il turāṯ tra sentimentalismo e critica del mondo arabo in Yawm al-dīn di Rašā al-Amīr

Turāṯ, the rich literary, cultural and religious heritage of the Arab world, has attracted generations of Arab writers, who have exploited it with various aims and from different perspectives. Lebanese author Rašā al-Amīr uses turāṯ as a means to attack Islamists, their physical and psychological violence and the ideal of pure society they want to impose. This paper explores the way al-Amīr works with her heritage – of which she is very proud – in her novel Yawm al-dīn published in 2002 and how she made intertextuality one of its subjects. She deals with the religious and secular literary heritage – in particular the Qur’ān, aḥādīṯ and al-Mutanabbī’s poetry – in a binary way, using these texts to describe the challenges that her hero, the imām of a governative mosque in an unnamed Arab country, faces everyday in his public and private life. How can turāṯ save the contemporary Arab world?