Fiction, Arabic, modern - Encyclopaedia of Islam, THREE
[Article]
Allen, Roger
Leiden
Brill
(3,091 words)
In quest of a term to designate the creation of " fiction ," modern Arabic has adopted the word takhyīl -literally, "making something imaginary"-while, for fiction's most basic parameter, irony-the interplay of knowledge and ignorance-the term mufāraqa is used. While the coinage of these generically specific words to identify narrative types and their modes of analysis may have occurred only during the last century or so, that is not to imply that the premodern Arabic literary heritage did not have its share of narratives of various types. The