مدارات النقد المعاصر للأدب الإسلامي

Islamic literature is the one which represents the reality of religious life in all its dimensions and events to symbolize this life in a creative image through texts with different topics, whether prose or poetry. Subsequently, the literary work can be considered as the mirror that reflects the image of the human life without neglecting any aspect of it as it is irrelevant to the Muslim’s life because anything can be a source of inspiration for fiction, poetry or even criticism works. However, this is not completely true. Islamic literature tends to avoid the discussion of certain topics and considers them prohibited, and this leaves room for others’ pens to write about them in any way they choose. Writers of Islamic literature should treat the various topics in an objective way and take a neutral stance that would help in treating those topics according to their perspectives and in line with their thoughts. This would have a great influence on their writing making it read by a largest number of readers, and without being limited to one category over the other. Eventually, we will discuss the levels of criticism in Islamic literature to find out whether they depend on subjective criteria based on moral values or on critical criteria which vary according to the nature of the work itself. The concept of Islamic criticism includes every conscious study of any written production with a value according to the thinking criteria. The criticism of Islamic literature is one of the different aspects of the general Islamic criticism. The most important criterion of the Islamic criticism is avoiding the standardization that seeks subjectivity and tries to give a place and a location for each element on the scale of values. This goes contrary to the objective vision which is the pillar of Islamic criticism. This vision seeks to show the essence of any element so it gives credibility to the Islamic criticism. We notice that the objective criticism is based on neutrality and deals with the criticized topic as a whole trying to save the academic communication between the critics and authors who are bound by the discovery and creativity strings in the field of literary production. It means that the critic has to take into consideration during the criticism process the Islamic ethics and scientific rules inspired from the provisions of Islamic sharia, sunnah and prerequisites related to criticism. So, he criticizes the idea not the writer and criticizes by giving advice as it is one of the fundamentals of Islamic religion. The positive criticism aims at reviving the spirit of competition and strengthening the personality of the author not banishing him. And there is no harm if the Islamic criticism borrows some western criticism criteria and takes benefits from its researchers’ experiences provided that these criteria go along with its civilizational project. So, the criteria of the Islamic criticism have to be global with humanistic dimension keeping the critics away from purposeless conflicts. The most important criticism criteria during the early Islam period are religion, morals and objectivity. The prophet’s criticism vision was based on three elements: content criticism; form criticism: disposition and artificiality, the beauty of the word and succinctness; and judging poets. Omar Ibn Al Khattab restricted his literature criticism vision to two elements: objectivity and moral and religious vision. Hence, we can say that the principles of the criticism in Islam is limited in: artistic and moral truth in Islamic literary creativity, strength and obviousness of the meaning and the form in literary production, authenticity, exhaustiveness and stability, absolute positive realism, faith commitment, and appropriate renewal fitting with Islamic values. But, there are a lot of obstacles facing the Islamic criticism but the major obstacle consists of the relationship between poetry and religion or poetry and morals. The modern Arab researchers adopted the movement of separation between religion and art, basing their arguments on doctrines of western philosophy; where they felt themselves free to produce literature which is not in any way linked to the principles of the Islamic Sharia. Thus, Islamic criticism becomes a stranger and absent from the criticism process of all creative works. Subsequently, it tightens the field of the Islamic criticism. Finally, the present paper attempts to account for the current trends of criticism and its contemporary orientations in relation to Islamic literature. Also, it attempts to shed some light on the principles of the critical method and how to be developed in order to get along with today’s literary product and therefore making the message of Islamic literature a global one with a humanistic orientation in the first place.