Zahiye Kundos is a literary scholar and essayist. Her scholarship ranges between modern Arabic and Hebrew literatures, Islamic reform movements, Arab intellectual history, and the critique of European modernity. She received her undergraduate degree from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s Comparative Literature and General History departments. She completed her MA and PhD in Literature at the School of Cultural Studies at Tel Aviv University. Since 2020, she has been a post-doctoral fellow at the Forum Transregionale Studien, Europe in the Middle East, the Middle East in Europe (EUME), and a visiting scholar affiliated with the Seminar für Semitistik und Arabistik at Freie Universität, Berlin. She currently holds the position of Research Associate at the Leibniz Institute for Jewish History and Culture, Simon Dubnow, in Leipzig. Among her recent publications, Amīna and the Breaking of the Secular Silence: Revisiting The Cairo Trilogy by Naguib Mahfouz (Political Theology, 2024) and Beginnings, Belongings and Political Anxieties (Political Theology, 2023). Zahiya continues to be an associated EUME Fellow through the academic years 2021-2025, with the support of the Minerva Foundation.
The Loss of the Muftī: Reimagining the Afterlife of Muḥammad ‘Abduh’s Islamic Modernism in Arabic Literature
What starting point can we find for a discussion of being Muslim as a moral way of life in these times when the Arabic discourse is bruised and stuttering? To begin to answer this therapeutic question, this project suggests that, instead of studying religious knowledge, (ʿUlūm Al-Dīn) and literature (Adab), separately – as their ostensible mutual estrangement in modernity has led us to do – we turn our attention to the range of experiences that become available when we consider the dynamic and symbiotic historical interrelations between them. This project is an endeavor in this direction. It attends to allocate the polemics incited in the first decades of 20th-century Egypt between religious and secular writers from the point of view of the latter as registered in their literal productions, particularly that by Taha Hussein (d. 1973) surrounding Muḥammad ‘Abduh’s death (d. 1905). Alongside voicing the tensions and uncovering the drama created in the aftermath of ‘Abduh’s absence, the project aims to show the ways Hussein and his fellow intellectuals, looked up and back to ‘Abduh with awe and sobriety and sought to extricate textures of belonging with him and his agenda of reform.
