Islamic literature

Islamic literature is literature written by Muslim people, influenced by an Islamic cultural perspective, or literature that portrays Islam. It can be written in any language and portray any country or region. It includes many literary forms including adabs, a non-fiction form of Islamic advice literature, and various fictional literary genres.

The definition of Islamic literature is a matter of debate, with some definitions categorizing anything written in a majority-Muslim nation as "Islamic" so long as the work can be appropriated into an Islamic framework, even if the work is not authored by a Muslim. By this definition, categories like Indonesian literature, Somali literature, Pakistani literature, and Persian literature would all qualify as Islamic literature. A second definition focuses on all works authored by Muslims, regardless of the religious content or lack thereof within those works. Proponents of the second definition suggest that the Islamic identity of Muslim authors cannot be divorced from the evaluation of their works, even if they did not intend to infuse their works with religious meaning. Still other definitions emphasize works with a focus on Islamic values, or those that focus on events, people, and places mentioned in the Quran and hadith. An alternate definition states that Islamic literature is any literature about Muslims and their pious deeds.

Some academics have moved beyond evaluations of differences between Islamic and non-Islamic literature to studies such as comparisons of the novelization of various contemporary Islamic literatures and points of confluence with political themes, such as nationalism.

Over the centuries, there have been numerous bibliographies and biographical dictionaries attempting to list authors of Islamic literature, including India-born scholar Maulana Mahmud Hasan Khan of Rajasthan, who died in 1946 and whose 60-volume M'ojam-ul-Musannifin (Dictionary of Authors) in Arabic provides the biographical sketches of some 40,000 writers from all over the Islamic world.

Among the best known works of fiction from the Islamic world is The Book of One Thousand and One Nights (Arabian Nights), a compilation of many earlier folk tales set in a frame story of being told serially by the Persian Queen Scheherazade. The compilation took form in the 10th century and reached its final form by the 14th century; the number and type of tales have varied from one manuscript to another. Many other Arabian fantasy tales were often called "Arabian Nights" when translated into English, regardless of whether they appeared in any version of The Book of One Thousand and One Nights or not, and a number of tales are known in Europe as "Arabian Nights", despite existing in no Arabic manuscript.

This compilation has been influential in the West since it was first translated by Antoine Galland in the 18th century. Many imitations were written, especially in France.

In the 12th century, Ibn Tufail wrote the novel Hayy ibn Yaqdhan, or Philosophus Autodidactus (The Self-Taught Philosopher), as a response to al-Ghazali's The Incoherence of the Philosophers. The novel, which features a protagonist who has been spontaneously generated on an island, demonstrates the harmony of religion and philosophy and the virtues of an inquiring soul. In the same century, Ibn al-Nafis wrote the novel Theologus Autodidactus (The Self-Taught Theologian) in response to Ibn Tufail’s work; the novel is a defense of the rationality of prophetic revelation. The protagonists of both these narratives were feral children (Hayy in Hayy ibn Yaqdhan and Kamil in Theologus Autodidactus) who were autodidactic (self-taught) and living in seclusion on a desert island. A Latin translation of Philosophus Autodidactus first appeared in 1671, prepared by Edward Pococke the Younger, followed by an English translation by Simon Ockley in 1708, as well as German and Dutch translations. Robert Boyle's own philosophical novel set on an island, The Aspiring Naturalist, may have been inspired by the work.

Beginning in the 19th century, fictional novels and short stories became popular within the literary circles of the Ottoman Empire. An early example, the romance novel Taaşuk-u Tal'at ve Fitnat (تعشق طلعت و فطنت; "Tal'at and Fitnat in Love"), was published in 1872 by Şemsettin Sami. Other important novels of the period included Muhayyelât by Ali Aziz Efendi, which consists of three parts and was written in a laconical style contrasting with its content, where djinns and fairies surge from within contexts drawn from ordinary real life situations. Inspired by a much older story written both in Arabic and Assyrian, the author also displays in his work his deep knowledge of sufism, hurufism and Bektashi traditions. Muhayyelât is considered to be an early precursor of the new Turkish literature to emerge in the Tanzimat period of the 19th century.