Muslim Voices in Contemporary World Literatures

The Journey of Ibn Fattouma was written by the same person, Naguib Mahfouz, that wrote Children of the Alley. For this reason, I chose to do a similar creative response that, in comparison with Children of the Alley, highlights relevant plot points from the novel. I thought an interesting point of the novel, The Journey of Ibn Fattouma, was the fact that the novel was really focused on the Journey as opposed to the arrival in the land of Gebel. The novel was really not focused on Gebel, but on the different places that Qindil (Ibn Fattouma) went on his journey. The different lands in the story correspond to different ideologies or things we can see in the real world. In Children of the Alley, it was the descendants of Gebelawi that represented different prophets and therefore their stories were representative of the different religions. I find it very interesting how Mahfouz uses these things inadvertently to create a story that is informative. My creative response to The Journey of Ibn Fattouma highlights different plot points from the story in drawing to form a visual path to the land of Gebel. Similarly to how it is done in the novel, I left the land of Gebel out of sight, because the importance of the novel did not rely on whether Qindil reached the land of Gebel or not, but on the journey that he went through. The first image that I have is a silhouette of a female body to represent his wife, Arousa, in the land of Mashriq. The path continues to a jail cell to represent the many years Qindil spent in the land of Haira in jail. Finally the path leads to the mountains where Qindil spots the land of Gebel.