"Meaning" vs. "form": reading O. Pamuk in the perspective of classical Islamic epistemology
In his novel “My name is Red” O. Pamuk consistently stresses the unavoidable clash of what he calls “Islamic” and “European” artistic manners, and describes it as a conflict of (accordingly) “sense” (mana, Arabic ma‘na) and “form”. He makes the two artistic manners belonging to different stages of art history and to different cultures meet only to discover the underlying conflict of the two logics and even of the two types of will, which overrides those evident differences. The paper argues that a consistent interpretation of O. Pamuk’s views is possible based on, firstly, the theory of “pointing to a sense” (dalala ‘ala al-ma‘na) developed by the classical Arab grammarians and, secondly, the theory elaborated by al-Jabin (1936-2010) in his groundbreaking “Critique of Arab reason” (Naqd al-‘aql al-‘arabl, 4 vols., 1982-2001). The final part of the paper puts forward a hypothesis about the two types of transcending the evident and reaching the invisible developed by Arab Islamic and European cultures.