The Dialectic of Heritage and Modernity and Its Systemic Representations in Maḥmūd al-Masʿadī's Novel *Ḥaddatha Abū Hurayra Qāl*

Maḥmūd al-Masʿadī's novel “Ḥaddatha Abū Hurayra Qāl” ranks among the most powerful contemporary texts, because it engages the human being in relation to the self, to existence, and to the cultural and ethical inheritance. This makes it a composite text that joins narration, philosophical reflection, the language of heritage, symbolic construction, and the modernist question of essence and existence. Two systems are therefore found within it: the first traditional, the second modernist, the two interacting within an artistic mold, each carrying its own epistemic load and intellectual frame of reference.

Heritage rests on the sacred, inherited language, asceticism, Sufism, and ethics; modernity rests on doubt, individual experience, existential reflection, and revolt against inherited authorities. The conflict ends in the impossibility of any absolute separation between heritage and its systemic representations and modernity and its coordinating manifestations, all fused within a brilliant fictional text that lays bare the crisis of the contemporary human being.