ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to give a brief overview of the links between fiction and belief in an Arab-Muslim context, as literature enters a modern and contemporary era. The emergence of narrative fiction as a literary genre, both inherited from endogenous forms and shaped by the Western literary canon, seems to go against literature’s submission to moral and religious edification. This evolution is paradoxical. The empowerment of the figure of the writer makes him both a possible challenge to the divine in the use of the word, and the guarantor of another type of truth—political or ideological truth, which can appear to be a limit to fiction. Several contemporary writers use narrative forms that combine genres (narrative, poetry, and essay), making possible a fictional and liberated staging of religion and belief, as well as of their erosion in the era of postcolonial migrations.
