Joyce & the Bab - A remarkable new essay by Todd Lawson

We are the first generation in the West able to read the Koran, 

if we are able to read Finnegans Wake. ~ Norman O. Brown

“Joycean Modernism in a Nineteenth-Century Qur’an Commentary?: 

A Comparison of the Bab’s Qayyūm Al-Asmā’ with Joyce’s Ulysses.”

by Todd Lawson 

In 

Erin and Iran: 

Cultural Encounters between the Irish and the Iranians 

edited by H. E. Chehabi and Grace Neville, 

Boston & Washington D.C.: 

Ilex Foundation & Center for Hellenic Studies, 

Trustees of Harvard University, 2015, pp. 79–118.

On amazon HERE.

"Numerous structural, thematic, and reception parallels exist between two otherwise quite incommensurable literary works. The one is James Joyce’s well-known, controversial and vastly infuential Ulysses, generally considered the frst major work of the modernist move-ment in European literature. The second, entitled Qayyūm al-asmā’,2 is the virtually unknown, unpublished and unread yet highly distinctive and un-usual commentary on the 12th sura of the Qur’an by the Iranian prophet Seyyed Ali Mohammad Shirāzi (1819–50), better known to history as the Bab. By suggesting the existence of parallels and similarities between these two works it is not also suggested that there is any sort of connection between them or their authors, genetic, social, historical, or otherwise. But, both authors wrote at specifc and intense moments of cultural crisis and change in their respective socio-historical situations. And each was profoundly and acutely aware of the particular centrality of the literary tradition in which they wrote and the literary weight of the sources and models for their respective compositions. In the case of Joyce and Ulysses, the weight and authority of this literary history is represented by the Odyssey and Joyce’s appropriation (and simultaneous celebration and critique) of the epic tradition, exemplifed by the Odyssey. In the case of the Bab and his Qayyūm al-asmā’, the quite considerable and truly unique weight and authority of his tradition is represented by the Qur’an, on which this ostensibly exegetical work is modeled…"