Image credit: [Merve Tabur]Abstract
This article presents a comparative reading of Egyptian playwright Tawfīq al-Ḥakīm’s play Poet on the Moon (1972) and British science-fiction author H. G. Wells’ novel The First Men in the Moon (1901). It reveals new insights on al-Ḥakīm’s familiarity with Wells and examines his contribution to transnational drama through a discussion of his theater of the mind in the framework of his “intellectual popular non-realism.” This article argues that both authors employ allegories of representation to question the limits of scientific knowledge and artistic expression, yet al-Ḥakīm asserts a transnational aesthetics inspired by Sufism to challenge colonial epistemologies.
Merve Tabur
Lecturer/Researcher
I am a scholar of comparative literature and environmental humanities, focusing on how environmental destruction is depicted in speculative fiction, film, and visual arts from the Middle East and its Anglophone diasporas.