Modernist Arab poets deployed ancient myths against Islamic tradition to signify Western modernity

Evidence

By a curious inversion, the “New” Arab poets, strongly influenced by modernist European poetry, have resorted to ancient Middle Eastern mythology in order to signify the authentically modern, indicating in this way their desire for escape from what they regard as the stifling traditions in the contemporary Islamic world. The most prominent among these poets is Adonis, the Phoenician pseudonym of the most eminent member of the shi‘r group, a self-declared atheist and modernist. Using devices familiar to Western symbolist and surrealist poetry, Adonis alludes to mythic figures in a self-conscious effort to disrupt Islamic aesthetic and moral sensibilities, to attack what is taken to be sacred tradition in favor of the new— that is, of the Western. (These myths, incidentally, have had to be translated into Arabic from the writings of modern European scholars who transcribed and re-narrated them.) — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 268

Categorization

• XREF: This bears on why modernity for Arab modernists entailed importing European categories — connects to Cooper’s critique that ‘secular modernity’ carries its normative freight from Christian-European history, with Adonis as a vivid case of emulating the West as telos.