Qaymt Ktb -

This paper asks: Drawing from Quranic notions of the recording angel ( raqīb , ‘atīd ), Sufi ontology, and modern literary theory, we propose that a book’s resurrection is an event of meaning-production, not physical return. 2. Theological Foundations: The Book as Witness The Quran repeatedly describes a kitāb (book/record) that contains all deeds (Q 18:49, 81:10-14). On the Day of Resurrection, each person is told: “Read your book. You yourself are sufficient today as an accountant against yourself” (Q 17:14).

For al-Jurjani, every act of successful reading resurrects the author’s intention. A neglected manuscript is a “dead body”; the critic, like Israfil (the angel of the Trumpet), blows the breath of interpretation into it, causing it to rise in the reader’s imagination. Thus, qiyāmah is . 5. Modern and Contemporary Echoes During the Arab Nahda (Renaissance, 19th-20th c.), figures like Butrus al-Bustani and Taha Hussein spoke of resurrecting classical heritage. Taha Hussein’s The Future of Culture in Egypt (1938) explicitly uses resurrection metaphors: “We must raise the books of our ancestors from the grave of neglect.” qaymt ktb

When a mystic reads a sacred text, the text “rises” from the page into the heart. Ibn Arabi writes: “The servant does not read the Quran; rather, the Quran reads the servant and reveals his innermost secret.” This inversion is the core of qiyāmat al-kutub : the book becomes the subject, the reader the object. The 11th-century critic Abd al-Qahir al-Jurjani, in Asrar al-Balaghah , argued that eloquence ( balaghah ) resides in naẓm (composition), not individual words. A dead lettering becomes alive through syntactic and rhetorical relationships. This paper asks: Drawing from Quranic notions of