Demythologizing the Myth of Ibn Arabi in Saudi Novelist Mohammad Hassan Olwans Small Death A Postmodern Rereading

This paper presents an attempt to demythologize the myth of Ibn Arabi and contributes to the process of fully understanding him in the context of Islamic Sufism by debunking his biased stereotypical representations found in biographies, as a mystic and a metaphysical person rather than an ordinary person. In this regard, I have highlighted some demythologizing techniques used by Olwan to portray Ibn Arabi to counter mainstream biases of conventional representations. The process of humanizing Ibn Arabi became the cornerstone of the demythologizing project of Olwan where he chose techniques that rendered the portrayal of Ibn Arabi a breathtaking and challenging process. Olwan focused on the accounts that best represent Ibn Arabi as a normal human being than a saint. These demythologizing techniques included the unreliability of history, the deconstructive approach, the metafictive and matahistorical approach and the use of first narrative technique as well as the use of simple language.

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

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The datasets used in this study are openly available at [repository link] and the source code is available on GitHub at [GitHub link].

This work did not receive any external funding.