Mystical

In this article, we take as a starting point the novel Le sommeil d’Eve (Eve’s Sleep) in order to examine Mohammed Dib’s thoughts on femininity and love. His input on those issues is remarkable and pervades all his work. The novel Le sommeil d’Eve reveals how some romantic encounters entail such trauma that the perceived love pushes the protagonists over into another universe, one where irrational phenomena reign: oddness, strangeness, hallucinations, loss of the sense of reality. This transition from one universe to another intertwines mystical with traumatic insanity, couples loss with devastation, and links birth to death.

There is no doubt that during the last several decades some significant progress has been made in the field of the inter-religious and inter-faith dialogue. It is also a well-known fact that wide scale changes have occurred in terms of global geopolitics and cultural interaction. What's more, in an era where even the idea of borderlines suffers a shape-shifting analogous to that one during the ancient Hellenistic times, we find ourselves facing unprecedented challenges and questions demanding viable answers. Now, more than ever, it is witnessed by all that politicians and economists have failed sourly in bringing peoples and cultures peacefully together. It is exactly where they have failed that religious leaders and religion experts are called upon to heal a severely wounded world. Should they succeed, the 21 st century would be one of religion and peace unforeseen in human history. Yet, even though around the same table, many a time religious leaders and spoke-persons find themselves entangled in the complexities of serious dogmatic issues, territorial (literal or not) power plays or the never-ending spiral paths of an all encompassing protocol or etiquette. Thus, though clear, progress is slow and meets not current pressing issues. Then, at the core of this brief presentation lies the belief that in the deepest recesses of religion, in their mystical dimension, one may find useful ideas and tools, perhaps able to help bridging a so far persisting gap of comprehension sometimes to be witnessed on all participant sides. Consequently, our task now would be to present at least some of those ideas that if approached with solemnity and a peaceful mind may widen our horizons and bring dialogue back to its ancient old nucleus: the human heart.