Barzakhic Cinema: Ibn ʿArabī’s Barzakh Ontology in Nacer Khemir’s Looking for Muhyiddin
Religions, cilt.17, sa.8, 2026 (AHCI, Scopus)
- Yayın Türü: Makale / Tam Makale
- Cilt numarası: 17 Sayı: 8
- Basım Tarihi: 2026
- Doi Numarası: 10.3390/rel17080882
- Dergi Adı: Religions
- Derginin Tarandığı İndeksler: Arts and Humanities Citation Index (AHCI), Scopus, ATLA Religion Database, Index Islamicus, Linguistic Bibliography, Directory of Open Access Journals, Academic Search Ultimate (EBSCO), Religion Database (ProQuest)
- Anahtar Kelimeler: aniconism, barzakhic cinema, Ibn ʿArabī, Islamic aesthetics, khayāl, Looking for Muhyiddin, Nacer Khemir, religion and film, Sufi epistemology, tajallī
- Ankara Üniversitesi Adresli: Evet
Özet
This article examines Nacer Khemir’s Looking for Muhyiddin (2012), a documentary-fiction film that explicitly names its operative space as barzakh (a liminal threshold between two realities). It asks how cinema can mediate between visible form and invisible religious meaning without reducing one to the other. The method is mutual illumination: close formal analysis of the film is brought into dialogue with Ibn ʿArabī’s ontology of barzakh, khayāl, dhawq, wajh/hijāb, and tajallī (imaginal reality, experiential tasting, face and veil, and divine self-disclosure, respectively), alongside debates in religion-and-film studies, documentary theory, haptic visuality, and spectatorship. The analysis shows that the film’s barzakhic structure operates through two encompassing dimensions—the ontology of production and the epistemology of reception—and three formal operations: barzakhic thresholds of cemetery, dream, and yakaza; the aniconic withdrawal of the faceless khirqa/burnous (the Sufi patched cloak); and tissage and superimposition as alternatives to montage. The article argues that these operations do not merely represent Ibn ʿArabī’s thought but stage cinematic analogues of its relational logic. It concludes that “barzakhic cinema” names a limited reading framework derived from the Islamic intellectual tradition, useful for rethinking how religious meaning can be sensed through cinematic form.