Samuel Beckett and the Islamic World: Connecting the Dots Through Beckett’s Works and Reception

The distinguished position of Samuel Beckett is due to his assignation of religious ideas. A quick closer look however reveals that Beckett has been studied from a Western perspective which is either religious or critical. A few studies on Beckett are from an Eastern viewpoint but Muslims’ perspective still is missing. Keeping this research gap in mind, the current paper aims to determine the significant impact of the Islamic perspective on Beckett’s works and how his works are adapted in various Muslim contexts. For this purpose, the adaptations of Waiting for Godot are used for finding out the connection between Beckett and the Islamic world. The findings of the paper highlight not only the presence of Beckett in the Islamic world but also the work offers rich signs in need to be traced.


Literature Review
Beckett's scholarship has been extended to Eastern critical, religious and political traditions, other than that of Western stance. However, the Islamic perspective still is missing.
It seems a bit unlikely phenomenon that too when throughout the 19 th century, there was a strong existence of Orientalism in Irish literature (Cochran, 2009 (Cioran, 1998, p. 5-6). In such conditions, the possibility of not knowing Islamic tradition by an Irish writer may be considered a mere exaggeration.  (Beckett, 1993, p. 61). Interestingly, Beckett misspells Hafiz as Hatiz and considers both the poets as pessimistic, which in fact is quite misleading and is against the worldwide popularity of the poets. None of both, Hafiz and Saadi, convey the pessimistic message. John Pilling, however, observes that Beckett puts the category of Muslim writers in the wrong thematic list and misspelled the name of Hafiz (Pilling, 2004, p. 116 And Wilderness is Paradise enow. (Fitzgerald, 2009, p. 21) In All that Fall, there is the use of 'Ramadam' by Mrs. Rooney for being loud. She says, "I am sorry for all this ramdam" (Beckett, 2012, p. 186). The critics like that of Fletcher and

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Fletcher opine that ramdam which is a French word, "is traditionally associated with festivities occurring during the nocturnal hours of the Muslim Ramdan Fast" (Fletcher, 1985, p. 84 (Beckett, 2007, p. 33) Ruby Cohn claims that the "stanza offers horrific details of the head frozen in Dante's ninth circle" (Cohn, 2004, p. 327). However mostly, this stanza refers to the ways stark behaved while Beckett was observing them. The effect of African Muslim culture can also be dotted in Not I in which we find a Djellaba-clad figure. Explaining this figure, James Knowlson accounts that the Djellaba-clad figure was "an Arab woman waiting there for her child", which highly captivated Beckett during staying in Tunisia (Knowlson, 1996, p. 589

Beckett's Reception in the Muslim Contexts
The discussion on Beckett's reception involving the Muslim contexts can be divided into two categories: Non-Asian Muslim context and Asian Muslim Context. The first section pinpoints how Waiting for Godot was adapted in Europe and the Middle East and the following discusses Waiting for Godot's reception in Asian Muslim contexts.

• Waiting for Godot and its Reception in Non-Asian Muslim Context
Waiting for Godot was produced by Ilan Ronen at the Municipal Theatre, Haifa (1984). The idea was to introduce Beckett for demonstrating the socio-political condition of the country.
The play was translated into Arabic and Hebrew by Anton Shammas (Hutchings, 2005). It metaphorically demonstrated the relations between different communities with a particular focus on Muslims and Jews. Although the originality was marred due to this experimentation, the universality helped depict the state in which the people of Israel were living. This linguistic variety of the adaptations helped the spectators to 'identify emotionally' with the circumstances of the characters (Ronen, 1997). While the edition was an artistic achievement, it can be esteemed as food for thought. It helps the audience and readers in knowing how it helps depict However, she suggested that the modification was essential to spare the audience from the disappointment of the non-arrival of Godot even the second time as "the despair of Act 1 was enough for the Sarajevo audience" (Bowe, 2021, 267). Her defence finds roots in the famous idea by Vivian Mercier, "a play in which nothing happens twice" (Mercier, 1956, p. 6).
However, it can be noted that Mercier, conversely, highlighted implicitly that no solid consequence is achieved by the end of both the acts but the characters neither departed nor left the place to utter darkness. Along with this, the changes could also be seen in censoring the religious content; however, this mindful omission can be justified as Sontag was aware of the diverse cultural and religious context of the spectators and reference to religious content could convey a negative message. On the other hand, Sontag (1994) claimed that the production was to express solidarity with subjugated citizens of Sarajevo, mostly Muslims, during the time of war.
The above conversation indicates that Waiting for Godot is an experimental play and this allows it to exceed the categorise of '-isms' such as existentialism, absurdism, and nihilism.

• Waiting for Godot and its Reception in Asian Muslim Context
In Bangladesh, the translated English text of Waiting for Godot became part of the curriculum in the late 1970s. Mahmood (1993) Mahmood (1993) reveals that the theme of misery did not go unnoticed; rather, it encouraged the audience to recognise "the confusion, the uncertainty, the hopelessness, and despair of the tramps in the play" (Mahmood, 1993, 62 The general appeal of the play did not fail in entertaining the people and urging them to search for the meanings and purpose of life by making an imaginative connection with the characters of Godor Pratikshaya. Although the religious invisibility allowed to adopt self-censorship yet this act might have led to the formation of ambiguity in the themes of the play. And this uncertainty of Waiting for Godot is its raison d'etre for being popular since the late 1950s. Knowlson (1996) opines that the durability of Waiting for Godot lies in its uncertainties and ambiguity. Much has been suggested rather than explicitly stated as the people can read into it what they want to read into it. Thus, it is expected that vulnerability and obscurity would make  (Nasir, 2021). Insha ka Intezaar reveals how average Pakistani men and women are facing the hardships of life and how their rights are unkempt by the powerful either patriarchs or rich.

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Amazingly, this adaptation of the play with the theme of religious exploitation is frequently displayed through the discriminatory constitutional laws and behaviour of the society. Jafri voices the agony and discontent of the common Pakistanis by aptly manipulating the universality of Waiting for Godot. Although the actions of the characters represent the unfair conditions of people in general, at the same time the frustration, the nothingness and helplessness represent the hollow hope for the future.
Moving around the paradoxical themes of void and hope, the adaptation cuts the religious symbolic text of Waiting for Godot. The outcome of this alteration, however, strongly instructs religious handling in the Pakistani society while evading Beckett's challenging religious material. For example, the speech of Lucky is being replaced by the ideas which are related to introducing Islamic laws in the constitution. Also, Naseebun (Lucky) portrays that religious discernment is common as she says that each one has created his own God. The representation of Pakistan's socio-religious and political reality is the leading theme in the play.
As soon as the characters start realizing that their hope is hollow and they should keep it away from them, one of them brings back the idea of waiting for Insha so they start waiting for Insha struggles to provide an aesthetic relief to the war-stricken ill-fated people, mostly Muslims. In all this process, it has been noted that the religious content was directly censored but the religious context of the audience led them to understand how the productions are related to them. On the other hand, Godor Pratikshaya and Insha ka Entezaar were staged entirely in the Muslim context of Islamic countries. Therefore, the explicit burden of religious context is not ambiguous. In both contexts, the adaptations ironically blue-pencil the religiously problematic ideas of Waiting for Godot. The expurgation of these ideas, however, resulted in the adoption of a coercive satirizing tone to highlight the plight of common citizens who, according to the adaptations' central message, are always misled by the religious authorities and the state.
Although all the productions almost blue-pencils the religious material of the original text of Waiting for Godot, they have hardly been able to move beyond the religious sphere. Instead, the religious contexts of the adaptations lend more expressive insights to the audience. In simple words, Beckett's version of religious content goes missing, but the receivers were able to see and feel more clearly what was absent in the adaptations. These adaptations provide a link through which Beckett can be explored and any exploration that traces the impact of Islamic writers and countries on Beckett would be very welcomed and it can decrease the hostility of the Islamic world to challenging writers like Beckett.