Five-page essay
Begin reading A Child from the Village immediately so that you have time to
complete your paper by the due date.
What follows is some background on Qutb and information about what I what you to
do in your essay:
The Egyptian Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966) was one of the most important ideologues of
the contemporary Islamic resurgence. Yet, prior to his conversion to the Islamist
cause in the late 1940s he was a secular nationalist with strong literary inclinations.
One of his literary works was the autobiographical Tifl min al-Qarya (A Child from
the Village), which documents his formative years in the Upper Egyptian village of
Musha.
The essay prompt: Drawing upon A Child from the Village,analyze Sayyid Qutb’s
treatment of transitions between levels of consciousness and social awareness. Focus,
in particular, upon the author’s “awakening” from the unreflective slumber of
customary rural existence to a new kind of life lived within the context of the
modernizing Egyptian nation-state. To what extent, and to what purpose, does Sayyid
Qutb’s autobiography explicate the East-West and tradition-modernity divides?
Documenting Your Essay
Provide page reference only when quoting directly, e.g., According to Qutb, “the
Maghribis were specialists in such matters, and used to come one Critics of Zionism
claim that Israel is a European-style colonial-setter state, Israelis and supporters of
Zionism generally, claim other wise: that Israel is the legitimate manifestation of the
Jewish people's national rights. What are your thoughts? Does one of these claims
have more justification than the other? Or is the truth to be found somewhere in
between?after another to the village” (Qutb, 90). Provide a full bibliographical
reference to A Child from the Village at the end of your essay. It should take the
following form:
Sayyid Qutb, A Child from the Village, translated and edited by John Calvert and
William Shepard (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2016).
An A or B+ paper will exhibit the following:
• Good style
• A clear organization of ideas
• Grammatical correctness
• Substantial degree of creativity and insight.
Grades of B, C+, C, and D will reflect, proportionately, any significant decline
in the criteria set for an A paper.
Style
An important part of wring an essay is style. There should be a clear opening
paragraph in which the central theme of the paper is introduced.
Each paragraph should follow naturally from the last one. The author has to lead the
reader through the essay making sure he or she does not get lost on the way or run
into any roadblocks A student may know what he or she is writing about, but that
information has to be communicated effectively to the reader.
Essay writing style is to be contrasted with reportage. An examiner is not only
interested in the amount of knowledge or the number of facts that a person knows
about a subject. He or she also assumes the student is already familiar with the
material. It is rather the manner in which the material is integrated and presented,
namely the style, which is important.
Content
While style is important, no paper receives high marks without a solid ground floor of
knowledge. This means that source material should be read at least twice, with an
equal amount of time being spent reflecting on the author’s thought before a person
begins to write. By taking time to think about how he or she is going to proceed, a
student can concentrate on the one or two important points that will be presented in
the essay, develop these ideas in a straight-forward manner, and eliminate a lot of
unnecessary material in the process. In conclusion, we can quote Wilfred Cantwell
Smith’s guidelines for a good essay: “In essays the form of presentation (literary
quality, structure of the argument, even neatness of appearance) is taken into serious
consideration.”