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AN ISLAMIC PERSPECTIVE ON HARDY'S TESS



DESCRIPTION:

Address: http://www.gl.umbc.edu/~relhag1/islamictess.html [NC]
Contact: Contact: Rasha El-Haggan (rehag1@umbc.edu)
Date: 07/01/04

This page is part of an "Islamic Webring" intended to "promote the cause of Islam"; it contains an essay titled "Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'uberville [sic]: An Islamic Perspective" by Rasha El-Haggan, an English major at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. The essay is about twenty paragraphs long and is interspersed with quotations from the Koran; its conclusion accurately summarizes the chief points it makes:

In conclusion, after a close exploration of what could have happened had Angle [sic], Alec, and Tess followed Islamic Shariah, one clearly notes that Tess’s death at the end of the novel could have been avoided. If Alec had lowered his gaze and refrained from seducing Tess, their affair would have been non-existent. If Angel and Tess concealed the sins that God screened, the rift in their marriage would be non-existent. If Angel had forgiven Tess as readily as she forgave him, he would not have felt it necessary to leave her for a year. Finally, if Angel stood by his husbandry [sic] responsibilities despite Tess’s supposedly unforgivable behavior, Tess would not have returned to Alec and murdered him.
COMMENT:

Of possible interest as an expression of one particular Islamic perspective on a Hardy novel--a perspective from which the writer asserts, for example, that "Alec's seduction of Tess is in itself an immoral act punishable by death in the Judeo-Christian tradition or 80 lashes under Islamic Shariah."

Otherwise, not likely to be useful for scholarly purposes: the novel is simplistically viewed from a "strictly religious standpoint," the text is marred by misspellings and typographical errors, and, although quotations from Tess are identified by page numbers in parentheses, no edition of Tess is cited to which the page numbers can be referred.
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