Essay Assignment
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).
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."