Elif Shafak and Amine Maalouf: Rerouting the Silk Road or Remapping the World Cartography

The present article juxtaposes the fictional world of two major contemporary literary figures, namely Elif Shafak and Amin Maalouf through two bestselling opuses, The Forty Rules of Love and Leo the African respectively. It investigates how the two texts’rereading of Arab Muslim history operates a discursive manipulation, which not only remaps the world cartography but more importantly designs textualities as ‘contact zones’, thus rehabilitating the ascendency of Oriental space and celebrating its multicultural essence, its civilizational stakes, and its unique spirituality.