What does it mean to be convinced by an interpretation of a work of art? In what does such a conviction consist, and how does it differ from other forms of conviction, such as moral, political, or—most polemically—religious? This project studies the vexed relationship between literary criticism and what has historically been considered its antithesis: divine revelation, particularly in the Islamic context. The doctrine of secular criticism, which has dominated the discipline of literary studies since its professional inception in the early twentieth century, insists that the practice of criticism constitutively rejects forms of unreasoned belief associated with religious devotion and that this is what makes criticism the marker of intellectual modernity. But it’s largely because of that secularist argument, the project shows, that the modern literary critical establishment has not been able to answer the thorny phenomenological questions plaguing critical practice, questions having to do with what it means to adhere to, to reject, to be persuaded by, or to be unpersuaded by a critical view. The project draws on histories of Islamic critical practice that approach such questions from within a framework at once theistic and rationalist, so as to illuminate how the experience of critical conviction is one especially acute place where the secularist argument for the nature of criticism starts to break down.