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Advances in Social Sciences Research Journal – Vol. 10, No. 8
Publication Date: August 25, 2023
DOI:10.14738/assrj.108.15047.
Yacoub, J. (2023). Jerusalem Rock: The Myth of Existence and The Universal Discourse. Advances in Social Sciences Research
Journal, 10(8). 19-31.
Services for Science and Education – United Kingdom
Jerusalem Rock: The Myth of Existence and The Universal
Discourse
Jalila Yacoub
Faculty of Letters, Arts and Humanities,
University of Manouba, Tunisia
ABSTRACT
This research paper is concerned with the myth, in what is circulated of creation
news and the longing for immortality, the person tries to deny the impotence by
entering into the world of reason and the desire for knowledge or by restricting his
presence in the temples. These meanings are the backgrounds of writing myths in
literature for realistic knowledge and truth in relation to the place, its steadfastness
as symbol of existence and continuity. If the myth is part of a person's confusion
about death then it remains one of the reasons for resurrection and inspiration for
knowledge through fortune-telling and the mediators of the unseen worlds in the
world of matter. It is the case of the "Rock of Jerusalem" novel in the literary genre
as established by the Palestinian writer Marwan al-Allan; multiple voices are in
narration announcing the promised return, which limits the concept of time and its
three dimensions, so they become shadows in faith or mother, God and the Holy
Spirit? The concept of triangulation has an axis, which is the sacred rock. Anxiety is
one of the mirrors of history, wars of survival in the biography of “Salem”, the axis
or the deviation to the centrality of civilization in the landmark when nature is
transformed into culture or the vision in the fortune-telling becomes a reality seen
as a will of gods, glory of the knowers, or a response to the distinction of the Ego and
its supremacy in action and existence.
Keywords: Myth, Creed, History, Novel, Symbol, Marwan al- Allan
INTRODUCTION
"Jerusalem Rock"(Ṣakhrah Ûrshalîm) by the Palestinian poet, painter, writer and critic Marwan
al-Allan, a novel or literary writing that combines many cultural references, namely history,
religion, civilization and myth in a sacred symbol that justifies the struggles of life in the human
relationship with time and place and the concept of heroism and glory and their search for them
in the field of fertility or annihilation and immortality through sacrifice or justifying what
cannot be justified except by digging into the successive recounts about the origin/ first
ancestor, the sacred symbol, the reason for staying in place and continuing in time; it is the
myth, when it is rationalized in discourse and self-concerns, it searches for the reality of history
and geography, both of which have no features except for the imagined beliefs and legacy of
successive civilizations. That is what preoccupied Marwan al-Allan’s thought and created it with
a literary dye in his novel on the origins of growing up and behind the flock, its axis is the place
and the Holy Spirit, even if it is from the remains of the dead and the traces of passers-by. The
obsession with the textual product and its criticism is not the definition or the republishing of
what the previous researchers spoke about, but the purpose is to research this interdependence
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Advances in Social Sciences Research Journal (ASSRJ) Vol. 10, Issue 8, August-2023
Services for Science and Education – United Kingdom
that the Palestinian writer established between history and geography, myth and religion,
literature and superstition, so the novel was vain the fabric of the text and its echo in the
confusion of existence and the guarantee of survival; binaries are the knots in the structure and
the ambiguities in presenting the subject. He searches for its tributaries, and finds nothing in it
except the maturity of the human experience. He wants to see himself in the material subject,
but he finds it only in the narrative imagination as discourse and in the revelations of the unseen,
its signs are manifested in fortune-telling and divination, based on which personalities in
individual and number may be the greatest sign in drawing the place and marking it with the
history of civilization or watering it with the sacred blood as an offering that obscures
consciousness and replaces the unconscious, as if it is the absolute of existence or presenting
oneself to gods that may guard the place in the superstitious imagination, but they complicate
the bonds of the psychological aspect in the mirrors of creative writing. In turn, the meaning
becomes problematic in the various eras of thought and its major developments and stages in
terms of:
• The concept of myth and its forms
• The legend between the origin in the reference and the tributary in creating the news
• The sacred symbol is an entity and group belief
• The status of history in myth, religion and its concept among the vanished peoples
reflected in the narrative imagination, so the text remains in the dialectic of truth and
the journey of searching for it.
JERUSALEM ROCK: MYTHICAL SANCTUARY AND RELIGIOUS REASON
The mythical and the religious when they meet in symbols and rituals in a world that is
perceived and not seen, just like the narration in the text and in the imaginary, he weaves the
features of culture in absolute existence and non-existence, one of which comes with the
features of the other, confirming and negating it, or the mythical between the reference and
“narrative questions” and the Arab-Palestinian creativity as it forms a “human identity” whose
features cannot be manifested except by waging an existential struggle between the arrivals to
the place desiring it with “fire and iron"[170- 172] and among the rest, if it is not a reality, then
by remaining a sacred symbol, despite the pluralism and diaspora so that there are no limits
except for what changes the manifestations of structures in the tributary and the source of
knowledge and its expression in literature, but through what differs from it in the biography of
humans and the modalities of existence that legitimize its phenomena and the impulses of
power, or as says Nidal al-Shamali:
“There is a kind of symbolic tyranny of a universal/ collective metaphorical nature, i.e. a cultural
pun that constitutes the collective implicit pronoun, and the symbolic tyranny plays the role of
the active engine in the cultural mind of the nation.”[254]
It is writing in myth and literature through and about history. Expressions and symbols that
link what is written in beliefs with means of thinking and speech that depict imagination as if it
was reality or desire to know through ages and civilizations.[141] As a result, the text -whatever
its identity may be from this trinity-exercises its seduction and attraction in the discourse. [119]
The myth of the sacred symbol is narrated as a religious history or as a religion. It is a collective
belief in the ancient concept of the nation through the spiritual leader and the reference of the
unseen knowledge that defines the purpose and guides it as the end and direction to the