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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

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Yacoub, J. (2023). Jerusalem Rock: The Myth of Existence and The Universal Discourse. Advances in Social Sciences Research Journal, 10(8). 19-31.

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.14738/assrj.108.15047

“Jerusalem Rock” or the sacred space for miracles and rituals that are practiced either in order

to establish the family within the framework of the practice of sacred sex, or when it turns into

a defiler in the duality of existence, and between them there is no continuity for one side except

with the annihilation of the other, invoking the ancestors’s recounts turns into a belief in the

myth of resurrection and continuity. Those beliefs become concepts and images of the values

they surround themselves with. It is a human motive behind the conflict between objectivity

and subjectivity, the interest in understanding both sides and their relationship to the outside

world, and the attempt to overcome the alienation that results from looking at a person

separate from his environment and from others, and this involves personal feelings and

intuition. The rock and the cave, or the solitude desired by Salem, in which he finds himself and

his being, he turns into the metaphysical world like a spectrum or part of what is behind the

veils, he lost himself in the world of matter, and it returned to him in the world of spirits, and

the place turned into cruelty and badness. The biography in literary writing becomes a fog, to

be replaced by the narration of antiquity in the writings of ideas or their silence, for there is

nothing but a dream of the promised.[164] The novel as it alienates the reality in the mythical

and the religious and adopts them as a construct and a subject at the same time, and the reality

as it transcends the limits of time and is bound by the place so there is no event except in it and

with it, and the novel when it transcends the concept of genre to simulate the symbolic

formation of storytelling, so the symbol is the experience in rituals, forms of consciousness and

the unconscious, and their extensions on the aesthetic levels in the narrative and cultural

construction in the universality of discourse when the told story flows over its “space, time,

personalities, and psychological and social states”[122- 123] and searches for logic for it in the

external world of meaning and criticism. Myth and values from the perspective of man as part

of his environment, not separate from it, and between being an attempt to build a new world in

an individual and then collective orientation based on religion and history, and between

becoming a cultural form that calls for understanding, as seen by George Lakoff and Mark

Johnson :

“Metaphors that structure the ordinary conceptual system of our culture, which is reflected in

our every day langage. We would now like to turn to metaphors that are outside our

conventional conceptual system, metaphors that are imaginative and creative. Such metaphors

are capable of giving us a new understanding of our pasts, to our daily activity, and to what we

know and believe.”[139]

Saying and there is no evidence except in claiming entitlement to the place and considering it

the source of life and the origin of existence. The rock is the beginner, the mother, death in the

end, departure between nothingness, and the possibilities of self-continuity in its germination.

A collision between the concept of emptiness or the illusion of that and the astonishment of

influence and domination and the beginning of awareness in the subconscious or between

instinct and established laws and other issues that have no keys for the closed ones.

MYTH BETWEEN HISTORY AND IMAGINATION

Marwan al-Allan created history within the artistic form, and made the legend embedded in

both, so the references overlapped except by describing literature as self-reading and raising

the problems of searching for identity, so history ceases to be part of the anthropology of

written knowledge to mimic the collective imagination in myth within the possible of existence

and the impossible in interpretation and fiction. A past literary text is a specific symbolic