Marife Turkish Journal of Religious Studies

Abstract

While Egypt, Syria, and Iraq witnessed literary vitality and scientific development in studies on modern Arabic literature, Moroccan literature remained far from new intellectual movements and remained loyal to classical Arabic literature. In modern Moroccan literature, it is seen that the new literary genres that emerged and developed in Arabic literature started late. As a result, the writers went through a process full of mistakes and inexperience, causing them to spend a long time and struggle hard until they reach a true story art. In Morocco new story started with the works of maqame imitation of figures such as Ebū Su'ayb al-Dukālī, Ibn Sakrūn, Mohamed Ğirrīd, and Mohamed Mūsā at the beginning of the XX. century. There are several factors contributing to the delay of the Moroccan short story. The French occupation had a great influence on the late emergence and development of the story. Moroccan short-story writer Mohamed Said al- Reyḥānī holds a master's degree in translation, communication, and journalism, a master's degree in authorship, and a bachelor's degree in English literature. He has been a member of the "Moroccan Writers Union" since 2008. The work “Death of the Author” of Reyḥānī, in addition to being a researcher on literature, who also works in the field of authorship, is the third of his story collection. The work was published in 2010. The author wrote his stories as a group of stories, not as individual texts. As all the themes in the other story collection are the same, the theme in all the stories in this collection is the same and that is death. This work of al- Reyḥānī named "Mawt al Muallif (Death of the Author)" is a storybook consisting of ten story collections in which the death theme is handled in different ways. Reyḥānī, who first thought of a title for his short story collection; expresses that it is a central subject around which all texts reproduced in a field of study are gathered around these titles. This style, which he adopted in his other collections, is seen as the central theme in this story called "The Death of the Author", with titles such as "end, death and salvation". In his story A State of Indifference, the author tells that in societies where there is no security and solidarity, death will choose what it wants, when and how it wants. He reversed the concepts of life and death in his story All Our Life for Comfort and All Our Death for Worry. A Case of Intoxication is his story about poisoning and the punishment of death. In the story of Honoring Your Dead, he described the funeral ceremony of the ruler in the cruel regime. In his story “On the Death Bed” he described the last moments of death. In the Worst Captive's Worst End story, a prisoner who needs an honorable death lesson takes up the case where death is slow enough for him to want death, having lost all his dignity. In Life As the Dead Will, the author puts death on the axis of honor in human life in this story. He composed the story of Death in the Style of the Emperors with his thoughts on choosing the way in which a person would die at the time of suicide. He revealed the impossibility of political assassination based on an actual event in the story "The One Who Killed Me, I’m Still Alive". As a result of the fact that the French writer Barthes was influenced by the understanding of the story in his story, The Death of the Author, the writer is dead and there is only the reader in this last story, where he pulls the author from the story and leaves the reader alone with the story.