An Analysis on Religious Intertextuality in the Novel of "Amaleqat al-Shamal" by Najeeb Kilani

Intertextuality is one of the attitudes in the new literary criticism which speaks of reaction among texts. In this critic trend which is known in Arabic literature as "Tanas", a given text will be studied from the viewpoint of its relationship with the other texts; for, there is no independent individual text but a recall from others. Although this theory has many similarities with the classic rhetoric idioms including: "quotation, implication, literary plagiarism etc.", but contemporary critics differentiate between them. One of important subsets of it is religious intertextuality which is meant as overlap between chosen religious texts such as the Holy Quran, Prophetic Hadith, religious characters, events, and verdicts with the main text. There should be a kind of conformation between the overlapped texts so as to provide the author's aim. In this research which is done with the descriptive method and context analysis technique, we try to analyze the religious intertextuality in the novel of "ʼAmaleqat al-Shamal" by NajeebKilani. The result of this paper is that NajeebKilani utilized Koranic verses and Prophetic Hadith in his novel both directly and indirectly; but he used Koranic tales and the events of Islam's history only indirectly.