Sanctification of Trees in ‘The Fig Tree of the Temples’ and ‘Doumat wad Hamid’

In their 'Derakht-e Anjir-e Ma'abed' (The Fig Tree of the Temples) and 'Doumat wad Hamid,' Ahmad Mahmoud and Tayeb Salih, respectively, created lands of nowhere, in which people show deep affection to a tree. Ahmad Mahmoud depicts a society in which people believe in the sanctification and miraculous power of a tree. It turned into the symbol of the beliefs and religious rituals of the people. Accordingly, they perform rituals that in divine religions are not appropriate to be carried out for anybody except for God. They, for instance, ask for the cure of the sick, pray the tree, impetrate, and pray it. Nobody dares oppose or deny the sanctity of the tree, and any opposition nipped in the bud. Similar devotions and seeking cure are also present in Tayeb Salih'sDoumat wad Hamid'. Document wad Hamid is a fruitless tree, which, like the fig tree, has become sanctified. People perform Tawaf around and make vows and sacrifice lambs for it. No opposition tolerated here too. The present paper applies a descriptive approach to study tree sanctification in these stories to highlight the myths and archetypes pointing out the relation between man and tree and finding the grounds and motivations for tree sanctification, finding how an element that is not intrinsically sacred becomes sanctified and determining which mechanisms used to achieve this. The findings show that the tree's sanctification is stronger in 'The Fig Tree of the Temples' than in 'Doumat wad Hamid,' and it has heftier relations.