Application of history in Turākinā by Mohammed Qasemzadeh and Zayni Barakāt by Gamal al-Ghitani: A Comparative Study

Tradition is an important source for the writers, and history is one of the fundamental sources of the tradition from which the writer can refer and inspire in his literary works. The same applies to the Mohammed Qasemzadeh, the Iranian novelist, and Jamal Al-Ghitani, the Egyptian novelist, in many of their novels, especially in two novels studied in this study, ie. Turākinā and Zayni Barakāt. This study investigates similarities and contrasts of two novels in the application of history as one of their traditional components and tries to study incentives and reasons of these similarities and contrasts including concerns about the contemporary history of Iran and Egypt. The study relied on the ideas of György Lukács and Lucien Goldmann, the two distinguished figures of the genetic structuralism, who emphasized the study of the form of literary works and the impact of the infrastructure on them. The study, being a comparative study, also benefitted from the school of dialectical materialism known as the Slavic school, a theory that is fully consistent with the theory of the genetic structuralism. Finally, it became clear that among the most important incentives of application history in two texts were the events and concerns of the writers times including the issue of women. al-Ghitani's novel is by and large devoid of women, that is a sign of the ignorance of women in the contemporary Egypt society, whereas in Qasemzadeh's novel the story of women is significant, as is evident from the title and the text of the novel.