Employing history in the novel Mawt Saghir by Mohammed Hasan Alwan

 The novel is one of the most difficult literary arts, and it also seems easy because it provides the writer with the freedom of action in narrating the events of people's lives and their reality, and this work may be realistic or imagined. The novel includes many topics that occupy novelists, so we find a variety of topics, including the psychological novel, the realistic novel, and the historical novel that is concerned with the historical aspect of human life and combines reality and imagination. The presence of the historical novel has become a strong thing in the Arab narrative scene. Indeed, novels that evoke history, such as the novel “Mawt Saghir” by Mohammed Hasan Alwan, or reproduce history through imagining artistic and experimental mechanisms, compete strongly in literary prizes. The aforementioned novel also won the Arab Booker Prize 2017. The general context of “Mawt Saghir” is based on the biography and travels of Ibn 'Arabî and the continuity between narrative narration and mystical revelation with the employment of Islamic history and the turbulent conditions in it. We have decided that the subject of our research should be about “the employment of history in the novel Mawt Saghir by Muhammad Hassan Alwan.” Among the reasons for choosing this topic there are subjective and objective reasons: As for the reasons for subjectivity are our inclinations to the novel, the objective reasons are to search for the writer’s goal in relying on the employment of history in His fictional work. But the important question is: How did "Muhammad Hassan Alwan" employ the element of history in his novel " Mawt Saghir"? And to answer this question, we relied on the descriptive-analytical method that no study can dispense with. After the study, we reached a set of results, namely: that the novel makes history in the era in which Ibn Arabi lived, until his death in Damascus, a framework for it, and the novelist’s endeavor to employ history is to touch beauty and influence human souls and minds by attracting and suspicious of the reader. The beginning of the events of the novel takes place in Andalusia, which makes the reader feel that he is traveling through time and living that historical era between its palaces, gardens and sports thirty pages) of the novel, then they returned to overlap and rotate together until the end.In its narrative discourse, the novel is based on the language of the era in which Ibn Arabi lived and the culture of Sufism that is part of his life, but in the same case it targets the present and its language enjoys the poetics of the culture of the ordinary reader in the current era.The novelist built his novel on an important stage of history, a time of conflict between the Almohads, the Almoravids, the Ayyubids, the Abbasids, the Seljuks, and a lot of strife and wars.In the text of a Mawt Saghir, Muhammad Hassan Alwan combined the historical and the imaginary (historical characters versus imaginary characters and an imaginary place), so he proceeded from the narrative imagination to talk about the real history.The novelist relied on contemporary narrative techniques towards the mechanisms of narrative intersection resulting from the intersection of narrative time (recall and anticipation).The writer was able to control the historical characters, and subject them to the imaginary side. One of the artistic characteristics of the novelist in the novel is the temporal intersection that stops the reader when reading the novel, as we find it at the beginning based on the present tense that embodies the end of the narration, and then returning to the beginning through remembrance.As for what is related to the description of the place, the writer has linked it to his relationship with the characters, that is, the character is the one who performs the description process in itself, as a result of the impact that the place leaves on the character. The writer's ingenuity in his depiction of the place became apparent to us due to his interest in it, as he used his artistic imagination, so the places came as if they were immortal artistic paintings.