Evoking History and Representing the Issues of the Arab Nation in the Novels of Radwa Ashour

Radwa Mostafa Ashour is a contemporary Egyptian writer and distinguished literary critic. History occupied most of Radwa Ashour's novels, and it was her companion when she wrote her autobiography "Atyaf", and history had an abundant share in it. Radwa Ashour has expressed through her historical novels the issues of the Islamic nation in general and the issues of the Arab nation in particular, and through them she specially focused on the issue of Iraq and Palestine, as she spoke about in her autobiography, lectures and in interviews with various newspapers. The researcher deals with five historical novels of the writer, in which she will discuss the issues of the Arab nation: “Siraj”, “The Granada Trilogy”, “A Piece of Europe”, “Faraj”, and the last of which is “Al-Tantouria”. Radwa Ashour expresses, through her historical novels, the history and facts that affected our past and shaped our present and reveals an important fact that we have arrived in our Arab homeland because of a past and a history that is not known about it. Radwa Ashour focused in “The Granada Trilogy” on the era in which the Arabs left Andalusia and used it as a mask to talk about the contemporary Arab reality and current affairs. She was keen, using the "mask" technique, to make the Zionists appear in the image of Castilian, and Palestine in the image of "Granada" and the "New World Order" in the image of the "New World". The writer focused on the issue of Iraq in “A Piece of Europe” through the intertextuality of Shakespeare's plays, especially the plays: The Storm, Hamlet, and then the transition from Shakespeare's Storm to the Desert Storm in the present time, the second Gulf War, and the occupation of Iraq. Radwa Ashour documented the tragedy of the Palestinian refugee in the novel “Al-Tantouriya” through the effort of the Zionist enemy to erase Palestinian geography.http://www.al-azhaar.org/index.php/alazhar/article/view/42