Arabs and the Golden Bough

The book opens new horizons for the Arab reader that he has not experienced in reading his literary heritage. By reading the story of Thamud through what was written about it by chroniclers, storytellers, and exegetes, he re-reads its history on two levels: the first is concerned with revealing the actual history that Thamud lived throughout history, and the second is concerned with revealing the myth that Thamud left in the Arab imagination before Islam. The author takes two steps in opposite directions: a first step is to reconstruct the history of Thamud and free it from myth, and a second step is to reconstruct the myth of Thamud and free it from history. In the غزوة تبوك (Expedition of Tabuk), a series of hadiths appeared concerning the ruins of Al-Hijr, the tomb of Abu Righal, and the golden branch buried within it. The author re-connects and welds together the parts of this story. He actually finds that the ruins of Al-Hijr were struck by a violent earthquake that destroyed its temple and eliminated its tribe and its people, based on the Lihyanite inscriptions. Thus, the historical reality of Thamud aligns with their symbolic myth: the she-camel represents the camel economy that was prevalent in Thamud, while the sacred sanctuary in which Abu Righal was buried is the pagan temple that was dedicated to the worship of Dhu-Ghabat, which collapsed on the heads of the city's leaders and priests. However, this integration between myth and history, or in other words, this reconciliation between the mythologization of history and its demythologization, does not satisfy the author's hunger. Hence, in the last chapter of the book, he compares the "branch of gold" mentioned in the Prophetic hadith about Abu Righal's tomb in Al-Hijr with three major foundational texts: "The Epic of Gilgamesh," Homer's "Odyssey," and Virgil's "Aeneid."

• Category: History Books

• Number of pages: 207 pages