Al-Juwaili deconstructs the Arab popular myth

Dar Africa-Al-Sharq published a new book entitled “The Man Who Conceived: Power, Birth, and the Feminization of Existence through the Arab Popular Fairy Tale” by the Tunisian researcher and thinker, Dr. Muhammad Al-Juwaili, on the occasion of the current session of the International Publishing and Book Fair in Rabat.

The book consists of 314 large pages, divided into six chapters, in which Dr. Muhammad Al-Juwaili studies and analyzes a popular fairy tale, which he has followed over the past twenty years, collecting ten novels about it in the Arab world, from Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Palestine, Saudi Arabia (2) and the Emirates (2). 2) Yemen and Oman.

According to information about the author, the story that the thinker Muhammad Al-Juwaili studied and analyzed anthropologically, while comparing it to similar things in the world heritage, is that a man becomes pregnant just as a woman does, because he ate an apple, a herring, or a rope fish while he was unaware of it, in place of his barren wife, so he becomes pregnant and desires it. Delicious food, so his wife hides him from people for fear of scandal, and when the time comes for him to give birth, he goes out into the open and gives birth to a girl under a tree, which he leaves alone. The birds carry her to their nests, raise her, and feed her until she becomes a very beautiful girl, and the Sultan’s son is fascinated by her and marries her.

What is surprising is that in all the ten Arab narrations of this story, there is not a single narration in which a man who conceived gives birth to a boy, always gives birth to a girl. This is what caught the attention of researcher Al-Juwaili, and he analyzed it in the book, which is the first of its kind in the Arab world to address this thorny and complex topic. Which combines seriousness and humor.

It is worth noting that Dr. Muhammad Al-Juwaili, a Tunisian national, holds a doctorate from the Sorbonne University in Paris (1995), teaches at the Faculty of Arts at the University of Manouba in Tunisia, and has moved on as a professor and visiting researcher in many international universities. He is considered among the most prominent scholars of folk tales in the Arab world. He is also considered a pioneer in the Arab world of the anthropological school of reading the folk tale that came after the formalist school under the influence of the Russian “Vladimir Propp”.