Religious Narrative and the Memory of Values in the Wondrous Religious Story: The Story of “The People of the Ditch” as an Example

Abstract

The research focuses on the analysis of a genre of ancient narrative forms that revolves around religion and its beliefs mainly "The People of the Ditch" which was mentioned in the Qur’an and has been narrated in various religious texts related to the interpretation of the Qur’an. The analysis engages with this story as a narrative genre, similar to other common narrative genres, due to the elements it contains. This story among other religious stories possesses artistic, structural, and thematic elements that are equally valuable to the retorical elements found in classical narrative genres. One aspect of our interest in this story is to address first and foremost in the introduction the usefulness of the tools provided by discourse theory. The research widened the scope of this theory to include the analysis of previously unexplored narrative texts in discourse analysis. In the introduction, one provides insight of the overall objectives of this study by presenting the topic and elaborating on the related issues. Then it delved into the structural characteristics of the religious narrative such as narration, events, setting and time. The aim is to identify the specific narrative content addressed by the story of the People of the Ditch. The researcher concluded by focusing on the distinctive features of this story, including the active presence of elements of the miraculous and the mythical, along with the religious aspect of the story's content. Last but not least, the researcher probes into navigating the story of The People of the Ditch between historical truth and metaphorical analysis. By laying due attention to these elements, the present research attempts to extract the major characteristics of the story by highlighting the cultural and religious purposes that the religious narrative seeks to consecrate not only in its real existence (the religious memory of the community) but also in its symbolic and metaphorical ones. The research concludes by summarizing the main findings derived from the analysis of the story’s various components