The Interconnection of Historical Text and the Illusion of Fictional Discourse: Raml al-Maya by Waciny Laredj as a Case Study

Abstract

This article investigates how historical and fictional discourses intersect and mutually reshape one another in Waciny Laredj’s novel Raml al-Maya: The Tragedy of the One Thousand and Seventh Night. It argues that the novel constructs a complex "textual interconnection" between history and fiction through its paratexts, its dense intertextual relations with One Thousand and One Nights, and its sustained reworking of classical and historical sources. The study adopts a narratological and semiotic approach to Gérard Genette’s notion of the paratext, combined with close reading of key narrative episodes that fictionalize well-known historical figures such as Abu Dharr al-Ghifari, al-Hallaj, and Ibn Rushd. It shows how the novel blurs the boundary between historical fact and narrative invention, and how it employs what is here termed a "textual paradox"—a double positioning between an antecedent text and a later re writing—to question both official historiography and inherited literary forms. By foregrounding the roles of the warraqūn (court chroniclers) and by reframing the narrative contract of One Thousand and One Nights through the voice of Dunyazad and the figure of al Bashir the Morisco, Raml al-Maya turns history into a contested narrative field. The article concludes that reading these novel amounts to rereading Arab–Islamic history itself, and that this rereading lay bare the continuities between past catastrophes and present forms of political oppression.