The moon in ancient Iraqi Culture : a rereading of Diana Abu Jaber's crescent and Inaam Kachachi's Tashari

الملخص EN

Man used to attribute good and evil in his life to celestial bodies.

Therefore, ancient civilizations paid much attention to astronomy which had a lasting impact on mythology and religion.

In ancient Iraqi mythology, sad and happy events like war and peace, death and fertility, flood and famine, were attributed to the appearance and disappearance of the moon.

Among the post-modern writers who wrote novels about Iraq are the Arab-American Diana Abu Jaber (1959 -) and the Paris-based Iraqi Inaam Kachachi (1952 -).

Abu Jaber's Crescent (2003) tells a love story between an Iraqi professor and an Iraqi-American girl.

The crescent of the title has to do with the Islamic ritual of marking the beginning of a lunar month like Ramadhan.

As the novel suggests it has to do with patience and the unknown as represented by the sudden and unexpected reappearance of the protagonist (Hanif) after a long time of absence.

Whereas Kachachi's Tashari (2013) details the scattering of Iraqis in different parts of the world after the-2003 events.

It attributes this tragedy to the Pope's refusal to visit the city of Ur, the birthplace of Prophet Abraham which also used to be the residence of Nana, the moon god of the ancient Sumerians.

While apparently both novels deal in part with the religious beliefs and practices related to the moon in Islam and Christianity, they, however, make no direct reference to ancient Iraqi myths.

Although Abu Jaber expressed the wish of writing about "the legacy of Iraq", "the cradle of civilization" and Kachachi wrote mainly about Iraq and its " good old days", but rarely they made a direct reference to the moon and its significance in ancient Iraqi culture.

Nevertheless, both novels implicitly abound in references to the moon that can be analyzed in terms of its status and the lasting impact it had on ancient Iraqi culture, which will be the focus of this paper.