Driss Chraïbi’s path to the Prophet Muhammad and the ‘Earth Mother’: conflating mercy in the Quran with the maternal womb

Abstract

ABSTRACT Franco-Moroccan writer Driss Chraïbi (1926–2007) evolved from antipathy to Islam in his early works to a novel about the Prophet Muhammad (1995). In this work, he fused the dawning of Islam with emergence from the earth mother's womb, conflating the Arabic root for mercy in the Quran with the word for maternal womb. The origin of theories of the Earth Mother was in the nineteenth century, and they were embraced by feminists from the 1960s. In Morocco, a statue of the female Supreme Creator was discovered in a pre-Islamic tomb of a noble woman, and Algerian feminist Assia Djebar adopted her as a symbol of matriarchal rule. Although Chraïbi may have been exposed to some of these ideas, his personal paths to Mother Earth appear to have emanated more from his own experience. Born at the mouth of the Oum-er-Bia [Spring Mother] river, his roots were among the Berbers/Imazighen people, who believed, he wrote, in the life-giving mother. Initially extremely critical of Islam in his writing, Chraïbi gradually began to forefront an Islam of peace. This evolving attitude to Islam, informed by the changing socio-political milieu in North Africa and France, led to his writing a novel about the life of Muhammad. In it he focused on Muhammad’s creative process, depicting the Prophet of Islam as a simple, non-violent man.