The Role of a Narrative Text in Criticism of Power: Al-Zahra Rumayj’s Al-Najun as a Case Study

The novelist text Al-Najun (Survivors) is the subject of this research of important novels that took care of the registration of the Moroccan people’s struggle for freedom against royal despotism in the 1970s. This research paper is based on the analysis of the literary text and analyses how religious authority overlaps with political and social power in the Arab society. More specifically, in Al-Najun, the Moroccan writer Al-Zahra Rumayj highlights the revolutionary progressive discourse in Moroccan society as a model of the reactionary power of religious authority to obliterate any improvement. The narrative text in Al-Najun criticizes this authoritarianism to reveal its falsity and how it delays humanitarian and progressive civilization and makes people live in political, economic, and social backwardness. Thus, this research is important.