The Religious Conflict in Diya Jbeili’s Novel (The Seer: The Journey of Damu the Sumerian): A Semiotic Study of the Fictional Text

Abstract

The novel constructs its narrative corpus upon a philosophical vision that integrates the historical and contemporary dimensions. The protagonist, Damu, functions as a semiotic sign traversing epochs and eras, serving as a witness to the "eternal return" of religious and ideological conflicts within the Mesopotamian space. The semiotic analysis of the text uncovers a deep semantic structure governed by binary oppositions, most notably (the sacred / the profane) and the dialectic of (the eternity of clay / the fires of contemporary ideology). Consequently, religious conflict manifests in the text as an inevitable byproduct of the articulation between narrative geography and temporal succession.

Accordingly, the study presents a spatial conceptualization that examines the "semiotics and ideologization of space," demonstrating how religious conflict is reproduced and its mechanisms updated with every spatial transition or temporal shift. Within this epistemological horizon, religion emerges as the ontological pivot that fulfills humanity's symbolic need for faith in the unseen. Conversely, in contrast to the authentic spiritual discourse represented by the devout, the text deconstructs the "semiotics of masks" by tracking the exploitative forces that utilitarianly appropriate the sacred, reshaping and ideologizing it to serve their authoritarian agendas.