JOURNAL OF THE IRANIAN ASSOCIATION OF ARABIC LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE
Year:2012 | Volume:8 | Issue:22|Papers Count:10

The Islamic civilization in the 4th century hejri reached to its peak prosperity with flourishing scientific, philosophical and literary activities in the east of the Islamic World. One of the samples of this prosperity is the appearance of Ikhwan al-Safa, a secrect society of unknown philosophers in the cities of Basra and Baghdad. They believed that the Islamic principles must be combined with the Greek philosophy in order to purify Islam from ignorance and adulteration. They came up with a great encyclopedia that included 52 chapters and hence, explained their beliefs and teachings. Some times they used fiction to explain their beliefs. The story of the animals' litigation about human's tyranny is one such fiction that is included in the twenty second chapter. In this article, authors try to analyze the discourse of Ikhwan al-Safa in this story. The study shows that the discourse is a critical one that includes the layer of Abbasid era. There is rationalism, idealism, criticism of some of the social trends during Abbasid as well as political criticism of authoritative governance of that time.

Tahamogh (when a person knows something but pretends to show if he doesn't know it, or sham idiocy) is a kind of humoristic poem where a poet shows himself a stupid in order to make the audience laugh and collect money. In other words, his poems tell something that is disagreeing with the society. This causes the happiness of kings and in return poets got awarded. This poetry has been present more or less in all periods. But during Memluk, this became more prevalent due to poverty, chaos and moral degradation. The inclination to Tahamogh in the age of Mamluk, more than other, was to acquire wealth and popularity. Poverty and lowering the moral values are the most important factor for creating this kind of poems. The current paper tries to analyze the factors behind the development of these poetries during Mamluk as well as their historical antecedent.

The historical relationship between Arabs and Iranians both before and after the advent of Islam is well-known to researchers. The reciprocal impact of these two cultures has long antecedent as well as this relationship has various aspects. Comparative literature seeks to uncover, describe and explain these dimensions. The Persian literature and its luminaries were always the source of influence on the Arabic literature, and undoubtedly enjoy a high status near Arabs especially great thinkers and laureate. A comparative research on Iraq does not seem inappropriate because of it being a neighbor as well as with reference to its cultural, religious, and historical commonalities with Iran. The Persian language and literature enjoy a high status with respect to poets, such as Zahavi, Rasafi, Najafi and Javaheri, covered in the study. They are inspired by the Persian language, and were compelled to learn Persian. To them, the Persian literature is equal to the Western literature, even closer to that of the Arab. The cordial relationship between some Iraqi and Iranian poets and their trip to Iran are noticeable in this process. The current study takes a descriptive approach to answer the following questions: What are the perspectives of the proposed poets about the place of the Persian literature and the Iranian literary figures?

The scene of a story defines time, place and the environment where that incident is happening. The scene enjoys much importance in the story because the story must happen in a particular place and a particular time. The story of Solomon is the one that enjoys importance not only from its stage setting rather from artistic scene too, it is important. As such, it affects the behavior of characters from stories as well as justifies their acts being influenced from exterior personality interaction. The mixture of place and time appears perfectly in the story and so are the curtain nine and ten which are equivalent to the story. Not only in its outer layer, it incorporates all features of artistic setting, but an extraordinary scene also appears in its inner layer too.

Human limbs, in particular heart, have been the centre of attention in religious texts and specifically in the holy Quran. Recently, some experts such as Michael Rison believe that there are thousands of nerve cells in heart that function as saving data. Based on these resent scientific studies, some other researchers in the field of Islamic studies have announced that the word "Heart" in the verses of the holy Quran is literal and not figurative or metaphorical. The present article, taking into account the exegetical tradition of the holy Quran tries to prove that consciousness in not a function of physical heart, despite its very strange functions in human body. Consequently, in many of the Qur'anic verses, "heart" has a figurate meaning.

Khaqani Shervani (520-595 AH) is one of the great Iranian poets of Azerbaijani style who composed his poetry in both Persian and Arabic languages. Despite ever-increasing researches on Khaqani over past two decades, his Arabic songs have not taken into account. This matter affected critic's judgment about Khaqani and his though as researchers could focus on his Persian poetry alone. Consequently, the current research tries to fill that vacuum by responding the following questions:1. What are the common and uncommon themes of Khaqanis’s Arabic and Persian odes? 2. What are the reasons of lack of attention to his Arabic songs? A qualitative research method has been applied here whereas the acquired results are analyzed through content analysis technique, with a library based document analyzing procedure. Results give an accurate understanding of Khaqani’s ideas and it paves the way for more important researches upon his Arabic odes.

Metaphor is one of the most important fields of research in the meaning- based approach of Cognitive Linguistics. According to "Contemporary Theory of Metaphor", ordinary language and our conceptual system are fundamentally metaphorical and metaphor is the understanding of idea or conceptual domain. The main tenets of the Cognitive Theory of Metaphor are summarized in the form of eight hypotheses: Ubiquity Hypothesis, Domain Hypothesis, Model Hypothesis, Uni-directionality Hypothesis, Invariance Hypothesis, Necessity Hypothesis, Creativity Hypothesis, and Focusing Hypothesis. By metaphors, we can understand an abstract and unstructured conceptual domain. So, in religion, as a highly abstract domain, metaphors play an important role. In other words, in all researches done in this field, metaphor is the mostly studied one as a poetic and rhetorical device. The current research is concerned about applying the cognitive linguistic view of metaphor theory to the Nahj-al-Balagheh to analyze its metaphors and cognitive models. The empirical findings of this research prove the theoretical tenets and show that linguistic metaphors are abundant and constitute the ordinary ways of expressing central religious ideas in the texts investigated, due to the necessity of metaphorical conceptualization in abstract domains.

One of the linguistic features of Amal Donqul's poetry is "artistic discord" that with recollection of literary and historical-religious heritage is described inconsistently. The main aim of Donqul in applying this lingual type is to describe the political circumstances of Egyptian king. The poet of resistance seeks to criticize and reject with his strong political sensitivity such conditions conducive to increasing failures of Egyptians and Arabs in 1960's and 1970's. Although, the basis of his discord is rooted in his past turbulent life and fuzzy political environment, this technique contributes to his being a pioneer in this linguistic genre. Using the most bitter and disharmonious geometry of meanings i.e. the language of poetical disobedience, Donqul proceeds to practice the literature of resistance in order to rescue the dignity of the Arab society and that continues to the extent of assuming the role of a champion filling the hollow soul of Egyptians and Arabs with the allegorization of the miserable circumstances, this is the hidden reason for his epithet of "the monarch of the poets of disobedience". Donqul does not write humor for laughs but his deconstructive disobedience, in the depiction of the present political situation in the form of discord, draws the reader's mind to his secret bitter laughter. He summons the inherited language and literature to solve the political circumstances and this deep reading along with his deep insight emerge when he reflects the disobedience of poets of the periods of Ignorance and Abbasids such as Mutanabbi throughout the intertextual operations. His persistence thus grants him the epithet of "poet of the contemporary Sa'alik".