PEDAGOGIC AND LYRIC IN PERSIAN LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE STUDIES QUARTERLY
Year:2010 | Volume:- | Issue:2 (5)|Papers Count:8

Attar, one of the most famous Persian Gnostic writers, pays specific attention to the fables in his couplet-poems (Masnavis) and his great book, Tazkerat Ol Oulia. Not paying enough attention to story-telling and fable-writing in Old Persian texts has caused mystical tales and story elements to be ignored. This paper is an attempt to examine the structure and plot of the fables in Tazkerat Ol Oulia. The fables are short, presented in a straightforward diction, most of which enjoy a three-part structure. Although Attar has borrowed the fables from his predecessors, his true understanding of fable-writing has enabled him, employing slight changes, to complete the plot of the fables, leaving everlasting influential fables.

Nasser Bin Khosrow Qobadyany Balkhi is a master poet and writer and a powerful and thoughtful thinker and theologian. In his youth, he started learning theological sciences, using his talent to promote religious ideas. His prose and verse works, Jame’ Al Hekmatain, Vajhe Din, Goshayesh O Rahayesh, Zad Al Mosaferin, Khan Al Akhavan, and his Divan, are rich in theological and philosophical points. In his prose work, Khan Al Akhavan, composed of one hundred chapters, deals with issues such as wisdom, self, reward, punishment, eternity, Resurrection, the Quran, prophet hood, and so on. He has, consequently, been able, through argument and rational reasoning, to express his ideas about faith. Considering his other prose works and his Divan, the aim of this paper is to illuminate Nasser Khosrow’s point of view about wisdom and its characteristics in Khan Al Akhavan.

The name of Shahriyar, “the love-ridden poet,” is tied with the Persian traditional sonnet. He was, on the one hand, a traditionalist moving in the direction of the modernism; but, on the other hand, most of the modernists believe him to be the best traditional sonneteer in contemporary Persian poetry. Love and frenzy are the essence of his sonnets. In his early youth, he fell deeply in an earthly love, but this love failure led him to a divine spiritual love. His sonnets describe this separation between him and his beloved. Besides this, he owes his reputation to his rural-social poem “Heydar Baba Salam” in which he narrates his past pleasant and unpleasant memories in a simple language. Among the modernists, Shahriyar particularly favored Nima. Though Shahriyar was in love with Hafez’s poetry, Nima’s legendary poetry introduced him into a new world. Sharing his secrets with Nima and his conversation with him full of love and kindness in his three poems “The Poet of Legend” (Shaere Afsaneh), “The Two Pheasants” (Do Morghe Beheshti), and “The Flying Pheasant” (Parvaze Morghe Beheshti) reveal how deeply these two well-known poets share their thoughts and feelings. In his “The Two Pheasants” (Do Morghe Beheshti), Shahriyar, inspired by Nima’s “The Legend” (Afsaneh), describes his meeting with him.

Hafez’s satire is social and political, yet it is artistic, subtle, and flexible in interpretation. However, in most cases, it is innocent, noble, deep and elegant, rooted in a logical feeling and understanding, reflected in a regretful smile.Hafez employs two general patterns in the structure of his satire: one, the frank social satire, directly criticizing a specific class or group; second, the mediated social satire in which he recklessly introduces himself to be representing a class, complaining about himself, thus reflecting what others are suffering from.Hafez has employed whatever possible method to fight satirically against injustice, corruption, and hypocrisy. Among his major ways of satire, irony, and witticism are: violating the signs and values of the sanctity of the ascetics and Sufis; changing the objects and the words by adoption and accountability; employing literary figures such as ambiguity, euphemism, simile, and antithesis; irony, kenning, and sometimes epigrams for the beloved in the form of questions and answers and repartee; satire in the form of an advice; panegyric writing and responsibility seeking; employing public culture and colloquialism. On the whole, Hafez’s satire is sometimes deep and sarcastic and sometimes superficial and tender which are going to be analyzed and illustrated in this paper.

Sheikh Shahab Al-Din Yahya Sohravardi is the mystic philosopher possessing a wisdom composed of both theoretical knowledge and practical conduct. In his thoughts, one can trace elements of thinking in ancient Iran, ancient Greece, and the Islamic culture. His main concern was to resuscitate the apocalyptic thinking through employing the advantages of the three above-mentioned cultures. Sohravardi shares his thinking based on Khosravani (Royal) School and Islamic thoughts with that of Sheikh Farid Al-Din Attar. The ways to understand and the nature of God for both thinkers is a crucial issue. In their thinking, other theories of knowledge are overshadowed by the mentioned fundamental knowledge. The key to understand Sohravardi’s apocalyptic wisdom is self-knowledge, which is, in turn, dependent on knowing God and the knowledge of the universe. Thus, he believes that his knowledge of the universe depends on the recognition of “lights”. In his thinking, God id the true and absolute light. Attar also believes that the light is the source and spirit of life and living. Without this light there is no stability, and no part of the universe is deprived of its sign. Both thinkers, like other Eastern ones, maintain that sensory and intellectual ways are not sufficient to understand God. The most genuine way, they argue, to understand God is through apocalypse and revelation. This paper is an attempt to analyze and evaluate Sohravardi’s and Attar’s thoughts.

Shiism is an inseparable, strongly-rooted part of Islam. Shiism is the outcome of the conditions, factors, and events that took place after Prophet Mohammad’s (PBUH) demise and what happened in the first century after Hijrat. Saqifeh community, the third Caliph being killed, Siffin War events, the emergence of Khawarij and Imam Hussain’s (PBUH) martyrdom, and the emergence of Tavabyn have been among the effective factors in the formation of Shiism. From the very beginning of Shiism, Iranians were specifically interested in it, and during the centuries after Islam, Shia was active in some regions in Iran. It was not till the beginning of the tenth century that the Safavid Shah Ismail announced it to be the official religion of Iran and expanded it in most regions of the country. Along with these specific religious conditions in Iran, Persian literature, especially poetry that enjoyed Hindi- (Esfahani-) style in this period, experienced changes among which Panegyric and elegy related to the Shia’s Imams were considered as new issues, something which is more or less seen in the Divans of most of the poets. This paper tries to examine this phenomenon, that is, the influence of Shiism on the poetry of the Safasvid era.

Dalael Al E’jaj Fi Elm Al-Maani by is Jorjani, the master of rhetoric. Apparently, this book is expected to discuss issues related to semantics, but it does not. Yet one can trace kenning, simile, metaphor, allegory and tropes in this book, like Abd Al-Qaher’s other book, Asrar Al-Balagheh Fi Elm Al-Bayan, in which semantic issues such as, inversion, hypo zeugma, ellipsis, asyndeton, polysyndeton, apostrophe, brevity, and periphrasis have also been presented.Or in Albadi’ by Ibn Mohayez, for example, not only rhetoric issues but metaphor and apostrophe have also been considered. Why is it so? The reason is that classifying rhetoric sciences into meaning, figurative language, and rhetoric, was first done by Sakaki (d.626 A.H.) and Badr Al-Din Ibn Malik in Almesbah.Here it has been said that the concepts of meaning, figurative language, and rhetoric are not the ones used by the predecessors not those used today. Or trope, for instance, in Abu Obeideh Ma’mar Ibn Motanna’s (d. 210 or 211 A. H.) Majaz Al Qoran is not the same trope employed in Qasim Al Haqiqah, but for him it means interpretation.

Archetypal criticism of the Persian poetry is among the issues less paid attention to. C. G. Yung believed that myths have an active in the depths of the human subconscious. These myths have an efficient role in literature and poetry. On the condition of accepting the Canadian critic, Northrop Frye’s exaggerated belief that myth and poetry are the same, one can notice the importance and the relation between the words and myths without needing to reflect so closely on what the previous artists and masters have said. Following the fact that myth is the basis of the imagery in the Persian poetry, this paper tries to study, in the Persian poetry, the motifs of the myth of the sun, the old god of the primitive man.