Semiotics of a Gazal by Jalāl al-Din Rūmi

Mowlanā Jalāl al-Din muhammad Rūmi(604- 672 h) is one of the iranian poets and Sufis. For those who don’t know Mowlavi well understanding the concepts in his gazals is a demanding task. The existence of mystical expressions, his broad knowledge of various Islamic sciences, and cultural and literal traditions can be regarded as causes of this. In spite of the growing trend of researching on mowlana in the recent decades and the valuable attempts made by these researchers, there are still lots of points calling for reflection in the interpretation of some Gazals of this knowledgable poet and there are untapped (or unmapped) areas in this regard. Investigating the kinds of signs in shams’s “Gazals” is one of those underresearched areas. The present study named “Semiotics of a Gazal by Jalāl al-Din Rūmi” tries to explore the literal and mystical signs and illustrate the relationships between the signifiers and the signifieds in one of mowlana’s gazals that begins with the following line: You! The sudden resurrection and the endless mercy You! The fire in the woods of thought The present study is of descriptive – analytical type. The data has been collected and Investigated by the content analysis procedure, library method and the studying of documents based on the principles of semiotics. The existence of terms like “fire, life, doorkeeper, silent, sun, mersy, colour, prison, copbearer, intoxication, seeker, wisdom, knowledge, hate, draunk and key” as mystical signs and internal rhyme, metonymy, hyperbole, collocation chains, the dominance of interpretive dimension, artistic use of meter, and the richness of peripheral melody as parts of literal signs in this gazal are among the finding of this study.