Shabastari's Golshan Rāz Receptiveness from  Attār's Asrār Nāmeh and Ibn  Arabi's Works, An Intertextuality Perspective

Intertextuality is the overt or covert appearance of a contemporary or earlier text in another, and texts with similar themes can more often impact each other intertextually. From this perspective, the intertextual impact of ‘Attār’s Asrār Nāmeh, as the background text, on Shabestari's Golshan Rāz, as the foreground text, was studied. It is argued that this intertextual impact begins with the title and poetic rhythm of the foreground text and continues through tacit/covert and overt semantic and literary images in it. Shabestari occasionally expands‘attār’s concepts to enhance the didactic overtones of his own work, and sometimes tacitly exploits and borrows concepts, allusions and poetic imageries of the Sheikh of Neyshabur to afford a mystic text with a new diction. Though the original aim of this research was to expose samples of the intertextuality of Asrār Nāmeh in Golshan Rāz, it also concluded that ‘Attār’s and Shabestari's similar cultural and thought milieu has also resulted in the similarity of the texts and contents of their works owing to the fact that they had both been brought up and educated in the context of the grand sources of Islamic mysticism including Hadith and Erfān, and this partly explains the intertextuality observed between the two works. Since Shabestari had also studied the works of Ibn ‘Arabi, traces of Ibn ‘Arabi's line of thought are also observed in Golshan Rāz which the researcher has broached in this paper.