An Inquiry into the Kinds of Allegory in the Parables and Stories of the Holy Qur an

The Qur’an is a guide book for mankind in all ages. The style of writing the Qur’an differs from that of writing other books and sometimes explains its teachings are demonstrated in a skillful and literary language in the form of parable، story and so on، so that all people can understand them. Some scholars believe that one forth or one sixth of the Qur’an is in the form of stories or narratives and that it contains nearly sixty parables. The main aim of this paper is recognizing the kinds of allegories in the stories and parables of the Qur’an in terms of their structure (method of equation، story about man and story about animals) and in terms of content (simple moral allegory، allegory of thought allegory of dream، and symbolic، political-historical allegory). The results of this paper which uses a analytical-descriptive method show that the structure of the parables in the Qur’an has different human narration groups and concerning their content parables are divided into two groups: «simple moral allegory» and «allegory of thought». Furthermore، Qur’anic stories fall into two groups: human and animal narrations in terms of their structure. As far as their content is concerned، they not only include moral allegory and allegory of thought but they are part of in other kinds of allegories: dream، symbolic، political-historical allegories.