Didactic anecdotes and their functions in Amir Khosrou Dehlavi's Matlaol Al Anvar

Storytelling has always been mental and affective needs of human from a long time ago. Iranians have been focused on its didactic aspect. Anecdote-making is also one of the methods of storytelling which was used with advising contents on the Mathnavies like Kellileh-va-Demneh in forth centuries. Sanai’s Hadighieh is the first mystical poem of fifth centuries which is composed by aim of training mystical, religious and moral contents. it used allegorical stories to express the concepts. After that, Attar extended this method and Molana completed it. furthemore, Amir Khosrou Dehlavi in 8th century, with following Nezami, composed Matla-al-Anvar in the method of Makhzan-al-Asrar. in all of these Mathnavies, narratives are used in order to explain and emphasize on moral-mystical contents. Stories have different functions regarding to their didactic aspects, but the goal of the present paper is define "what are the goals of didactic narratives in Matla-al-Anvar; and what function did Amir Khosro Dehlavi use to explain his moral-mystical contents? In this study, 20 stories of Matla-al-Anvar have been studied with analytic-descriptive method with regard to content. the results showed that Amir Khosro Dehlavi for his narratives used various functions such as satisfaction, proof, illustration and perception, taking the lesson, facilitating complicate issues, defamiliarising and evolution in order to explain mystical-moral problems.