The Investigation of Ashoora Motifs in Sharif Morteza's Poetry

The Ashoora and its corollaries, as soon as the event occurred, turned into dominant motifs in the Shiite ritual poetry. Sharif Morteza, one of the Abbasid Shiite thinkers and poets, has portrayed the different aspects of this crucial event in his poetry. Employing a descriptive-analytic method and selecting a number of his poems on the Ashoora, this study attempts to analyze the content and motifs of Seyed Morteza's poems as well as elaborate on their rhetorical and literary aspects. A close investigation of Seyed Morteza’s poetry indicates that his Ashoora poems not only convey the ethos of the Ashoora and evoke the audience’s emotions, but also underline Shiite principles such as the leadership-status of the Holy Prophet’s Family (Ahl al-Bayt), the position of the Ashoora in history, particularly the history of Islam, the causes of the catastrophe, the oppressed rights of Ahl al-Bayt, and the true legacy of Imam Hossein and Ahl al-Bayt’s religious leadership (Imamah).