Minimalism in Attar's Tadhkirat-ul-Awliya: An Esthetic Strategy

The social situation and the cultural requirements of the early 1970s became the groundwork of minimalism which gradually appeared in different fields of art and literature. The short story is one of the most prominent instances of such approach in narrative literature. Although, many believe that the root of this gender is in Western literature, but many of the authors in East, especially the Persian ones, have benefited it in their own works. There are lots of minimalistic examples in Persian classical literature such as Attar’s Tadhkirat-ul-Awliyā (Memoirs of Saints and Mystics). Tadhkirat-ul-Awliyā contains many anecdotes and short stories which had been written by the author to transfer his rational concepts to the ordinary people through a very simple and concise language, in a way that the presence of minimalistic elements can be considered as the most prominent feature of this didactic literal work. We want, in present paper, from one side, to make the features of minimalistic texts clear using some stories of Tadhkirat-ul-Awliyā through the structural features of Short Story, and on the other side, to know why Attar used such modern approach in his work.