The Morphology of Joseph's (pbuh) Tale in the Translation of Tafsir-e-Tabari

The necessity of using modern literary knowledge in evaluating the Quranic texts and the writings based on the Quranic teachings is clear and necessary for Muslim researchers in today's world. In this research, the structure of Joseph’s (pbuh) Tale in the translation of Tafsir-e-Tabari (the Persian translation of Tabari’s Commentary of the Quran) has been evaluated by using Propp’s morphology. To achieve a more appropriate conclusion, this tale has been divided into four stories and its characters and their functions have been critically analyzed in each story. The number of the characters and the manner of their functions clearly demonstrate the structure of this tale on the basis of Propp’s theory. The movements of three stories out of four in the mentioned tale have followed Propp’s sextuple movement pattern; only in the second story of this tale, a two cross-sectional movement is seen that is not adaptable to Propp’s movement patterns and is considered as a new movement. Propp in his ideas has considered the religious roots and his morphology theory has been very efficient in studying Joseph’s (pbuh) tale. Since Propp has paid attention to structures rather than superstructures and quantitative details, his ideas are also helpful in studying the other tales. Finally, the author suggests that all the Quranic tales can be evaluated from a structural perspective on the basis of Propp’s ideas to find out the fundamental structure of these tales.