Minimalism Style Features in Stories of Hujwiri’s Kashfolmahjub

Precipitance of contemporary humans in most stages of life stems from popularity of machinism and dominance of technology in world today. This ended in minimalist conception of architecture, painting, sculpture, literature and so on. In literature, minimalism is a literary style or principle based on excessive compression and undue brevity of literary content. Advent of minimalism and short short-stories is something novel in the west, but there are numerous instances of short short stories in ancient Persian literature which manifest characteristics of minimal stories. Kashf-ul-Mahjub, written by Hujwiri, is one of mystical and literary works in Persian which requires elaboration and investigation not only because of its content but also for its storytelling. This paper aims to answer the following question: "Does the structure of stories told in Kashf-ul-Mahjub agree with features of minimal stories?" Consequently, the present paper intends to investigate and compare the characteristics and parameters of minimal stories to stories told in Kasf-ul-Mahjub to demonstrate that brevity and minimalism in story genre, although more vivid nowadays, is deeply rooted in ancient Persian literature. The results of our study attest that most of stories told in Kashf-ul-Mahjub possess the features of minimalistic storytelling.