Criticism and review of rhetorical subjects in Majmu'e-ye-Latayef-va-Safine-ye-Zarayef

Abstract Currently, one of the most significant areas of literary studies is to assess, review and criticize of various rhetorical work from different viewpoints; such studies is more remarkable especially when performed on older literary texts with critical-thinking view.”Majmu'e-ye-Latayef-va-Safine-ye-Zarayef” poem ontology compiled by "Saif-e-Jam-e-Heravi", one of the most ancient rhetorical text from the late eight and early nine AH centuries, is written in the Indian subcontinent. The study of rhetorical subjects in ”Majmu'e-ye-Latayef ", considering its history, provides outlook on rhetoric’s history and development, especially in the Indian subcontinent; hence, this paper inspects this work from innovations, impressionability and imitation viewpoints as well as its importance from rhetoric perspective.  The innovation of "Saif-e-Jam" in this poem ontology are as follows: personal terminology for rhetoric concepts, critique of his precedent poets’ poems, novel classifications, and new examples. Additionally, he gathered poems from both famous and less known Indian subcontinent poets, hence his ontology could be the only reference for several poets, especially the less knows or unknown ones. Such innovations has extolled the merits of his ontology beyond a merely imitation work. To specifically clarify imitations of ”Majmu'e-ye-Latayef ", this work is compared against other precedent predominantly rhetorical texts. This comparison reveals that “Saif-e-Jam-e-Heravi" have adopted various sections of his poem ontology from different references without mentioning their titles and authors; several of such references are as follows: Rashid-e-Vatvat's “Hadayegh-ul-Sehr” (divisions and examples), Jajarmi's “Munes-ul-Ahrar” and Kalati's “Munes-ul-Ahrar”(classification and poem samples), Amir Khosrow's “Eijaz-e-Khosrawi” and “Dibache-ye-Divan-e-Ghorrat-ul-Kamal”(definitions and examples created by Amir Khosrow), Khatib-e-Qazvini's “Al-Eizah-fi-Olum”(definitions), and Taftazani's “Al-Motawwal” (definitions). Furthermore, this work reviews and criticizes errors and mistakes of this ontology's rhetoric section in definitions, examples, and classification areas. "Saif-e-Jam-e-Heravi" have intended to collect an ontology and just exploit rhetoric viewpoint for classification of the gathered poems under separate sections; hence, he have mentioned incorrect examples for a given literary figure of speech or even have called one specific figure of speech under different names or labels (e.g., “tarh-e horuf” /lipogram and “hazf-e horuf”/ elision are identical).