A Comparative Study on Chahar Maghaleh and other Biographies of the Ninth Century AH

Chahar Maghaleh or Majmaol Navader contains anecdotes, some of which are not found in any former sources. After Chahar Maghaleh, many books have mentioned anecdotes. Each text is somehow related to the texts before and after it in terms of whether the connection is direct or indirect, conscious or unconscious, and limited or unlimited. Understanding such connections helps us to better understand the text through its sources. ‘Dialogue and intertextuality’ is a theory examining the relationship between texts and works before and after them. Dialogue deals with the relationship between all systems of language, writing, image, etc., according to the social nature of human beings. Man's interest in history and the experience of the past for a better life is based on the intertextual characteristic. The present study examines the memoirs of the ninth century AH to determine the relationship among six biographies and Chahar Maghaleh. For this purpose, first, six ninth-century AH biographies were examined. The related memoirs were Majmal Fassihi, Tazkereh al-Shoara, Baharestan, and Roza al-Safa. Then the commonalities between them and Chahar Maghaleh in the fields of vocabulary/words, phrases or sentences, events, time, and places were examined. Among the ninth-century memoirs, four were related to Chahar Maghaleh in the areas under discussion, especially events.