Intertextuality of Imam Ali's Short Sayings in the Poems of Shahnameh

According to intertextuality, every text is a direct or indirect intervention and recreation of its previous or contemporary texts. From a long time ago, authors have used the concepts and instructions of Nahj al-Balagha next to the Quran as an approach to increase their vocabulary richness. Considering the noble goal of Ferdowsi in his precious work of Shahnameh, which was preserving the Persian language and culture, this study, using the descriptive-analytic method, was aimed at recognizing and determining the level of intertextual influence of Imam Ali's sayings in the words and themes of Shahnameh poems. According to the results, the intertextual forms, which were lexical, interactive and informative between the present and absent text, represented intertextual relationship between the two texts in the forms of partial, parallel and general negation. It should be noted that the most frequent kind of relationship was parallel negation, which was performed in content and inspiration, while the lexical intertextuality is the least frequent one due to Ferdowsi's emphasis on using Persian lexicon.