Title: Researching an Issue in Two Schools of Literature, and Art and Thought: Analyzing Evil from the Perspective of Rumi and Shakespeare (Case Study: The Story of Moses and Al-Khidr and Shakespeare’s Macbeth)

The subject of "evil" is one of the most important topics in theology and culture and has appeared in the literature of different nations in different ways and through variety of techniques. Rumi's works, as one of the greatest writers and thinkers of the Islamic Middle Ages and Shakespeare’s, the great poet and writer of the Renaissance, have given certain artistic aspects to this theology that are prone to analysis and comparison, especially from a poetic point of view. The differences in cultural, historical and religious origins between these two thinkers, of course, have been effective in their techniques, in different conceptualizations, and have been reflected in their works. In The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Cassirer introduced the earlier forms of Kantian cognition into the field of analysis of human culture and, using Hegelian historiography, began to formulate the forms of the history of cognition that began with myth and reached higher forms of religious, mystical, artistic and scientific cognition. For him, symbolism is the only road map for the study of culture. Comparative studies, meanwhile, is a field of fertility that can be aided by Cassirer's theoretical framework. The method of the present research is descriptive-analytical and is based on Cassirer's theory of "symbolic forms of cognition". Also, using his theory on the analysis of symbolic structures in the form of narrative constructs, we try to show how allegorical and tragic techniques in the concept of evil are shown in the stories of Moses and Al-Khidr and Macbeth.