A Comparative Study of the Spiritual-Journey in Contemporary Persian and English Literature

Spiritual-journey has a special position among common themes in the world’s literature. The paper explores the notion of journey in Persian and English literature. The English corpus includes The Pilgrim’s Progress as a celebrated allegorical literary work written by the eminent author John Bunyan (1678). Christian is the main character of the novel. The Persian corpus includes Samad Behrangi’s (1347) The Little Black Fish which concerns the challenges encountered by the main character in passing through different stages of the mystical journey. The works are compared based on the framework presented for the stages of spiritual-journey in Attar’s Mantegh-al-tair (i.e., language of the birds). It embraces the following seven phases: quest, love, wisdom, independence, monotheism, amazement, indigence and death. The findings have revealed that the stages of spiritual-journey are outstandingly comparable. The main rationale behind such an amazing similarity has been realized to be the fact that both works belong to the area called mystical-literature and cover the common theme of ‘spiritual-journey’.