فصلنامه پژوهش های ادبی - قرآنی
سال هفتم شماره 4 (پیاپی 28، زمستان 1398)

The Holy Qur’an as the highest manifestation of the Islamic culture is a book full of revelatory teachings. The overwhelming number of Qur’anic ayahs on educational topics and Sa'adi's in-depth understanding of this quality made the extent of his being influenced by the Qur’an very considerable. Some of the major Qur’anic features that strongly influenced Sa'adi are: the educational nature of the Bustan and the Gulistan as the most basic characteristic of the Holy Qur’an, the simplicity and clarity of the text, stories and parables, humor, rhythmic language and artistic brevity. The present study, within the framework of interdisciplinary studies on the Qur’an and Sa'adi's masterpieces, discussed the educational literature and some tools for perceiving it as the most effective methods of audience attraction. A theoretical-citation research method was used in this study that relied on Qur’anic data and aimed to analyze the effect of the Qur’anic culture on Sa'adi's viewpoint by explicating a number of strategies used for influencing the audience. The findings show that Saadi's success in being inspired by the Holy Qur’an predominantly lies in his choice of the literary type of educational literature that enjoys a very simple and expressive language, which while observing the musicality of language and tone of speech adopted from the brevity and miraculous nature of the Holy Qur’an, manifested his highest level of inspiration from this infinite source so that this very thorough application of Qur’anic teachings can be considered as the key to a kind of literary enjoyment that one feels when reading Sa'adi works.

In the Holy Qur’an, God uses various techniques and methods to highlight his intended concepts and meanings. In this way, he accentuates those concepts and places them in the hearts of the audience. Readers and people soon are attracted to those concepts through reading them or listening to them, and the training and guidance of human beings, which is the main goal of the Qur’an, is achieved. The present study aims to identify and examine these words and the way they are chosen for foregrounding, to know the type of the foregrounded words, ways to foreground in the Holy Qur’an, and to analyze their functions to reveal the semantic and conceptual weight of the Holy Qur’an as well as its eloquence and miracle. The most important part of this descriptive-analytical research evolves around this point that for which group of words does Surah Ghafir, which is a Meccan surah, uses the method of foregrounding and why, and what semantic and emotional connotations are involved in the foregrounded words. The results of the research show that these cases are numerous and varied in the Qur’an and include such functions as creativity and innovation, repetition and balance, synonymy and resemblance, and contrast and antonymy.

Binary opposites always play an essential role in transferring the meanings of narratives; meaning is produced and transferred through the structure and interrelations of binary opposites. Some structuralists believe that all narratives are founded on a fixed structure of binary opposites. Based on the role of binary opposites, this study compared narratives related to Creation in the texts of the Bundahishn, the Selections of Zadsparam, the Qur’an and Torah in order to establish the basic structure of the Story of Creation. To this end, first a hypothetical structure was depicted by analyzing the mythemes of the main texts and some other texts. Then, by a thorough re-reading of the selected texts, this structure was set as the verified basis and found the ability to explain the events in the text. Based on this structure, the main binary opposites of the first phase of the Story of Creation are: light/dark and male/female. Four characters, namely, light-male, light-female, dark-male, and dark-female, have been produced by combining these binaries. In the spring chapter of the Bundahishn, these four characters comprise never ending light (Hormozd), material light, never ending darkness (Ahriman), and material darkness. Day, earth, night, and sea play the same four characters in the first chapter of Torah and in the creation story of Adam they come in the names of pre-heaven Adam (spirit), Adam’s wife, Iblis, and angels. Another characteristic of the first phase of Creation is that creation in the light world is only spiritual and no material creation happens.

The structural analysis of narrative is highly important in order to know the dimensions of the narrative and to describe the general and generic literary structures and the role they play in the production of meaning. Time as one dimension of narrative has an irreplaceable role in determining the timeline’s relations between discourse and story. The present library-analytical research analyzed the Story of Musa (UHBP) and the Bani Israel as an important and long story, which is narrated in three different Qur’anic surahs, through studying the attributes of time structure from a structuralist viewpoint, which can be investigated in three main categories of duration, order and frequency. This research intends to shed light on the structures of time of these three surahs and to analyze one of the elements of the linguistic miracle of the Qur’an and the recognition of one of the dimensions of narrative in it by acquiring knowledge about the time dimension in the plot of this story as well as the relationship between story-time and discourse-time. In other words, it aims to initially analyze the narrative time in the Story of Musa (UHBP) and the Bani Israel, and then explain the most important temporal devices used in the narration process of this story. The findings suggest that in this story time traverses its simple and linear mode and all temporal devices have been employed in the narration flow.

Linguistics is a powerful tool in the methodical study of language. Semantics is one of the most prominent branches of linguistics studied by many researchers in order to further discover the different purposes of a text. In his semantic studies and theory, de Beaugrande has identified four factors that encompass all the lexical and non-lexical dimensions of the text. According to this theory, the realization of textuality in a text requires the presence of standards arising from the above factors. The Holy Qur’an, as an unequalled literary example, has used all the elements of textuality in a unique combination, in which careful word-selection has played a pivotal role in the implicational development of ayahs. The present library-analytical research examines the application of standards of textuality to the development of implication in the Holy Qur’an. This research seeks to answer the question of how and to what extent the presence of these seven standards in the Qur’anic literature leads to the expression of deeper semantic layers of linguistic units in the ayahs. The results show that in addition to the two standards of cohesion and coherence, the strong presence of five extra-textual standards such as "acceptability" and "situationally" has led to the production of more meaning or "implicational development" of ayahs for the audience and the translator.

The interdisciplinary studies of the Holy Qur’an suffers from the ambiguity of terms and a lack of consensus among scholars about them. That said, mythic expression is a branch of literary criticism which is even more challenging because of its relation to religious texts on the one hand and with myths on the other. Yet, this literary genre is only a creative and artistic approach basically different from texts' narrating myths. The present paper thus aims to provide an exact definition of mythic expression as a term within literary stylistics and the science of rhetoric and then to discuss its various applications in the exegetic and scientific tradition of Muslim Qur’an scholars. This study addressed the following questions 1-What is mythical expression, and what status it has in the literary studies of the Holy Qur’an? 2- Is it possible to find equivalents or substitutes for this term within the exegetic tradition of Muslims and Qur’an scholars, and how are they different from each other? The findings suggest that mythic expression in the Holy Qur’an, regardless of its long history and significance in literary studies, scrutinizes the rhetorical level of the religious texts and can be traced in Muslims'' traditional rhetoric chiefly via terms such as personification, metaphor, metonymy, pictorial language, etc.

The Holy Qur’an has in different forms given human attributes to certain objects, which greatly help the audience in a more effective grasp of meaning. The abundant occurrence of personification in the Holy Qur’an, the various styles it is employed in and the weighty meanings conveyed through it, which are some of the requirements for a full understanding of the Revealed Word, demanded the present research that aims to find the types of personifications employed in the Qur’an by adopting a descriptive–analytical approach and to investigate the different semantic aspects, the methods of application and the rhetorical mysteries and motives of this device. The results show that in order to communicate the meaning, certain objects are endowed with human attributes in many ayahs in different ways. In this regard, the culture, experience and life circumstances of the Arabs as well as their popular literary tradition such as employing similes, metaphors, and current metonyms are beautifully manifested in the Qur’an. The important point is that the personifications used in the Qur’an transcend time and place, which is in and of itself one of the causes of the inimitability of the Qur’an..