فصلنامه لسان مبین (پژوهش ادب عرب)
پیاپی 17 (پاییز 1393)

The Ashoora and its corollaries, as soon as the event occurred, turned into dominant motifs in the Shiite ritual poetry. Sharif Morteza, one of the Abbasid Shiite thinkers and poets, has portrayed the different aspects of this crucial event in his poetry. Employing a descriptive-analytic method and selecting a number of his poems on the Ashoora, this study attempts to analyze the content and motifs of Seyed Morteza's poems as well as elaborate on their rhetorical and literary aspects. A close investigation of Seyed Morteza’s poetry indicates that his Ashoora poems not only convey the ethos of the Ashoora and evoke the audience’s emotions, but also underline Shiite principles such as the leadership-status of the Holy Prophet’s Family (Ahl al-Bayt), the position of the Ashoora in history, particularly the history of Islam, the causes of the catastrophe, the oppressed rights of Ahl al-Bayt, and the true legacy of Imam Hossein and Ahl al-Bayt’s religious leadership (Imamah).

Amin Reihani is one of the greatest writers of Mahjar literature, well-known as the Father of Arab prose poetry. He had the greatest impact on the modernization of Arab poetry. With the advent of blank verse and opening of a new chapter in literary history, prominent literati like Gibran Khalil Gibran followed him and made the Arab literature more productive with their beautiful works. Reihani, a political and social reformer and also a great tourist, took giant strides toward awakening the Arab East by shouting and calling for freedom, unity, etc. In this path, he has mused on reasons for the success and failure of the people of Orient, trying to recognize them with precise and regular methods of investigation. His global mindset and his concerns for human motifs such as founding an international and ideal community, freedom, unification of East and West, and equality as assets for success and overcoming ignorance and religious prejudices, imitations and superstitions, colonialism and oppression, war and poverty as a factors of people’s failure have distinguished Reihani as a capable and committed literati and thinker. This research employs an analytic-descriptive approach to examine the procedures of achieving success and the factors of failure in political and social domains from Reihani’s perspective. The results demonstrate that besides being a well-known writer and traveler, Reihani has registered his name as a global peace-maker among other great names in world records. He has tried to improve the Orient by discovering and appreciating the routes of success and failure among the people of the Orient, publicizing his achievements for their knowledge and reform.

Literary criticism falls into diverse categories including psychological criticism which came into being in the twentieth century with the emergence of famous psychologists like Freud and his disciples. In psychological approach, the critic employs psychological principles to analyze literary works and explore the creator of a literary work’s psyche and personality, expressing their role in the formation of the literary work and studying the relationship between the writer’s psyche and literature. This study is intended to review and criticize the poetry of two Jaheli poets based on psychological principles and theories of personality as well as analyze the content of the work and assess the influence of their moods, emotions, and personalities in the process of composing poetry. The research will conclude that Amr bin Kulthum can be categorized as the perfectionist/avenger type, because he continuously seeks power and to achieving that constantly puts himself in conflict with others. He can additionally be dubbed dead-oriented due to his excessive interest in describing bloody and horrific scenes. Also Antarah is an active, independent and positive personality who steadily tries to achieve his goal without despair. He removes the masks and emoticons from his face, revealing his real self with all his weaknesses and strengths. Besides deploying rough and male features (the animus), Antarah represents passionate and female ones (the anima). It should be pinpointed that the environmental, social, and cultural context have had a significant influence in the formation of these two poets’ characters.

The science of narratives, a relatively new one, mainly identifies the structural elements of the narrative and the different moods of combining them, as well as, the frequent techniques and analysis of narrative discourse. During the last decades, this science has been the focus of a great number of theorists, providing the ground for the evolution of narratology. Gerard Genette is a French narrative-oriented structuralist who promoted this science by his theories. In his narrative theory, Genette concentrates on three factors (tense, mood, tone or position) in order to analyze the story in the spotlight. This research employs Genette’s theory to examine the sufferings and hardships of the Egyptian people during the years 1952-2002 represented in The Yaghoobian’s Mansion by Alaa Al-Aswany. The results show that the novel lacks a chronological sequence of events and that the narrator rarely ever appears in the narrative, but the maximum amount of information is rendered and this influences the readers ever more. Throughout the narrative, the author/narrator takes the narrative control in hand and helps the story proceed.

Learning Arabic, as the language of our religion and culture and one of the most enriched and applicable languages of the world, is grappling with numerous deficiencies and challenges in our society. Meanwhile, English is increasingly penetrating into all the layers of mind, thought, and social communications, and wittingly or unwittingly devastate all other languages and cultures employing all psychological, cultural, social, educational, and media forces and tools. Adopting a descriptive-analytic method, the present article comparatively criticizes the reasons behind the deprivation of Arabic in Iranian schools and universities from various linguistic and pedagogical perspectives, evaluates the status of Arabic compared with the prestige attributed to English as an international language, and identifies the effective features involved in an ideal pedagogy and the necessary strategies. The comparative study of the similarities and differences between the syntactic features of Arabic and English compared with Farsi based on the methods of contrastive linguistics and the moderate version developed by Aller and Zia Hosseini (1970) alludes to the fact that the syntax of Arabic as Sami language is extremely different from the Indo-European languages of English and Farsi, and consequently presents many difficulties to the students. Furthermore, the investigation of such factors as curriculum planning, language learner, teacher, textbooks, and other educational tools, and teaching methodologies reveals that unfortunately the planning and teaching of Arabic Iranian schools and universities are exerted quite far from the vast development taking place in teaching foreign languages all around the world.

This study tries to compare the views of the Iranian poet and scholar, Mohammad Taghi Bahar, and the Lebanese poet, Sheikh Nasif Yazjy, on world picture in their poetry. The two poets come from different languages and cultures, but both have made great use of moral concepts and poetic wisdom in their collections. Thus, Yazjy is known as the poet of sapience, while Bahar is known for his collection, quatrains, couplets, and poetic wisdom. Persian Bahar and Arab Yazjy are very similar in terms of thought, spirit and philosophy. This analytic-descriptive study will deduce and render evidence, examine the results and answer the queries raised while comparing and contrasting the two poets in the light of the American school of comparative literature.

One of the most important subjects that has occupied man’s mind, particularly scientists and poets, is the question of death. Death as the greatest event in man’s life was a great concern to Arab poets before and after Islam too. An example is Labid bin Rabieh, the Arab poet of the pre-Islamic (Jahili) era, who composed many poems on death. Thus, a close reading of his collection of poetry will prove the semantic fields of death to be dominant in the works of this death-minded poet. This paper seeks to examine all death-related-words such as “al-mawt”, “al-maniyyah”, “al-hatf”, “al-himam”, etc. based on famous dictionaries such as Lesan al-Arab and Mogam al-Maghaeis, with their implications within the context of the poems. This research also studies the symbolic (marked/unmarked) use of words in the death semantic field, thus concluding that the poet is greatly capable of summoning proper diction.