Document Type : Original Article
Author
Associate Professor of Persian Language and Literature, Institute for Humanities and Cultural Studies. Tehran, Iran.
Abstract
Introduction
Love is one of the basic concepts in Islamic mysticism and the basis of creation in the perspective of mysticism. Because love is an abstract concept, the mystics' words about love are metaphorical and symbolic, and in order to reach the foundation of the mystics' thinking and thought about love, it is necessary to analyze and interpret their words. Therefore, in this article, we intend to use the conceptual theory of metaphor to reach the basic concept or concepts that mystics have used to depict the image of love and reflected in their speech. Therefore, in the first step, we identify the metaphors of love in Molvi's works, in the second step, we specify the source domain of metaphors. In the third step, we will examine the relationship between social context and metaphor in order to reach the cultural and intellectual origins of love metaphors and the macro concept that lies behind the linguistic forms.
Discussion
In this article, we analyzed the interpretations of love in Mowlavi's works and we saw that Mowlavi, with numerous and diverse metaphors, described love as having attributes such as learnable, uplifting and transforming, eternal and eternal, the origin of everything, generous, great and abundant, pure. , purifying, bountiful and rich, sheltering and liberating, attractive, dominant, carrier, life-giving, crazy, enlightening, eventful, leader and helper, beautiful, rebellious, brave, violent, catch, precious, delicious, holy, destroyer and sublime. He has known and got these attributes from the three domains of lover, king and God. Therefore, the mappings "Love is a lover" and "Love is a king" and "Love is God" are three conceptual keys of love, and two conceptual keys "Love is a lover" and "Love is a king" are derived from the macro metaphor "Love is God". Therefore, according to Mowlavi, love is God and all the attributes and characteristics of God, such as the two main features of being a creator and annihilator, are in love. Other characteristics of love can be placed under two important characteristics (creation and mortality: یُحیی و یُمیت).
To know the empirical context of the metaphor "Love is God", attention should be paid to the characteristics of the beloved. In Mowlavi's thoughts, love is literally in the meaning of the beloved, and since the beloved can have different types and people, its attributes are also numerous, but these attributes are common in the two general directions of life-giving and death. That is, the love that causes the lover to live a happy and euphoric life and the love that causes the lover to be hurt and destroyed.
The cultural and intellectual background of this metaphor is the ancient Iranian beliefs about the existence of two entities: spirit and matter. The ancient western, Iranian, Indian and Islamic ideas were founded on the originality of the spirit and validity of the substance. According to this idea, the soul is the whole and the matter is a part, God is the whole and man is a part, the upper world is the whole and the material world is a part. This dualistic thinking has led to the emergence of two groups of good and evil in all areas of thought, and the metaphors of love in Molvi's works are also based on the dual oppositions of good and evil and their subsets and their counterparts. Contrasting the water of life with the water of death (floods and storms), the wind of life (like the spring wind) and the wind of death (autumn wind), the fire of life (like the gold plant and the heat of the sun, which was obtained from Abraham being thrown into the fire, and is a type of test.) with the fire of death. The fire of life embraces the lover like Abraham and purifies it from material pollution and elevates it from the current level to a higher level and makes the copper of his existence golden. In addition, Mowlavi lived in an environment full of Jewish and Christian ideas, and in the Masnavi, he has repeatedly mentioned stories from the Torah and the Bible, and it is possible that in addition to the story of Abraham being thrown into the fire, which is also in the Holy Quran, with the story of the three Jews of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, who were thrown into the fire by the order of Nebuchadnezzar, was familiar and took the life-giving fire from that story. In addition, he may have been familiar with the myth of Isis and Osiris, in which, like the story of Abraham, the child of King Melkart and Queen Astarte did not burn in the fire.
Conclusion
As we can see, Molavi's metaphors are taken from myths. The same myths that told the ancient people about the different aspects of the king, god, lover and its characteristics. This statement means that the linguistic and intellectual works of the ancient traditions were still present in the intellectual resources of Mowlavi and in the popular beliefs and atmosphere of his society, and perhaps he came to such an understanding of love without his will and expressed the attributes of love often with the same mythological interpretations, and sometimes he has used non-mythical language; For example, the elements of the metaphors related to the king and the lover are the same elements of the solar mythology, some of which have found their way to Mawlawi's thoughts through Jewish and Christian texts: elements such as sunshine, sun, rain, cloud, horse, fire, light.
Keywords
Main Subjects
Keyhan. [In Persian]
Rozaneh. [In Persian]
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