Review and analysis of Suhrawardi's Fi Haqiqah al-Ashq based on Roland Barthes' Five Codes

Document Type : Research article

Authors

1 Corresponding author, Professor, Department of Persian Language and Literature, Faculty of Persian Literature and Foreign Languages, Tabriz University, Tabriz, Iran.

2 Professor, Department of Persian Language and Literature, Faculty of Persian Literature and Foreign Languages, Tabriz University, Tabriz, Iran.

3 Ph.D Conditon, Department of Persian Language and Literature, Faculty of Persian Literature and Foreign Languages, Tabriz University, Tabriz, Iran.

Abstract

Sohrevardi’s (1154-1191 CE) Resāla fi ḥaqīqat al-ʿishq while the mystical manifestations of love and its states in the two stories of the creation of Adam and Joseph, provides an opportunity for analysis and interpretation through Roland Barthes’s five-code system. The stories’ inherent symbolism and amenability to interpretation make this analytical framework a methodologically sound and creative approach. Barthes considers every text to be generative, dynamic,, believing that texts are distinguished from each other through fluid nature. Sohrevardi, while explaining the secrets of the creation of beauty, love, and sorrow in a Neoplatonic style, and drawing upon Magian thought and Quranic subtleties, addresses their place within an Illuminationist cosmology and epistemology. Mystics like Ghazali and Baqli Shirazi consider beauty, love, and sorrow as essential pillars of the spiritual journey, seeing love as the result of the manifestation of beauty and sorrow as a result of fear. This article employs a descriptive-analytical method to investigate the hidden voices within Sohrevardi’s Resāla fi ḥaqīqat al-ʿishq, revealing aspects of its codes to the reader. Given its vast use of symbols and allegories, the Resāla is of the type of writable (or open) texts where the reader is not passive. Rather, they use their creativity, and in each attempt to fix a meaning, they employ their own innovative method. Barthes’s suggestion for this type of reading is the creation of a method through which the text is fragmented and scattered, and the reader is present as a producer of the text.

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History

  • Receive Date: 19 May 2024
  • Revise Date: 11 August 2024
  • Accept Date: 11 August 2024

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