Mohammad Hossein Naraghi, Postgraduate Student, Persian Language and Literature, University of Tehran, Iran
Abstract
There are many themes related to Christianity in the works of Persian poets and writers. The majority of these themes include the teachings and sermons of Jesus, the use of elements of Christian customs and rituals as symbols and metaphors, and the image of Christ based on what the Qur'an mentions. However, in this article, an attempt has been made to refer to themes from Persian literature that, firstly, are explicitly mentioned in the gospel and, secondly, there are not any Qur'anic parallels for them.
This article tries to address the themes in Persian literature that are directly influenced by the New Testament, to analyze their historical origins, and to clarify the question of when and how each of them found their way into Persian literature. For this purpose, two examples have been presented:
1. Sanctifying the blood of Christ and using it as a metaphor for wine according to the story of the Last Supper in which Christ likens his blood to wine. To justify this, poets considered wine to be lawful in the time of Jesus, which is particularly reflected in Rumi's poetry.
2. One of the Persian proverbs that has been common from the far past to the present and has been adapted from the chapter "Light and Salt" of the New Testament. (By focusing on Nasir Khusraw's works the first poet who has used this verse in poetry).
These shreds of evidence and examples, in addition to showing the familiarity of a group of Persian-speaking poets with the gospel, indicate the influence of this book on Persian language and literature. Furthermore, It is concluded to what extent each of these poets was familiar with Christianity and whether they were directly influenced by the gospel or not.
A fascinating study for those of us who only know Rumi!
I'd like it followed up by another paper which looks at the period following the translation of the Gospels into Persian - what difference did the translation make? And what was the line of thinking which led up to the 19th century Muslim translation of the Gospels in to Persian about which we are going to learn in Dennis Halft's paper?
Very interesting presentation, Mohammad! Thank you! I've just watched a recording of the session, as I had to attend the parallel session on the day. Just a few suggestions from me to take this forward:
1) One possibility for solidifying the theoretical foundation of your study is to look at the work of a number of scholars in literary criticism around intertextuality: this scholarship have developed answers to such key questions about what, why and how texts establish intertextual relations with other texts.
2) I would like to know about the impact these intertextual relations (especially with the text the Gospel which is not viewed favorably by the majority of Muslims) had on their readers. What effect they had?
3) This links with Ida's question above: how did this kind of borrowings from the gospel change after Persian translations of the gospel?