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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Persian Parables: Form as Philosophy

Persian Parables: Form as Philosophy

Dabashi, Hamid

Paperback

Series: Translation/Transnation

Literary CriticismWriting Instruction

ISBN10: 0691269890
ISBN13: 9780691269894
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: Aug 25 2026
Pages: 216
Weight: 0.69
Height: 0.50 Width: 6.14 Depth: 9.21
Language: English

A major reassessment of the parable in Persian literature and its contribution to philosophical and creative thinking

In this book, Hamid Dabashi offers a radical reconsideration of the parable in Persian literature, arguing that parabolic thinking is a mode of philosophical reflection. Dabashi eschews the conventional focus on the supposed moral or political allusions in these parables--the moral of the story--to allow the radical surfaces of their poetic disposition to reveal themselves. He turns his attention instead to what Kafka called the fabulous yonder as the defining moment of the parable. Focusing on a sustained course of Persian parables through the ages, Dabashi shows that the genre is not limited to masterpieces by such iconic poets as Sa'di, Rumi, Attar, and Sana'i. In fact, he argues, parabolic thinking has a much wider domain in Persian literature and philosophy and plays a distinct role within Persian and Islamic traditions.

The cumulative result of these parables spread across Persian prose and poetry is an alam al-mithal, a parabolic world--a world of parables, similitudes, and verisimilitudes. Dabashi points to the moment in these works when life is absorbed into the formal fabric of the stories, erasing the borderline between fact and fantasy, history and story, the living and the dead, the real and the unreal--and life itself, as we live it, becomes a strange and captivating parable. With this circular self-referentiality, parables enable a way of thinking as a philosophical form.

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