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Why did Rumi have empathy with the rulers of Seljuk and Mongols invaders in Konya, while Mongols destroyed Baghdad, the capital of Islamic Caliphate, and killed the Caliph? This question has remained an enigma to many Rumi scholars. This paper examines the political behavior of Rumi as an influential jurist and mystic, exploring the theoretical foundations of his behaviors. To clarify the issue, I have examined Rumi’s political behavior based on historical evidence at three levels: (1) the structure of power in Konya and Rumi’s relation with his contemporary politicians; (2) the relation between Rumi’s political behavior and his political unconscious; and (3) the cause of the inconsistency between Rumi’s political actions and his political thought. I have concluded that the verse “obligation to obey the Muslim Sultan” in the Quran acts as an ideological axiom that justifies appealing to cruel rulers by Muslims and cooperating with them. Ideology as a huge force prevents Rumi and his society from understanding this fundamental contradiction. In other words, ideology naturalizes all the contradictions for its followers.

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Shahnameh of Ferdowsi has been continuously studied by numerous researchers and scholars from literary, mythological and cultural aspects. One of the rarely and less noticed issues in this regard is investigating the ideological role and function of language in this piece of literature based on a certain adopted theory and method. In other words, the writers of this article try to understand how Ferdowsi utilizes language to engender the ideology of Iranian superiority and revive Iranian identity by producing the relevant discourse. To achieve this goal, the current study has been constructed over the theoretical framework of critical discourse analysis introduced by the famous linguist Teun van Dijk. We also focus on the battle of Rostam and Chengesh in the story of “Rostam and Chinese Khaghan” (“Rostam and the king of China”) to restrict the research area. The results show that Ferdowsi employs some strategies such as ideological polarization, positive self-presentation, negative other-presentation, lexicalization, and actor description to make a discourse on the supremacy of the Iranians.

 

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In this study, based on Saadi’s Bustan, we have raised the question of how the peasantry gained power in the social structure. According to the hegemony and power approach, whose experts are Antonio Gramsci and Michel Foucault, and using the methods of critical discourse analysis and intertextuality, we examined power and resistance, which are the circles of interaction between community participants.Considering the multifaceted function of discourse in the seventh century texts, the research findings showed that along with Sufis and Zaheds and various social groups that used their own mechanisms to gain power, the subordinate class and the peasants also gained new power.By combining the ideas with the religious, mystical and customary beliefs in the society, which at the same time caused their own obedience and subjugation, they developed a mechanism that by reproducing and applying it,forced the most powerful individuals to surrender.Thus, with a deconstructive reading of texts, complex action and interaction between actors replaces the diminishing notion of one-sided interaction between socially active groups.
 

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If we admit that culture is a kind of text, we must inevitably accept that “The History of Jahāngushā” is a text that is the point of contact of different ideologies, each of which forms a part of Iranian identity and culture. Contrary to formalist approaches, an attempt has been made here to revisit the text based on those approaches of literary criticism that read the text in a dialectical and interactive connection with the material contexts of its production. Therefore, first, the ideologies in the text are introduced and analyzed, and after determining their role in shaping the ideological system of the History of Jahāngushā, their discourse contradictions are revealed, and finally, the impact of these ideologies on the text is discussed. Various factors such as historical context, social, cultural, and ideological institutions have been influential in the composition of this text and its linguistic form. It seems that more than the linguistic and expressive complexities, it is the discoursal, ideological, and cultural contradictions that have caused confusion and complexity of the text. Analyzing and retrieving the ideological currents of the text not only explains the reasons for its different readings but also helps the reader to reach a new and different judgment of the literary, historical, and cultural aspects of the text.