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Magic tales are considered as one of the most significant types of oral
literature. These tales, specified by number 300-749 in the ATU
international list of folktales, remind us the time when every single
object or phenomenon possessed a magical and metaphysical power in the mind of the primitive man and exceeded man’s power.
Those men believed that at the time of troubles, magical powers would come to assist them and would save them from dangers. Through content analysis of magical tales, we may find clues to the roots of the thoughts of primitive man such including animation and personification of
objects, the ability to speak to plants and animals, metamorphosis, etc.
 

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Quranic tales have always been used by Persian poets in order to create beautiful and unique themes and images. One of these tales is the tale of Adam and Eve and their Fall from Heaven due to eating the Forbidden Fruit. Following most Islamic commentaries, wheat has been considered as this fruit in classic Persian poetry, but the reading of contemporary poets of this tale is different. Sometimes, their reading is similar to classic poets but in other times, following the Old Testament, they consider the apple or the tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil as this fruit, and still in other times they have a mixed reading of Islamic and Jewish traditions. Also, some contemporary poets have proposed a symbolic reading of this tale. This article, initially provides a history of the tale of Forbidden Tree in the Quran, Old Testament and their commentaries. Then, this issue is investigated in the poems of twenty outstanding contemporary poets (from Nima to the present time) and their poems are compared with Quranic and Biblical narratives. The results show that those contemporary poets which have traditional views, have paid attention to Islamic narratives whereas modern poets have often used Biblical narratives

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The "falling into a jar" motif along with its other changed forms is rooted in the rituals of death and rebirth festivals in the ancient Iran. Although this ceremony has vanished, its images exist in Persian poetry and folktales. In this paper the researchers have explored a number of stories, proverbs and figures of speech that contain this ceremony. The result of this research shows that literature preserves these customs and festivals. In addition, there is a strong connection between this ceremony and literary images, and sometimes the structure or themes have been changed by the poet’s feelings or social conditions.

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The necessity of using modern literary knowledge in evaluating the Quranic texts and the writings based on the Quranic teachings is clear and necessary for Muslim researchers in today's world. In this research, the structure of Joseph’s (pbuh) Tale in the translation of Tafsir-e-Tabari (the Persian translation of Tabari’s Commentary of the Quran) has been evaluated by using Propp’s morphology. To achieve a more appropriate conclusion, this tale has been divided into four stories and its characters and their functions have been critically analyzed in each story. The number of the characters and the manner of their functions clearly demonstrate the structure of this tale on the basis of Propp’s theory. The movements of three stories out of four in the mentioned tale have followed Propp’s sextuple movement pattern; only in the second story of this tale, a two cross-sectional movement is seen that is not adaptable to Propp’s movement patterns and is considered as a new movement. Propp in his ideas has considered the religious roots and his morphology theory has been very efficient in studying Joseph’s (pbuh) tale. Since Propp has paid attention to structures rather than superstructures and quantitative details, his ideas are also helpful in studying the other tales. Finally, the author suggests that all the Quranic tales can be evaluated from a structural perspective on the basis of Propp’s ideas to find out the fundamental structure of these tales.   

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Qotol-al-Qolob is an organismic and rich text that has been very effective in stabilizing the Sufist discourse. This is because of the flow of Sufism articulated in the late second century in the context of religion and passed through contradictory discourses such as jurisprudence, theology, and philosophy and then emerged in a period that radical rationalism, jurisprudential controversy, philosophical conflicts as well as political and social quarrels spead over the entire Islamic world. The ideologues of Sufism highlighted absent and separated propositions with the help of the logic of discursive difference and by studying and recognizing dominant approaches. They were gradually able to successfully integrate and dominate the Sufist discourse. This is visualized in Qotol-al-Qolob which we consider to be the confluence of two scholarly and insightful discourses. To achieve this important point we use the method and discourse analysis of La Clau and Mouffe and we show how Abutaleb Makki could renovate the absent, excluded, and depleted propositions of the jurisprudential discourse by the use of interpretation model.
 

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Heroism is one of the main themes in popular Persian prose stories. The hero in these stories has characteristics that generally belong to the mythical beliefs and traditions of pre-Islamic and post-Islamic Iran. Many historical and social factors are important in the transmission of these traditions and beliefs but one of the most important ones is Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh. In many cases, the actions and characteristics of the hero in the Shahnameh can be considered to be the prototype of the hero in popular Persian prose stories.
In this study, by examining four heroic prose works of Persian folklore, each belonging to a specific era, we identify and compare the heroic, political, and social characteristics of the hero-pahlavan and his comparison with the Shahnameh. The results of this research are as follows: Despite the formation of these works in the historical centuries, the hero has retained many of the mythical and epic features of the Shahnameh. Some of these actions and features are perfectly in line with the mythical and epic examples of the Shahnameh, and the narrators and writers have attempted to match the Pahlavans of popular literature with the Shahnameh. In some cases, despite similarities, there are differences between these actions and characteristics. The differences have often been due to the heroic ethics and some of the heroic and social political and social practices that result from the intellectual and cultural situation of the era of popular literature and the changes and transformations of the Ayyari system. Most of similarities can be seen in terms of appearance, combat power, type of birth, upbringing, growth stages, and the ideal years of the heroic.