Document Type : Research Paper
Authors
Shahid Beheshti University
Abstract
The third turn (nawbah) of Kašf al-asrār (Unveiling of mysteries) is a collection of Sufis' fragments concerns the interpretation of Qur'ān by Abu’l-Fażl Rašid-al-Din Meybodi. Most of them are referred to "the Elder of the Path" (pir-e tariqat) or to some general unknown titles. It was previously assumed that "the Elder of the Path" was a certain person who had probably been Maybodi's spiritual master. Some of the rhymed (musajja') phrases, attributed to the Elder of the Path, reinforced the suspicion that the title refers to khwaja 'Abdullah Ansari, to the point that some researchers have been trying to derive Khwaja's interpretation out of Meybodi's and to estimate its potential volume. Later, it was however hypothesized that these "Elders" would not refer to a specific person and they can be different ones. It has been tried, in present study, to detect the identity of some of these unknown speakers and to seek the history of their sayings in the sources existed before Meybodi. The analysis of the unknown speakers' statistics in the 3rd turn of Kašf al-asrār raises another hypothesis that many of these "Elders" might have no specific sources or references, and, it is possible that Meybodi himself had added tes title to many of fragments that had certain literal pattern.
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