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Translated Article

No. 9 (2025): Dossier: "Mimesis in Philosophy and Literature"

Sanam: The Idol in Persian Vernacular Theories of Mimesis

DOI
https://doi.org/10.64957/nesir.1803846
Submitted
01.10.2025
Published
23.10.2025

Abstract

This essay introduces the process by which the Abrahamic polemical concept of the idol became a key term for Persian metapoetics and surveys the questions in poetics and narratology that writers and critics explored through the literary motif of the idol. The piece first establishes the Abrahamic and Islamic theological-hagiographic background for the rejection and destruction of idols; the Eastern Islamic milieu of religious diversity in the period from the eighth to the eleventh century CE that set the conditions for Persian poetic uses of the idol; and the contemporaneous Islamic philosophical reflections on Central and South Asian use of devotional images by Ibn Sīnā and al-Bīrūnī. It then considers a few case studies from the works of canonical poets from the tenth to the fifteenth century CE: Firdawsi, Unsuri, Nizami, Sadi, and Jami. Lastly, the piece briefly considers some partial parallels with the Petrarchan literary use of the figure of the idol.

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