Political Thought Manifested in Narrative Structure of Zayn-al-Akhbar by Gardizi

The purpose of this study is to identify Gardizi’s main motivation for writing the history of Zayn-al-Akhbar.
As the historian’s aim of writing history is reflected in the structure of his text, and Gardizi’s narrative of historical events is a meaningful narration that forms a distinct result in the mind of the reader and promotes, confirms and documents a political thought, the present researchers sought to discover and decipher the meaning and political thought underlying the narrative structure of the history of Zayn-al-Akhbar. To achieve the purpose of the research, Gerard Genette's theory of narrative time was used in harmony with the atmosphere of Gardizi’s history. In this method, the highlighting elements of the narrative time were selected and finally, parts of the text, which were prominent in terms of time, were examined regarding the ideas. As a result, two vital elements of the narrative structure of Gardizi, namely “decline narrative poetics” and “narrative interface loops” were proposed and explained. The analysis of these two elements indicated that the main aim of Gardizi while writing Zina al-Akhbar was to motivate the Ghaznavids to regain control of Khorasan, and his motivation for writing a historiography was to discover the root causes of the decline of various governments to find a way to save the Ghaznavids’ reign from destruction and revive it to the height of Mahmoud Ghaznavi’s rule.