Discourse Analysis of Religion and Government in Triple Parts of Shahnameh

Shahnameh, written by Abu ʾl-Qasim Ferdowsi in the fourth century, is a great work in Iranian literature. This literary masterpiece includes myths, legends, and Iran history from the beginning to the conquest of Iran by Muslim Arabs. The relationship between religion and government (monarchy or kingdom) in Shahnameh, because of its importance in the modern era, is one of the favorite subjects of the new generation. In this paper, using Norman Fairclough's hermeneutics based on three levels of description, interpretation, and explanation, we investigated the relationship between religion and government in three mythological, heroic, and historical eras of Shahnameh. In this book, government has a uniform trend but religion affects this relationship with its ups and downs. Government as monarchy and kingdom has a simple structure but religion moves toward the complex structure over time and it transforms the relationship between religion and state. And over time, their simple relationship during the Keyumars, the first king, transforms into a complicated relationship in the end of Shahnameh. In this paper, we investigate the relationship between religion and state in Shahnameh according to three analytic levels of Fairclough and three parts of Shahnameh.