The Tale of Shah Ismail and Arab Zangi from Neo-historicism Perspective

Folklore is to some extent derived from a history, whose bitterness is disregarded and is essentially transformed as pleased through tales by the public to relieve themselves. It is through such a drive and attempt that the general public leave behind their preferred history in tales, a narrative that consists of the elements of historical and meta-historical/utopian discourses. Such an approach in textualism of stories can be consolidated by prominent theories of literary criticism and, in here, using the theory of neo-historism. This approach is utilized for investigations into a variety of discourses such as power in politics, silenced and non-dominant discourses, cultural discourses, etc. This study investigates the tale of "Shah Ismail and Arab Zangi" based on the neo-historicism approach and using the historical explanation method. This text tells us not only about the various aspects of the discourse of political power in the Iranian history, which was connected with the religious ideological discourse in the Safavid era and manifested with the symbol of Zulfiqar (Imam Alichr('39')s sword), but also about the discourse of the Kurdish minority at that time and other social and cultural discourses at and beyond that time.