Attār of Nishapur's Mantiq-u-Tayr and Orhan Pamuk's The Black Book: A Comparative Study

Orhan Pamuk, the well-known Turkish novelist, has created some of his works under the influence of Iranian literature and in accordance with the patterns found in the masterpieces of classical Persian literature. In The Black Book, one of Pamuk's novels, modern Western storytelling methods are combined with ancient stories and anecdotes of Eastern literature, including Persian literature. In the novel, Pamuk has paid special attention to Attār of Nishapur's Mantiq-u-Tayr and has tried to match his work with the symbolic patterns in Mantiq-u-Tayr. He has taken advantage of the content of Mantiq-u-Tayr and used it as a structural support for his work, and by creating special narrative situations, he has tried to represent the mystical paths in his novel. The present article, by analytical-comparative method, examines the way Pamuk benefits from Attar's ideas and how he was influenced by the Mantiq-u-Tayr. The findings show that the mystical, allegorical and narrative capacities of Mantiq-u-Tayr and The Black Book are similar in different ways. In his novel, Pamuk provides a semantic representation of the mystical concepts of Mantiq-u-Tayr, and refers directly to its stories, especially the story of the birds' journey to Mount Qaf; also, the mention of some common proper names in both books clearly shows that there is a deep intertextual relationship between the two works.