Arabic-Persian Motifs of ʿUd̲h̲rī Love in the Georgian Romantic Poem of "The Man in the Panther's Skin"

Abstract

"The Man in the Panther's Skin" is the masterpiece of Shota Rustaveli (c. 1160—after c. 1220), the greatest Georgian Christian poet, who has been translated into nearly 45 languages in the world so far. In this article we are going to study the Motifs of ʿUd̲h̲rī Love (AR: al-ḥubb al-ʿud̲h̲rī) in Rustaveli's book. The Ghazal (ode) of Ud̲h̲rī is a literary product of the Islamic-Arab community in which love derives its principles from religion of Islam and the like. In fact, during the era of the Umayyad caliphate (661-750 BCE) was born ʿUd̲h̲rī as a new kind of ode in the Arabic poetry in the Arabian Peninsula and has made its way into other lands, including Iran, and this kind of love poem penetrated through Iran into Rustavli's poetry.ʿUd̲h̲rī poem was narration of true, intense and chaste love between lover and a beloved far from sensuality, debauchery and lechery. Therefore, their lifestyles were very similar to mystic. The main purpose of this study is to find out the extent to which Rustaveli was influenced by ʿUd̲h̲rī poem. The research method in this article is to compare the specific and objective features which inferred from the Arabic-PersianʿUd̲h̲rī literature with the narrative in the Rustaveli's work. This does not mean, of course, that we will examine all the ʿUd̲h̲rī poetry works written before Rustaveli's book in the world; rather, we mean matching the specific Motifs of Arabic-Farsi works with the Rustaveli's poem. The results of this study show that there is a complete similarity between the motifs in the poems of Rustaveli's work and the motifs of the ʿUd̲h̲rī poets in all its components. This study also confirms that if we omit some details of the story in Rustaveli's book, we will find that Rustaveli was thoroughly familiar with Islamic ʿUd̲h̲rī literature and implemented it in his book "The Man in the Panther's Skin".