Document Type : Research Paper
Authors
1
Ph.D. student of Quran and Hadith sutdies, Esfahan University
2
Associate Professor of Quranic Sciences and Hadith, University of Isfahan
Abstract
Abstract
One of structures of Qur’an to render its teachings is storytelling or narration. Like other Revealed Books, the holy Qur’an has also abundantly taken advantage of stories and narratives for teaching the inherent rules of universe to man, warning and annunciating him, and informing him of the stories of the predecessors and prophets. One of these Qur’anic narratives, is the story of Her Holiness Mary (as), being highly considered due to its inclusion of various ups and downs and extraordinary adventures such as a childbirth without a father or his speech in cradle. Many scientific attempts have been devoted to description, commentary and analysis of this story and other Qur’anic narratives, and many researchers have scrutinized various aspects of these stories by different literary, semantic, historical, and linguistic approaches. One of the new emerging approaches in the study of Qur’anic stories is “Narratology” and its distinguishing aspect from other approaches is that it studies the structure of a story and provides the possibility of methodological extraction of implicit meanings in it, considering the various aspects of a story such as narrator, characters, point of view, plot, etc.
The present article, reporting the narration of the Qur’an from the story of Mary, aims to answer the question of “how and to what extent do these components have role in analyzing the structure of this story?” The study indicates that despite the differences between Qur’anic stories and human ones in various aspects, the story of Her Holiness Mary has a plot similar to that of human stories and its structural pattern, with a slight difference, is applicable to that of common ones. The meaningful outcome of this reading is that Mary (as) has experienced many ups and downs in her life, but in all the hardships and happiness, an aider from God, the Almighty, has helped and saved her. In addition, through these difficult events, Mary (as) has been led to the position of being higher than other women in the world and she has achieved a special position before God, the Almighty.
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