An Investigation into and Analysis of the Applications of the Qur'an Verses and Hadiths in Sharh-e Shatahiat of Ruzbahan Baqli

Using the Qur'an verses and the hadiths by the Prophet in the prose texts was a common practice after Islam. This was done to maintain the words of God and the Prophet. In addition, the texts were adorned and arranged in numerous manners. Using Quran verses and hadiths accounts for the fundamental basis of mystical texts. These have been frequently used in simple and technical prose of this type of texts. The book Sharh-e Shatahiat by Ruzbahan Baqli is among the mystic prose texts written in technical prose (12th century AD), in which Quran verses and hadiths have been used more than 1,000 times in numerous ways. After a thorough and precise study of the book Sharh-e Shatahiat, this article attempts to first provide comprehensive statistics on the number of verses and hadiths used in the text, and then after showing the highly used cases, it investigates and analyzes the applications of the numerous verses and hadiths from the three viewpoints of grammar, expression, and meaning. In the grammar part, grammatical roles of the verses and hadiths, including subject, object, etc. as well as the way they are arranged in the sentence are studied. In the expression part, metaphors made of the verses and hadiths, the poetic images resulting from them, and the motivation and purpose of Ruzbahan about his creation of these images are analyzed and investigated. In the semantic part, the secondary purpose of the applications of verses and hadiths are explored on the basis of the viewpoints by Hossein Khatibi.