Negative and Positive Resistance in Attar's Tadhkerat al-Awliya

Abstract

The mystics were not indifferent to the social conditions around them. Sufism aims at the salvation of the individuals of society and has no systematic program to govern society, but this does not mean that the Sufis were indifferent to the social and political conditions around them. In this study, we have turned to Attar's Tadhkerat al-Awliya and through a rereading and reconstruction of the concept of Foucauldian resistance, how the vast majority of the stories of Tadhkerat al-Awliya fall within the scope of the big game of power and resistance and how Attar represents the methods of Sufi resistance by designing diverse bodies. Some of these bodies use the method of negative resistance and others use the method of positive resistance, and sometimes both aspects of negative and positive resistance are manifested in one physical behavior. The reason for choosing Tadhkerat al-Awliya is that this work contains the essence of Attar's thought. He displays his many life and writing experiences in his previous works, and now in the final parts of his life he writes Tadhkerat al-Awliya, which is the subtext of many of the metatexts of Sufism of later periods. To this end, we first carefully read the stories of Attar that contain the concept of resistance and extracted their instances. In the next step, we classified them into several groups and identified the instances of negative and positive resistance in them. In the final step, we analyzed each section and presented the analysis report in the article.

Keywords

• attar
• tadhkerat al-awliya
• foucault
• negative and positive resistance