nasrolah emami; bahman rezaei
Abstract
What is being studied in this survey is the following line from Khāghānī's Ode of "Tarsā'īyah": "Due to this oppression, I go kiss the bell, and tie Zunnār (the Christian belt)." ...
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What is being studied in this survey is the following line from Khāghānī's Ode of "Tarsā'īyah": "Due to this oppression, I go kiss the bell, and tie Zunnār (the Christian belt)." In recent years, some interpreters have hesitated to record the word "kiss(Būsam)" in the line cited above, and believe that this word is a script error and a distortion of the word "Nūsham" (the shortened form of "Nīyūshīdan" which means "to listen") that has been changed, in the course of history, into "Būsam." The objective of this research is to carry out a semantic and functional analysis of the word "Nāghūs" which means "Bell" and to examine the history of the word and its various types in Persian verse in order to come up with the correct meaning of "Nāghūs" and "Nāghūs Kissing." Furthermore, dictionaries and books of Persian poetry have been consulted in order to discover the roots of kissing Nāghūs and listening to Nāghūs and thereby to eliminate the ambiguity surrounding the issue. The findings of this research reveal that Nāghūs, apart from the meaning it has today, had been used differently by oriental Christians in the past; they had two pieces of wood, one was Nāghūs and the other a short bat which they called "Vabīl"; at the outset of prayer, they were knocked against each other as an invocation to worship. According to various poetic evidences, kissing holy objects and religious symbols has been an ordinary practice among Christians.
Keywords: Khāghānī ,Ode,Tarsā'īyah,Kissing the Bell, Script Error
