Arabic Sultanic Narratives: An Interpretative Cultural Approach to the Book of “Kalila wa Dimna”

This research discusses the Arabic sultanic narratives through an interpretive cultural approach to the book of Kalila wa Dimnah as a narrative genre that institutes for the exemplifying exhortative narration –the allegory – in Arab-Islamic Culture.  The study has been arranged in  two themes: An establishing axis that historicizes the principals of imperial (sultan) Arabic writings as represented in some of Abdel Hemmed bin Yahya Al Kateb letters, induced through the instructions of two Umayyad Caliphs – Hisham bin Abdel Malek and Marwan bin Muhammad.  The second theme is an interpretative cultural approach to the book of Kalila wa Dimna as interpreted by Ibn al Muqaffa’, through which I reveal that the book embodies two contradicting cultural patterns.  The apparent pattern which firmly establishes the authoritative imperial or sultanic repression and the respects of hierarchal ranks, whereas the concealed pattern deconstructs the ideology of power and honors the triumph of the mind and reason represented by the imperial sultanic intellectual in the context of a founding project through which Ibn Al Muqaffa’ sought to create a true partnership between the governing establishment represented by Abu Ja’far Al Mansour, the Abbasid Caliph and the establishment of the imperial sultanic writers through a “social contract” between the two; any violation of this contract on the part of the political authority will mean its collapse and the elevation of the intellect state on its ruins. The allegorical symbolic representations and the argument of power and reason have supported this trend in the book.