Aspects of Muhammad Ali Foroughi’s Letters Influenced by Farahani’s Monsha’at: From imitation to innovation

Mohammad Ali Foroughi (also known as Zoka-ol-Molk) is regarded as one of the well-known contemporary Iranian men in politics, culture, and law.His political and cultural careers motivated him to correspond with many educated friends about these issues.Due to Foroughi's familiarity with ancient literature and his attachment to Iranian culture, his letters have been influenced by the style of his predecessors in addition to the earlier literary works.By perusing these letters, one can visibly see the influence of Ghaem Magham Farahani's Monsha'at (Letters).While imitating the style of Farahani, Foroughi had innovations in his letters.The present article aims to reveal the extent of Foroughi's innovation and his being influenced by Ghaem Magham's letters by considering Farahani's letters as an example of the return style.In the current study 11 letters from Foroughi, collected in Zoka-ol-Molk's policy book, and 11 letters from Ghaem Magham's Monsha'at, fallen into friendship, politics, and social categories, were analyzed.It was found that although Foroughi was influenced by the letter styles, literary techniques, and linguistic features of Farahani's letters, he made innovations in their contents and concepts.Zoka-ol-Molk's innovations can be seen in combining the return style with modern socio-political concepts.In writing letters, Foroughi paid special attention to the temporal conditions and people's understanding.Therefore, besides being influenced by the return style (especially that of Monsha'at), he overcame its weaknesses with some expressive tricks and subtleties.By using this way of writing, Foroughi has achieved the goals of attracting the attention of the audience to promoting Persian culture and literature and conveying modern concepts along with reporting on current social issues.In his political and social letters, we see him imitating demanding literary-historical texts; while his friendly letters are very tender and heartwarming due to imitating lyrical texts.Hence, reading these letters gives the reader more literary pleasure than social letters.