Date-palms, language and the power of knowledge: An analysis of a fable from Kalila and Dimna

Abstract

The paper examines one of the fables in the Persian-Arab Abbasid prose writer Abdullah Ibn Al-Muqaffa's translation/adaptation Kalila and Dimna – The Fable of the Crow and the Partridge – within its own frame and story. The paper addresses the issues of context and “contextomy”, the power of knowledge and of language, metaphors of foreign language learning, interlanguage, communication contexts, ideology of the fable genre and narrative embedding and blending and layers of narration, and provides a fairly detailed discourse analytical description of the fable. One central argument the paper makes is that fables of this kind should be critically revisited so that their “timeless truths”, which may prove to be neither timeless nor true, may be uncovered. The authorities of an author, a Philosopher and a hermit which respectively occasion a seemingly realistic Philosopher–King frame, a hermit–guest story and a crow-partridge fable, discouraging self-improvement and social mobility, in the case of the present fable, should be situated in a socio-historical context and scrutinized rather than be taken for granted.