Biographical-Spiritual Motivation Of Navoi’s Departure: A Textual-Hermeneutic Model Based On The Mathnawi Letter To Sayyid Hasan Ardasher

Abstract

This article examines how Alisher Navoi’s mathnawi-style letter to Sayyid Hasan Ardasher narratively constructs spiritual subjectivity through the configuration of exile. While previous scholarship has largely interpreted Navoi’s departure from Herat in political or socio-economic terms, the present study argues that the text organizes crisis, displacement, and longing within a literary discourse of inner transformation. Drawing on narrative theory, philosophical hermeneutics, and Sufi anthropology, the analysis demonstrates that exile in the mathnawi functions not merely as historical movement but as a narrative technology through which the self becomes spiritually intelligible. Close reading grounded in manuscript tradition reveals a three-layer motivational structure—an aesthetic-intellectual tension, a social-moral rupture, and a transcendental Sufi aspiration—whose interaction produces a trajectory of subjectivation oriented toward irfan. By situating Navoi’s autobiographical discourse within global debates on premodern selfhood, the article shows that reflexive interiority and narrative self-configuration were already conceptually elaborated in fifteenth-century Islamic literary culture. The study thus reframes Sufi poetic writing as a form of narrative construction of spiritual selfhood and contributes a transferable interpretative model for analyzing autobiographical texts across premodern traditions.