Any Story Can Be A Parable

Parables are normally associated with Jesus and the stories he once told, but any concise story that includes a deliberate moral message can be called a parable. The definition of a parable is a short allegorical story designed to illustrate or teach some truth, religious principle, or moral lesson (Dictionary.com). Therefore if a story is to be a parable it must be relatively short, contain symbols or metaphors, and teach a moral concept. As an example of a non-biblical parable, I will use the story "The Prophet’s Hair" by Salman Rushdie because it is only 24 pages and meets the first criteria for a parable. This short story can be found in his book East, West.

(prophets hair/trichome of his beard

The story is filled with symbols and metaphors and the first, which is the most obvious, is the Prophet’s Hair. This symbolizes a relic, an item that is one of a kind, has religious power, and is an item no human can own. This story requires that a relic be the item of focus because of the power it would hold. Another symbol is that of the scarred thief, his scar is "in the shape of the letter sin in the Nastaliq script." He symbolizes men who are scarred and filled with sin. What happens to him is what happens to all men living with sin who do not repent. The father figure is a most complex metaphor for being a hypocrite and materialist. He is a hypocrite because he tells himself that he is saving the "distracted devotees" from their "relic-worship" yet he becomes so fixated and paranoid about the relic that he sleeps with it. He also lashes out at his family and debtors and hurts them and says "from now on […] there’s going to be some discipline around here," yet he is the one who is not disciplined enough to show his family what is expected of them without violence. He is also a materialist because of his "collector’s mania," which makes him a lying hypocrite. He says the devotees are distracted by it but to him "It’s the silver vial I desire, more than the hair" because if that were true he could have taken the bottle for himself and given the pendant (it holds the hair) to the mosque. He desires to collect both the bottle and the hair because they are rare for this world and add to his collection of material items. There are many other examples of symbols and metaphors in this book but the relic and the people of the stories but these three symbols—the hair, the thief, and the father—are enough to explain how this story teaches a moral.

Some morals found in this story are that relics cannot be owned, sinful people cannot escape the justice of Allah, and materialistic and hypocritical people bring suffering to themselves and their family. This story is a parable because it uses the symbols to teach these morals. The father chose to keep the hair even though he knew the "hair must be restored to its shrine, and the state to equanimity and peace." He knew that hard ship would follow if the relic was not restored yet he tempted fate and Allah when he kept the hair. He sought the matirial item "of this world" and did not seek Allah, which led to his obsession with the relic and abuse of his family and debtors. His hypocritical accusations of this family gave them mental anguish, which led to further pain. In the end his obsession with the hair and his hypocritical actions led his son to his death, his wife to insanity, and him to murder and suicide.

In short, any short story can be a parable. All that a story needs is to have symbols and metaphors that teach good morals. Parables don’t even have to be religious. They just have to show how people with bad morals go through hardship, and that if they had had good morals the hardship would have never taken place.