The didactic mas?navi, as a genre, is characterized by running homiletic discourse studded with illustrative narrative exempla; it is these narrative components that have garnered the most interest in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. They were not always such a pronounced feature of the genre, however. As J. T. P. de Bruijn has shown in his study of the first extant didactic mas?navi, the ?adiqat al-?aqiqa of San??i (d. ca. 1131), early manuscripts of the poem contain substantially fewer narratives than those produced in the thirteenth century and later. This presentation builds on de Bruijn’s work to show that narrative content increased not only in manuscripts of San??i’s work, but across the genre as whole, and that this increase in narrative content was bound up with a surge of anecdotes and tales with erotic themes. More specifically, I argue the role of narrative in the didactic mas?navi genre increased throughout the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and that ?A???r (d. c. 1221) led the vanguard in this shift. Although he has long been recognized as a proponent of love mysticism, the extent to which he deviated from his models in terms of his use of erotic narratives has not been fully appreciated. A better understanding of his generic originality allows us to make sense of certain defensive passages within his poems regarding his alleged “storytelling.” It also clarifies the poetic function of his innovative frame-tale structures, which I argue are defensive authorial maneuvers meant to reassert the didactic function of long erotic tales that had not appeared in previous instances of the genre. The first half of this presentation uses quantitative analysis to compare the number and length of narratives, and the prevalence of erotic themes within them, in the didactic mas?navis of ?A???r, San??i, and Ne??mi (d. 1209). This provides a context, in the second half of the presentation, for close readings of ?A???r’s meta-poetic apologia, along with an analysis of the frame-tale structure. The talk thus not only historicizes the development of the genre and clarifies ??A???r’s literary-historical role, but also elucidates a critical feature of medieval Perso-Arabic narrative culture: a surge of interest in the didactic value of erotic tales, accompanied by widespread concerns over their spiritual utility, fictionality, and alleged status as frivolous entertainment, often expressed in gendered terms.