This study undertakes a comparative narratological analysis of al‑Ḥarīrī’s Dīnārīyah Maqāmah and Saʿdī’s “The Dispute between Saʿdī and the Claimant” (Jedāl-e Saʿdī bā Moddaʿī) in the Golestān, with the aim of demonstrating how Saʿdī reconfigures the internally paradoxical unity of Abū Zayd al‑Sarūjī into an explicit dialogic confrontation between two distinct and fully articulated voices. In al‑Ḥarīrī’s maqāmah, the tension between professed ascetic poverty and the underlying desire for material gain remains embedded within a single persona, generating an irony that arises primarily from the character’s cultivated duplicity and rhetorical performance. Saʿdī, however, purposefully externalizes this paradox by recasting it as an intellectual exchange between two autonomous speakers, each of whom articulates a coherent system of reasoning, ethical assumptions, and worldview. Neither voice is granted absolute or definitive moral authority; instead, meaning emerges through the dynamic interplay of arguments, a condition closely aligned with Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of polyphony and dialogic imagination. Methodologically, the research adopts a descriptive–analytical and comparative framework, drawing upon discourse analysis, irony studies, and theories of narrative voice and dialogism. Beyond the close reading of the primary texts, the study also considers classical Arabic and Persian rhetorical conventions in order to illuminate the stylistic and cultural factors that shape the authors’ differing narrative choices. The findings indicate that Saʿdī, by projecting the internal contradiction of the maqāmah onto the plane of dialogic action, transforms its originally monologic and performance‑oriented structure into a genuinely dialogic model. As a result, irony shifts from narrative texture to spoken interaction, and the narrator evolves from a passive observer into an active moral agent. Furthermore, the expressive tendencies of Persian—its inclination toward clarity, brevity, practical wisdom, and a balanced moral tone—facilitate Saʿdī’s reimagining of the maqāmah form, allowing ethical purpose and narrative technique to reinforce one another. Consequently, Saʿdī introduces a distinctly Persian paradigm of moral storytelling founded on the interplay of voices and the equilibrium of competing arguments.