THE SHAHNAMEH
THE
SHAHNAMEH
THE PERSIAN EPIC AS WORLD LITERATURE
HAMID DABASHI
Columbia University Press
New York
Columbia University Press
Publishers Since 1893
New York Chichester, West Sussex
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Copyright © 2019 Columbia University Press
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E-ISBN 978-0-231-54494-8
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Dabashi, Hamid, 1951– author.
Title: The Shahnameh : the Persian epic in world literature / Hamid Dabashi.
Description: New York : Columbia University Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018019466 (print) | LCCN 2018020311 (ebook) | ISBN 9780231183444 (cloth : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Firdawsī. Shāhnāmah.
Classification: LCC PK6459 (ebook) | LCC PK6459 .D33 2018 (print) | DDC 891.55/11—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018019466
A Columbia University Press E-book.
CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at [email protected].
Chapter opening art: Folios from an illuminated manuscript. Made in Iran, Tabriz.
The Shahnameh (Book of Kings) of Shah Tahmasp. Author Abu’l Qasim Firdausi (935–1020). Paintings attributed to Qadimi (ca. 1525–65).
Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Arthur A. Houghton Jr., 1970.
Preface: The Shah’s Wise Men Approve of Zal’s Marriage, Folio 86v, ca 1525–30
Introduction: The Angel Surush Rescues Khusrau Parviz from a Cul-de-sac, Folio 708v, ca 1530–35
Chapter 1: Zal Expounds the Mysteries of the Magi, Folio 87v, ca 1525
Chapter 2: Tahmuras Defeats the Divs, Folio 23v, ca 1525
Chapter 3: Siyavush Recounts His Nightmare to Farangis, Folio 195r, ca 1525–30
Chapter 4: Bahram Recovers the Crown of Rivniz, Folio 245r
Chapter 5: Nushirvan Greets the Khaqan’s Daughter, Folio 633v, cz 1530–35
Conclusion: Afrasiyab on the Iranian Throne, Folio 105r, ca 1525–30
Cover image: Rustam and Isfandiyar Begin Their Combat, Folio 461v, ca 1525
For Sultan Mahmoud Omidsalar
The generous patron of this book on the Shahnameh
CONTENTS
Preface
Acknowledgments
INTRODUCTION
1 THE PERSIAN EPIC
2 FERDOWSI THE POET
3 THE BOOK OF KINGS
4 EPICS AND EMPIRES
5 EMPIRES FALL, NATIONS RISE
CONCLUSION
Notes
Index
PREFACE
The Shahnameh is a long beautiful poem in my mother tongue. It was composed in Persian with poise, patience, perseverance, as if performing an act of poetic piety, of moral obligation, of the ritual ablution of a people. It has been loved and admired since its completion in the year 1010 in the Khorasan region of Iran, the singular lifework of one poet who in more than fifty thousand couplets summoned the full historical imagination of a people. It is the longest epic poem in the world composed by one poet.
The Shahnameh is the surviving relic of many beautiful and exquisite tales informing bygone and forgotten empires. It is forever loved, beautifully written, ceremoniously read, happily recited, and then, generation after generation, memorized, performed, painted, praised, critically edited, and even revered by Iranian and other Persian-speaking people around the globe. People name their children after its heroes. They call their loved ones names immortalized in these tales. Living histories are made of stories told in this book.
The Shahnameh is an epic of many empires. Its stories date back to time immemorial. It tells stories of legends and heroes and histories long since otherwise forgotten—the Sassanids, the Arsacids, Alexander the Great, the Parthians, the Kiyanids … stories of who knows what other forgotten gathering of unending pride and enduring prejudices.
Hakim Abolqasem Ferdowsi Tusi is the name of the poet who wrote the Shahnameh. He finished it around the year 1010 in the Christian calendar, though he lived on a different calendar, an Islamic, an Iranian calendar. The original text of the epic is carefully researched, judiciously documented, impeccably preserved—every single word of it lovingly cherished, meticulously honored, thoroughly documented.
Beyond and above its imperial pedigree, the Shahnameh has been the companion of multiple nations across the colonial and postcolonial worlds, deeply rooted as these nations are in a common moral imagination. The Persian epic is the shared memory of that active and enduring imagination.
The poetic gift at the heart of the Shahnameh extends the totality of its mythic, heroic, and historical narratives deep into an open-ended infinity they collectively invest in those who read it. When the narrative roots of this text began, we do not know; when it will end, we have no clue. The Persian epic remembers and perpetuates itself—in and of itself. It has sustained itself through the thick and thin of a history that has always had but limited, passing, fragile political claim on its unfolding poetic horizons. The Shahnameh is a renegade epic.
The paramount question today is, how are we to read the Shahnameh beyond its past and lost glories—today meaning almost two decades into the twenty-first century in the Christian calendar, which is not the calendar in which the Persian epic was written, or in which it is now read in countries where people can read and recite it in its original?
The Shahnameh has been widely translated into various languages and admired by readers around the globe. To read it in a language other than its original Persian, people have had to read it mostly in English, some in French, and less so in Arabic, Turkish, German, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, or Spanish. That fact is not accidental to the way the Shahnameh is read today. The primacy of English in reading it in its translation reflects the colonial context of its reception over the past two hundred years plus. Ferdowsi wrote the Shahnameh in Persian, once an imperial language of its own. Today people around the world, the world in which this Persian text is to be or not to be considered as part of what is called “World Literature,” mostly read it in English. In that factual paradox dwells the ironic power of an epic living beyond its destiny.
In reimagining the Shahnameh as a piece of world literature first and foremost that Eurocentric world needs to be reassessed and reimagined. The “World” in “World Literature,” as we use the term today, is a fictional (“Western”) world—an imperial, colonial fiction, a fiction that has factually impaired the larger world in which we have lived. It is a decidedly European world, positing a Euro-universalist imagination upon the moral and normative universe in which humanity lives within multiple worlds. It is a colonial confiscation of the real world. It is the imperial appropriation of a world that has been denied its own inhabitants and their varied and multiple worldliness. Any text from any part of that real world that wants to enter this warped world of “World Literature” must first and foremost ask permission from a fictive white European literary critic and thus distort itself to the aesthetic, poetic, and above all mimetic particularities of that European world he represents before it is admitted, and once it is thus admitted it has ipso facto disfigured itself. In making the case for world literature, we must first and foremost dismantle and overcome the European fiction of that “World Literature” as theorized from Goethe forward. What Goethe and his followers have theorized is not “world” literature. It is the imperial wet dream of European literature. It is theirs. It is their world. It is not worldly, it is not real, it is f
ictive, imperial, cherry-picking aspects of other people’s literature and twisting and turning it to its liking. It is therefore innately abusive of the world it wishes thus to appropriate and narratively (as politically) to rule. The world, the real world, the world at large, is entirely outside the parameters of that European manufactured, colonially fictional “World.”
Where exactly is this “World,” we can now ask in earnest, when they say “World Literature”? Can we question the location and the logistics of this world? Might this world perhaps be a specific world, a Eurocentric world, a world mapped to look dominant under the sign of “Europe,” a world in the shadow of Europe, a world imagined by European cartographers, philosophers, world conquerors, and enlightened thinkers, and all their North American descendants? If so, might we perhaps think of another world, a world ravaged by European colonialism and now rising from the enduring conditions of its postcoloniality to claim a dignity of place for itself, including a claim on world literature beyond the limited imagination of “World Literature” perhaps? If so, can the Shahnameh be read as a piece of world literature in that world—the real world, the postcolonial world—as part and parcel of a global claim on the pride of place not mapped in “World Literature”? Can we reverse the order of these worlds and begin theorizing from “the wretched of the earth” upward, rather than the other way around, the way “World Literature” has been theorized?
To enter this real, larger world, to become part and parcel of world literature (without any imposing Euro-universalist capital letters), my argument in this book is very simple: the Shahnameh must be read and remembered for the imperial worlds it once occupied and the postcolonial world it now inhabits—the world in which it was created, the world it envisions, and the world in which it has been read. My consistent argument throughout this book is that to place the Persian (or any other non-European) epic in the context of real (not the colonially fictional Eurocentric) world literature, we must detect the ways in which its epic nature consistently overcomes its imperial uses and abuses and theorize the manner in which its poetics triumphs over its passing politics. To do so we need to see how its stories tower more prominently over its histories and show how its form trumps its formalities. Above all, you will see me consistently demonstrate how its Oedipal (or what I call Sohrabaneh) trauma dismantles its patriarchal order, and how its subdued eroticism undermines its flaunted warmongering, or how its festive bazms undermine its fighting razms. Ultimately this line of argument leads to my basic proposal that the sense of tragic in the Shahnameh embraces its sense of triumph, and how its subversive narrative foreshadows its triumphalist prosody. The result of this decidedly worldly reading of the Shahnameh places it against the very grain of the triumphalist reading of European epics from the Iliad to Virgil, a sentiment now evident in the very imperial diction of the idea of “World Literature.”
By placing the Shahnameh far beyond the foreclosed totality of Eurocentric “World Literature,” we open up its expansive vistas onto the infinity of a planetary conception of world literature that will liberate the very ideas of “modern epic” and “world text” into far more emancipatory literary and moral horizons. Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh is neither triumphalist nor defeatist, if we were to place it on a common Eurocentric classification of epic. It is a decidedly defiant epic, drawing attention to its own form by the power of its expansive poetics. It is to that poetic force that I first and foremost draw your attention in this book. The Shahnameh is rich. It is diversified. Historians can draw historical evidence, biographers biographical data, emperors seek legitimacy, tyrants fish for justification, as could linguists rely on its syntax and morphology for their own purposes. But it is first and foremost as a poetic act of ingenious originality and power that I emphasize the enduring significance of the Persian epic in order to place it in the context of a radically reconfigured conception of world literature.
The Shahnameh began from the scattered sources in both Persian and Pahlavi. It was gathered and composed into a singularly beautiful and compelling narrative by a gifted, driven, and visionary poet. It was then loved, celebrated, admired, produced in beautiful illustrated manuscripts and, as such, served successive empires as the talismanic touchstone of their always fragile legitimacy. All those empires eventually collapsed, and European colonial modernity dawned on the Persian-speaking world—from India to the Mediterranean shores. Postcolonial nations emerged and laid varied claims on the Persian epic, as did states seeking legitimacy from the bygone ages the Persian epic represented. It was a mismatch, but it worked. The varied worlds the Shahnameh has historically inhabited are no longer there. The world in which it now lives is no longer a Persianate empire. It is an American empire—fragile, clumsy, dysfunctional, self-destructive, abusive, vulgar, producing its own unconvincing epics, therefore in no need of any “Persian epic.”
The poetic power of the Shahnameh, however, was never contingent on any imperial anchorage or abuse. It gave those passing empires the symbolic legitimacy they needed and lacked but kept the substance of its own poetic sublimity to itself. It is now precisely that poetic sublimity that must be matched and mixed with the fragile world the Shahnameh today inhabits. The fragmented world in which the Shahnameh now lives, and in which it can lay a claim to being world literature, renders its stories allegorical, as indeed the closed-circuited totality of this world opens up the infinity of its poetic possibilities, its intuition of transcendence, now as forever definitive to the Shahnameh. My book is about this matching, this approximation: bringing the Persian epic to a close encounter with a fragmented empire it now inhabits, it can never legitimize, and it will ipso facto, discredit.
The Shahnameh is a long beautiful poem now mostly read in English, the language of an empire upon whose flag “the sun never set.” It is reported that Herodotus once used that phrase for the Persian empire. From the Achaemenids to the British and now the American, empires rise and fall, all reflected in the shining pages and magnificent stories of a Persian epic that has endured and survived them all—to teach them a lesson or two in humility, and give the rest of us the good tidings of resistance, resilience, and triumph, so we can all learn that if empires lasted the whole world would be reading the Shahnameh in its original.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The idea of this book on Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh was first suggested to me years ago by my good friend and longtime editor Sharmila Sen. It took much longer than I had hoped or anticipated to write this book. But I still remember Sharmila’s enthusiasm about the idea and am happy to have delivered what I promised her I would do.
Mahmoud Omidsalar is a world authority on the Shahnameh and a dear and close friend of mine. Without making sure he had read every word I wrote here in this book I would not have dared writing on the Persian epic. He is not on the same page with me on many of my thoughts in this book about a seminal text we both love and admire. But he was exceedingly generous and patient reading me out and being tolerant of my speculations. Dedicating this book to him is the only way I know how to publicly acknowledge my gratitude.
Another good friend and colleague, Ahmad Sadri, is an equally authoritative scholar and translator of the Shahnameh. He, too, has read portions of this book and given me valuable comments. It is not easy to write on the Persian epic with so many towering scholars in the field. But their grace and friendship have seen me through the task—at once daredevil and joyous, exacting and exhilarating.
Two anonymous readers generously took time to review my manuscript and offer me extraordinary comments helping me revise my book in purposeful and sometimes even unanticipated ways. I don’t know who these distinguished scholars are but am indebted to them beyond words. One of these two reviewers was particularly helpful in passages of my book where I take on the issue of “World Literature.” I am thankful to this colleague. I cherish the time-honored practice of such selfless service. I have done it for others and am privileged to have received it from these colleagues, too.
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sp; My Columbia University Press editor, Philip Leventhal, has been a constant source of support and unwavering professional integrity to see my book through publication. I am grateful for his constant patience and extraordinary editorial care. Lisa Hamm, senior designer at Columbia University Press, has been exemplary in her aesthetic taste, patience, and grace to give my book the look of a quiet elegance in which it has now reached you. I am ever so grateful to her. I thank Sheila Canby, Patti Cadby Birch Curator in Charge of Islamic Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, for her gracious help with illustrations on the cover and chapter headings of my book.
My research assistant, Sumaya Akkas, had an uncanny ability to procure obscure sources for me at a moment’s notice. This book will always be indebted to her.
The two successive chairmen of my department as I was writing this book, Timothy Mitchell and Mamadou Diouf, have been exceptionally supportive of my work during their tenure. I am blessed by their friendship and collegiality.
As in my all other work, I have written this book on the Shahnameh while away from Iran, not in exile—an expression for which I have no use—but in an enduring distance from a homeland I can claim only in my scholarship, in a perpetual sense of loss I can remedy only when I read and write (about) “Iran.”
New York
Spring 2018
INTRODUCTION
Beh Nam-e Khodavand-e Jan-o Kherad!
In the Name of the God of Soul and Reason!
It takes certain audacity, a lofty sense of purpose, an abiding determination to do, or to have done, what is necessary, to begin a book with that kind of magisterial pronouncement and authorial power: In the Name of the God of Soul and Reason! And then to bring the evocation home: For beyond this, (human) intellect cannot reach!
Khodavand is God in Persian, the language in which this poem is composed. But the poet opts to specify what kind of God is to sit so majestically upon the commencement of his poetic edifice: the God that has given us life and reason, a soul and a sense of right and wrong, the ability to think, for beyond the invocation of the name of such a God human intellect itself cannot reach. He then goes on to specify who exactly this God is: the God that makes it possible for us to secure a good name for ourselves and ascertain a respectable standing among our peers, and the God that gives us our daily sustenance and who guides us, the God that created this vast universe and its planets, and the God who brought light to the Sun, the Moon, and Venus. The poet then confesses this God is superior to our ability to name, to identify, or to speculate about his nature, so we must think of him as an artist perhaps whose work of art is quite evident but not his own whereabouts. I keep using the gender-specific pronoun “he” or “him.” But in Persian we don’t have gender-specific pronouns. So this God is beyond gender and thus beyond any pronouns. So as you see you enter the commencement of these lines of poetry, and before you know it a whole different universe is opened up to you. You keep reading and going down the lines, every line a step upward and downward and sideways into the making of an edifice that the poet and you build together. The imperial world he inherited and the poetic world he built, before you know it, become your world too, the world in which you live and read and teach and learn. He gives you the line and you keep reading and fathoming what they could mean. The play is endless. The game joyous. The stage sparkles with magic.1
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