The Shahnameh

by Hamid Dabashi

  Who is the poet who wrote those words at the commencement of his monumental epic? Whence his pious vigilance, this august sobriety, this power and poise with which he commands the attention and secures the respect of any person who can read and understand Persian anywhere around the world, from the epicenter of Khorasan in northeastern Iran where the poet lived around the world into the home and habitat of any Afghan, Iranian, Tajik, or any other person who can claim Ferdowsi’s mother tongue as his or her own.

  Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh. There have been many Shahnamehs in the course of Persian poetic history—both before and after Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh (composed ca. 1010). But today as indeed throughout history when we say “the Shahnameh” we mean Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh. “The Book of Kings”: that is what “Shahnameh” means, for it is a book about kings, queens, and heroes. But the word “shah” does not only mean “king” but can also mean “the Best,” “the Most Significant,” “the Chief.” Shah-daneh means the best seed, Shah-tut means the best berry, Shah-rag means the most important vein, Shah-parak means the most beautiful wings and thus a “butterfly”: thus Shahnameh can also mean “The Best Book,” “The Master Book,” “The Principal Book,” or simply “The Book.”2

  “The Shahnameh to me is what the Hebrew Bible is to an orthodox Jew.” Mahmoud Omidsalar, one of a handful of eminent Shahnameh scholars alive today, is not usually taken by hyperbole. I still remember this phrase with his solid Isfahani accent and I wonder. Every time I come near Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, Omidsalar’s phrase first stands between my reverential fingers and the opening page of the Persian epic. The first few lines I read still echo Omidsalar’s voice, but soon Ferdowsi’s magic begins to strip you of all your worldly concerns and seduces you into its poetic power, storytelling panache, wise missives, heartbreaking asides, rising crescendos of battlefields, erotic corners of his heroes’ amorous adventures, and above all the triumphant defiance of his sublime gift of storytelling. You become a character, willy-nilly, in his plays. You act out, you sing along, you recite the lines out loud that demand and exact elocution.

  I write this book to tell you all about the Shahnameh, most everything I have learned reading and teaching the Persian epic for a lifetime. But first let me tell you one of the stories of the Shahnameh before we go any further.

  THE STORY

  Once upon a time, and what a strange time it was, in a faraway land there lived a king named Merdas who had a young and handsome son named Zahhak. Zahhak was fiercely brave and blindly ambitious and very receptive when Ahriman (Satan) appeared to him as a counselor and advised him to kill his father and become the king. Zahhak did as Iblis (Satan) had told him to do (with the possible and perhaps even tacit complicity of his mother), agreed for Iblis to plot and kill his father, and became the king of his father’s realm. Next the selfsame Satan appeared to Zahhak as a cook and every day prepared for him a delicious feast and eventually made him carnivorous. Grateful to his amazing cook, Zahhak ordered him one day to ask his king for a favor. Iblis said all he wanted was to kiss Zahhak’s shoulders. Zahhak said fine. No sooner had Iblis kissed Zahhak’s shoulders than he disappeared into the thin air and two monstrous serpents emerged from Zahhak’s shoulders exactly where Iblis had kissed them. Next Iblis appeared to him as a physician and told him the only cure for his serpents, to prevent them from devouring him, was to kill two young men every day and feed the monstrous serpents their brains. Meanwhile in Iran a just and magnanimous king named Jamshid was ruling the world, and yet eventually arrogance and hubris took over him and weakened his kingdom, which is precisely the moment when Zahhak accepted the invitation of Iranian nobility to come to their capital, which he did and from where he ruled the world with terror and tyranny.

  In the Shahnameh story of Zahhak we come across one of the earliest accounts of the father-son-mother power struggle and erotic tensions that will run consistently throughout much of the Persian epic. In this particular case, we see a son who covets his father’s throne and through the intermediary function of Iblis kills him. Ferdowsi’s wording of this murder suggests either a conspiracy between Zahhak and his mother to kill his father or else an allusion that the king was in fact not Zahhak’s father and he was born out of wedlock to an illicit relationship between his mother and someone else.

  He conspired to kill his own father—

  I have heard wise men say:

  That an evil son even if fierce as a lion

  Will never kill his own father—

  Unless in secret the story is something else:

  The curious must discover the mother’s secret.3

  In either case, if Ferdowsi is merely alluding to the possibility of Zahhak’s being a bastard or his mother’s having shared his son’s plot to murder her husband, we have a decidedly circuitous twist on the Freudian Oedipal complex, in which case Zahhak’s two giant snakes become phallic symbols of an insatiable urge to kill all the other sons to prevent them from murdering Zahhak himself. This, which posits Zahhak and his mother as an archetype of the trope for the rest of the Shahnameh, is the first case of patricide as regicide in one of the earliest stories of the Persian epic. Zahhak’s mother’s possible complicity in the murder of her husband and helping her son ascend the throne can itself be read as her desire for the father-king to be replaced by the son-king. She wants the father-king to come out of her womb as a son-king, so that fathers are symbolically castrated, preempted, foreclosed. Even if we opt for the reading that Zahhak’s mother did not conspire with her son to kill her husband still we have the narratively absented biological father of Zahhak, which in effect reduces the triumvirate of father-mother-son to a mother-son register.4

  Such Shahnameh stories, which abound in the Persian epic, offer fresh, provocative, and at times destabilizing occasions to reflect back on psychoanalytic theories we have received from mostly European provenances. If, for example, we were to read Zahhak’s story in this manner, then what the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze suggests in his Présentation de Sacher-Masoch (Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty, 1967) not only offers a partially plausible reading of the late nineteenth-century German novelist Leopold von Sacher-Masoch but also takes us much farther into a renewed understanding of world literature. In Deleuze’s reading, the masochist subject (which he successfully decouples from the sadist) effectively dismantles the patriarchal order and reaches out for a pre-Oedipal maternal universe. In this pre- or post-Oedipal subversion of the patriarchal, the acting subject becomes always already heteronormative in his/her pansexual trajectory of desire. Zahhak’s feeding his snakes with the brains of the young male subjects (Iblis had turned him into not just a carnivore but also in fact a cannibal) reflects his fear of castration and offers a powerful homoerotic urge, while his pending demise in the hands of Kaveh the Blacksmith (whose sons had been killed by the king to feed their brains to his serpents) and the restoration of Fereydun to the Iranian throne represent a pronounced return to the patriarchal order.5

  I occasionally venture out into such speculative reflections on Shahnameh stories via theoretical familiarities in the European domain in order both to wet your speculative appetites and yet hold them at bay when we go back to the stories themselves. As a towering masterpiece of worldly literature, Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh is a gold mine of such exquisite stories that are yet to be fully explored and assayed in their social and psychological implications. If you wish to learn what happened to Zahhak and his serpents at the end you need to allow me to welcome you to this magnificent epic in its entirety, so full of strange and amazing stories as it is. The first thing you will probably need to know is who the author of this epic was, when and where it was composed, in what language, for what purpose, how it survived through the ages, how it reached us, what the stories told in this epic are, how they are related, and how we might benefit from reading it today. If we are to consider it in the enticing category of “World Literature,” what could that inclusion possibly mean? By focusing on one literary masterpiece definitiv
e to an entire world of literary imagination, I place the text and its author in the larger frame of their historical contexts (in plural). I am particularly mindful of both the inner world of the Persian epic itself and the multiple imperial worldliness in which it has been put to political use. The normative and moral space in between these worlds is itself an unfolding world. By bringing a global attention to these interwoven layers of worldliness I wish to map out the hidden geography of ignorance and negligence that today passes as “World Literature.”

  I therefore write this book in order to facilitate your reading of the Shahnameh, learning about its composition, its heroes and villains, love stories and tragedies, memorable dramas and historical narratives. Imagine Shakespearean dramas and mix them with Homeric deeds, if those are the literary classics with which you are familiar, and then forget about them both, for in the Shahnameh you will learn a whole new spectrum of stories you probably never knew existed or were even possible before. I intend to make the foreignness of the Persian epic familiar to you, without losing its innate and irreducible meaning and significance. By the end of my book, I hope you will rush to read the Shahnameh in the best translation available in your mother tongue, and even if you didn’t then through my book you will gain a solid and reliable command over what the book is all about and why people consider it a world-class epic, and what sorts of lessons it has to teach us even today. I will read the Shahnameh with you, place you in its history, tell you about its author, guide you through its illustrious labyrinth, and then we sit down together to wonder at its magic. I have wondered at its magic since I discovered myself the native speaker of the language in which the Persian epic is composed. I have marveled at the fact that Ferdowsi and I were born to the same maternal language. I have heard it recited by wandering storytellers in the streets of my hometown. I have learned its diction and prosody from my elementary and high school teachers. I have read its poetic power from the learned scholars of my homeland.

  When my eldest son, Kaveh (named after a Shahnameh hero as you will soon discover), was a young boy I used to tell him Shahnameh stories. Before long he began to compose his own “Shahnameh stories,” placing his favorite heroes of the Persian epic on various planets around the galaxy. He soon became distracted by other superheroes—Superman, Batman, and such. But something of the Shahnameh stayed with him and grew to give sculpted vision to his later literary taste. Kaveh is born and raised in the United States. His Persian is sufficient but hesitant. I told him Shahnameh stories in English. I now think the stories of the Shahnameh I told him and later taught my other children require and deserve a much wider readership. I write this book to share the joy of telling Shahnameh stories to my own children and teaching my students to a much wider audience. I believe the sheer pleasure of these stories is the surest path to their inner truth, their wider philosophical implications. In many of the existing translations in English unfortunately the segments of the Shahnameh in which Ferdowsi is meditative, self-reflective, and addresses profound issues his stories raise are left untranslated, for what reason I shirk from speculating. I alert you to these what I call the poetic implosions within the narrative and ask you to think with me about what they mean.

  Why is this epic so important? It is impossible to exaggerate the significance of Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh as the imperial epic of a bygone age and successive empires to which today a number of postcolonial nations such as Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Azerbaijan, and even the vaster Persianate world that includes Georgia, Armenia, Turkey, Dagestan, Pakistan, and as far as India have a legitimate claim. A long epic poem written originally in Persian and subsequently translated into countless other languages, the Shahnameh was composed in some fifty thousand verses between 977 and 1010, when the shape of the civilized world was much different than what we see today. It is the longest epic poem ever composed by a single poet. It is usually divided into three sections—mythical, heroic, and historical—narrating a global history of a people that Ferdowsi himself calls Iranians and their land Iran—from the creation of the world to the Arab conquest of the Sassanid Empire in 650s. What today we call Iran is only a fragment of what Ferdowsi called Iran. His was an imperial age and lexicon, ours a postcolonial. We need to reimagine ourselves back to his age before we commence our journey forward to come to ours.

  When and where and why was the Shahnameh written? Who wrote it and for what reasons and purposes? What were the historical circumstances of its composition? Can you imagine a gifted poet spending his entire lifetime writing only one book? Just imagine the courage, the conviction, the sense of purpose and the determination. What literary tradition does it come from? Who was Ferdowsi, the single author of this epic, and what prompted him to spend a lifetime collecting the necessary written and oral material and then sit down and write it from beginning to end of this monumental work? What is the basic structural composition of the Shahnameh narrative, and how are these sections connected? What are some of the most important stories of the Shahnameh: Zahhak and his serpents on his shoulders; King Jamshid, who became immortal and arrogant; the tragedy of Rostam, who inadvertently killed his own son Sohrab; the story of innocent Seyavash, whose stepmother fell in love with him; the tragedy of Esfandiar, and Rostam’s sad fate to kill him; what about the love stories of Rostam and Tahmineh, Bizhan and Manizheh; what about the stories of Anushirvan and his wise vizier, Bozorgmehr? Did you know Alexander the Great has a whole story in the Shahnameh?

  What are these stories and how are we to read and interpret them? There is not a single volume in English or any other European language that can act as a simple and solid guide to the Shahnameh or what its fate was after its composition in 1010 and before modern scholars in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries began to collect all the available manuscripts they could find and prepare a critical edition of it. What was the organic link between the significance of the Shahnameh—both materially and symbolically—for all those Persianate empires that preserved and staged and celebrated it: the Ghaznavids, the Seljuqids, the Mongols, the Timurids, the Mughals, the Safavids, or the Ottomans? What can we learn from such an intimate structural link between the Shahnameh as an epic and the different empires that decidedly celebrated it?

  What happened to the Shahnameh when these empires collapsed and eventually postcolonial nation-states emerged? How and to what particular purpose was the Shahnameh claimed and reclaimed by modern nation-states? How can an imperial epic be claimed and appropriated by postcolonial nation-states? Can the politics of an epic be separated from the epical politics it invokes? Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh is no ordinary book. It breathes with a living history. It makes past present, the present palpitate with past. It shrinks time, it collapses distant spaces upon one another, it mixes facts and fantasies, it matches otherwise dissonant cognitive stages of our historical consciousness. It is written in beautiful calligraphy, it is recited eloquently, it is performed dramatically, it is painted elegantly, it is staged theatrically and cinematically. It is cited when children are born, or when revolutionaries succeed, or dynasties fall, and it is cited when national heroes die. It is the talismanic evidence of dignity and pride of place of a people, a nation, a national consciousness, scattered beyond many fictive frontiers, evident through any and all boundaries.

  Having been born to the language and culture of the Shahnameh, and growing up with both the learned and the popular versions of the book, and after decades of studying it closely and teaching it to generations of my students, I intend to open up the evident and concealed pleasures and wisdom of one of the greatest literary masterpieces in world literature for a new generation of students and educated public alike. My ambition is to make the Shahnameh as proverbial to a global conversation about epic and poetry as the Gilgamesh, Iliad, Odyssey, or Aeneid have been, and as the Mahabharata should be. A classic, they say, is a book everyone cites but no one reads. I intend to make people read the Shahnameh.

  THE POET AND HIS PATRON

  The Shahnameh
is no antiquarian relic. It is a living organism. Based on earlier sources, it was conceived at a certain point in history. It was poetically delivered by a master craftsman and born into this world with a conscious awareness of its significance. It was not canonized by changing literary historiography. It was made definitive to an imperial political culture that had given birth to it to begin with. It has gone through successive generations and gestations. It has aged gracefully. Today its aging countenance still carries its youthful disposition. As a text, it can excite and instruct at one and the same time. But that is not all that there is to its living organism. It is an imperial consciousness now embedded in multiple peoples and nations from one end of the world to the next, anywhere and everywhere that a Persian-speaking person can open it to its initial pages and read: Beh Nam-e Khodavand-e Jan-o Kherad!