The Shahnameh

by Hamid Dabashi

  The author of the epic is Hakim Abolqasem Ferdowsi Tusi (ca. 940–1020), one of the towering Persian poets of all time. He was born in the village of Paj near the city of Tus in the northeastern province of Khorasan to an impoverished landed gentry in the year 940. Khorasan was a rich and fertile region in the nascent Samanid Empire (819–999) that had secured a sizable territory in Central Asian domains that today encompasses Iran, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan. The little that is known about Ferdowsi’s personal life portrays him as a young husband and a loving father who is grief-stricken by the death of his young son, and who makes a note of that tragedy in his Shahnameh. Such personal remarks are a veritable feature of the Persian epic, where we are always conscious and aware of the person and the poet behind his magnum opus.

  The text of the Shahnameh and the authorship of Ferdowsi are intertwined in our reading of the Persian epic. The poet and his poem have become interchangeable signifiers for each other, to the point that today the mere mentioning of the name Ferdowsi also means his Shahnameh and Shahnameh also means Ferdowsi. Sultan Mahmoud of Ghazna (r. 998–1002), who would become Ferdowsi’s patron, was a powerful warlord and world conqueror, the most prominent sultan in the Ghaznavid Empire (977–1186), which extended from eastern Iran into the northern Indian subcontinent. Under his reign the Ghaznavid Empire became a solid bastion of Persian language and culture, inheriting what the Samanids had already achieved and expanding it deeply from Central Asia through Iran to northern India. Though rooted in the Samanid cultural revival of the Persian culture, Ferdowsi came to full fruition under Mahmoud of Ghazna, and thus historically the poet, the patron, and the poetic legacy of the Shahnameh have all been intertwined. The fusion of the three is so endearing and enduring that it has spread deeply into the folkloric traditions surrounding the poet and the poem and extended to satirical remembrances of the patron who had originally commissioned the writing of the Shahnameh.

  According to one such delightful folkloric story, when Ferdowsi finished his Shahnameh he offered it to Sultan Mahmoud. The powerful sultan had promised him a gold coin for every line of his poetry in the epic, which had now reached more than fifty thousand couplets. The sultan looked at that many lines and thought no way he could give the poet so many gold coins. He consulted with his viziers and offered him as many coins of silver. Ferdowsi was deeply disappointed by the sultan’s reneging on his promise. “Your Majesty,” he said, “I just remembered a few additional lines, and I’d like to take my manuscript back and add them to the end of the book.” On his way out he gave all the silver coins to the sultan’s retinue. He went straight to a mosque where the sultan used to pray and wrote a graffito on its wall somewhere Mahmoud could see it:

  Oh you Sultan Mahmoud the world conqueror:

  If you are not afraid of me be afraid of God!

  For thirty years I suffered to write the Shahnameh

  So that the King would appropriately reward me—

  For sure the King was born to a lowly baker,

  For he has given me the rewards enough to buy a loaf of bread!

  If the King’s mother were of a noble descent,

  I would have been richly rewarded with gold and silver.

  Sultan Mahmoud heard of this story and had his soldiers chase after the poet to punish him, but Ferdowsi ran away to Baghdad and sought refuge with the ruling caliph. At the end Ferdowsi returned to his homeland upon receiving the sad news his son had passed away. Sultan Mahmoud sent for Ferdowsi with the award he had initially promised him. But his delegation and their award arrived as Ferdowsi’s coffin was being carried to his grave.6

  The apocryphal nature of this folkloric story has all the plausible elements of Ferdowsi’s life embedded in an implausible narrative that speaks of the truth of the fiction at the heart of the memorial manner in which generations have opted to remember Ferdowsi the poet, his patron Sultan Mahmoud, and his epic masterpiece. The fictive manner of this prose is almost entirely irrelevant to the factual evidence of a world in which people’s creative imagination across centuries and through empires lends a helping hand to the most abiding truths of their cultural heritage.

  THE HISTORY

  Yeki bud yeki nabud gheyr az Khoda hich kas nabud! That is how in Persian we say, “Once upon a time,” though literally we say, “There was one, there was no other, except for God no one else was!” The phrase is an invitation into a time immemorial. “There were those who were alive, and there were those who were yet to be born, but except for God no one ever exists anyway”—that is what the phrase really means idiomatically: transfusing a theological speculation into a story time that has the time of its own. By telling you the stories of the Shahnameh, I plan to make the magic of that phrase meaningful to you. The stories of the Shahnameh are embedded in history. There is an active fusion between the stories of the Persian epic, rooted in bygone ages, and the living ages people have experienced with the stories that Ferdowsi put into beautiful poetry for them as the trusted codex of their lived experiences. Like all other good stories, the tale of the Shahnameh itself is embedded in history—and it is in history that we must begin.

  The Muslim conquest of Iran in the seventh century dismantled the more than four-hundred-year reign of the Sassanid Empire (224–651) and subjected its vast domain to the emerging Arab dynasties. That was a powerful empire, and this was a crushing defeat. As Iran was actively incorporated into the expanding Umayyad (656–750) and then Abbasid (750–1258) Empires, Arabic language and Islamic culture and civilization dominated the world from the Indus Valley to the Mediterranean coasts. From this fateful encounter between a dying empire and its culture and a rising imperium and its civilization, the Persian language eventually emerged with a new zest and energy. As the power of the central caliphate initially in Damascus and subsequently in Baghdad began to decline in the late ninth century, Persianate dynasties emerged in the eastern and northern provinces. The Samanid Empire (819–999), under whose rule Ferdowsi emerged as a prominent poet, was one among such dynasties. These dynasties in general, and the Samanids in particular, were politically drawn to the Persian language as the lingua franca of their expanding domains, for their subjects may have converted to Islam but their language and culture had remained mostly Persian. By culture and character their ruling monarchs were drawn to Persian heritage, including myths and legends, language and literature, prose and poetry. Beholden to the Sassanid Empire as the prototype of their own imperial ambitions, the Samanid and all other subsequent monarchs were looking favorably to those poets and prose stylists who had started gathering such ancient Persian sources. Ferdowsi was the culmination of such poets, their crowning achievement.

  Like all other epics, the Shahnameh is an imperial narrative, the product of an imperial heritage, embedded in a crucial period in history when Iranian dynasties were actively asserting themselves against their Arab conquerors. From its completion in the year 1010, it has had an enduring significance in the life and long history of the Persianate world and successive empires that have ruled it. As a living text, it has been the cultural heritage of multiple nations within such bygone empires. As such the Shahnameh has functioned as the political icon of both national sovereignty and state legitimacy in subsequent postcolonial nation-states. The content and the context of the Persian epic are thus intertwined, one framing the interpretation of the other. The story of the Shahnameh itself, as a book, an epic, an enduring icon, is as a result intertwined with the long history of post–Arab conquest Persianate dynasties from Central Asia to the Mediterranean leading to the active formations of the postcolonial nations. While its function as a tool of “state legitimacy” may vary from a Pahlavi dynasty (1925–1979) to an Islamic Republic in our own lifetime, its centrality to the historic constitution of “national sovereignty” in a country like Iran becomes definitive.

  How can this central significance of the Shahnameh as a text be historically documented? The enduring importance of Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh can be assayed by th
e countless simple or lavishly illustrated manuscripts of its various copies that have reached our time from various royal courts and dynasties. With the rise of every new dynasty the commissioning of the writing and illustration of a copy of the Persian epic was the surest manner of laying claim on loyalty and legitimacy. In the course of postcolonial nation-states, the preparation of a critical edition of the book based on such original manuscripts became a functional equivalent of such earlier efforts and kept generations of scholars very busy, searching for the closest possible approximation to the original text of Ferdowsi. European and non-European Orientalists have also been deeply involved in preparing such critical editions. Two of the earliest such editions were prepared in 1811 by Matthew Lumsden and 1829 by T. Macan, both in India. Between 1838 and 1878, the French scholar Julius Mohl (1831–1868) prepared another critical edition that remained reliable for decades. A German scholar, J. A. Vullers, began yet another critical edition in 1877 but did not get to finish it. A Russian team of scholars led by E. E. Bertels prepared (1960–1971) a finely edited critical edition of Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, which became the most authoritative text for many decades. But the critical edition prepared by Djalal Khaleghi-Motlagh and his colleagues beginning in 1988 is today considered by far the most reliable version of the epic. All these critical editions are monuments to successive generations of scholarship dedicated to the enduring significance of Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh. Throughout the ages, from courtly sponsored and lavishly illustrated manuscripts to preparing critical editions, the iconic significance of the Shahnameh in both empire- and nation-building projects has been paramount.

  The European discovery of the Shahnameh, as perhaps best represented by Matthew Arnold’s (1822–1888) famous poem “Tragedy of Sohrab and Rustum,” but also in the admiration for it expressed by Victor Hugo and Goethe, gave it a renewed global significance far beyond its Persianate borders. The translations of the Shahnameh into European languages were sporadic but consistent. Louis M. Langlès translated a few episodes of the Persian epic into French in 1788. Later, in 1859, Victor Hugo, who was drawn to Persian poetry, became seriously interested in the Persian epic. Finally, Julius Mohl produced the first complete translation of the epic in French. Numerous other translations into other European languages appeared, and the first serious attention to it in the English-speaking world was by Sir William Jones (1746–1794).7 Many other partial or complete translations were made into other languages; the version done by Dick Davis today stands as the most widely admired and justly celebrated version of the Shahnameh available in English.8 The most recent illustrated version of the epic in English is the popular Shahnameh: The Epic of the Persian Kings, translated equally competently by Ahmad Sadri and illustrated by Hamid Rahmanian. A number of interrelated factors and forces are at work throughout these mostly European, Russian, and North American interests in the Persian epic. The romantic aspects of the Shahnameh appeared to the European Romanticists, while colonial officers like Sir William Jones were attracted to its imperial pedigree when in the service of the British Empire.

  Although the seal and signature of an imperial age are all over the Shahnameh, its continued relevance brings its mesmerizing stories to our own age. There are reports that during the Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988) the former Iranian president Abolhassan Bani-Sadr referenced it in his speeches to high-ranking Iranian officers to instill courage in them to defend Iran against the Iraqi invasion. During the celebration of Noruz at the time of U.S. president Obama’s administration pictures of a recent edition of the Shahnameh could be seen on the Haft Sin table at the White House. The living symbolism and enduring power of the Persian epic continue to unfold apace long after Ferdowsi first put pen to paper and wrote, Beh Nam-e Khodavand-e Jan-o Kherad!

  THE SHAHNAMEH AS AN EPIC IN WORLD LITERATURE

  What can a close familiarity with this Persian epic as I intend to provide in this book do to help us rethink the very idea of “World Literature” as we understand it today? Can the Shahnameh be considered part and parcel of world literature, and what would such a designation actually mean? How would it affect our reading of the Shahnameh as we have received it today? How would it affect our understanding of world literature if we bring the Shahnameh into our consideration? I wish to posit Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh not merely as a significant epic that merits being included in that category (which many scholars have always held) but also, and far more important, as an occasion that enables us to critically think through the very idea of world literature. Other scholars (older and younger generations) have already made persuasive arguments as to why the Persian epic richly deserves to be thus considered. But I have a far more ambitious proposal here. I wish to tell the story of the Shahnameh, its author, its patronage, its ancient roots, its imperial provenance, and later its varied national destinies as a constellation of parameters that enables us to see a whole different world, in fact multiple worlds, in which epic poetry and the literary imagination it has enabled had a towering presence. In this book, in other words, I intend to bring back to life a different “world” in which a vastly different conception of “word literature” was possible long before Goethe and other European and North American thinkers and scholars entertained the idea. I have already addressed the theoretical foregrounding of this argument in The World of Persian Literary Humanism.9 In this book I want to deliver and map out that argument in the specific case of this epic masterpiece. We cannot simply take the notion of “World Literature” as it has been articulated by Western European and North American scholars for granted and then try to push the Shahnameh onto it—awaiting or expecting the theoretical generosity of “First World” theorists. We need to rethink the whole category. This objective is not merely to rescue the very idea of world literature from its astonishingly prolonged Eurocentric provincialism but also, conversely, to liberate the Shahnameh itself from generations of its abusive readings for decidedly political purposes. The Persian epic has sustained an entirely original relationship to questions of temporality, history, and empire hitherto left un- or undertheorized by its most serious readers. The next generation of scholarship needs to address that challenge. For now, the groundwork I laid in The World of Persian Literary Humanism I need to bring to bear on this singularly significant text to see in what particular way the Persian epic fares in the grander scheme of things.

  To do so, my objective in this book is to bring The Book of Kings to life at the forefront of a new generation of literary consciousness by asking the simple question, how are we to understand the place of Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh as a Persian epic and its relations to various Persianate empires it informed in the context of other studies of epic and empires?

  In Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton (1993) David Quint divides the genre of European epics into two kinds: the Virgilian epics of conquest siding with the victors (Virgil’s Aeneid, Camões’s Lusíadas, Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata) and the countervailing epic of the defeated (Lucan’s Pharsalia, Ercilla’s Araucana, and d’Aubigné’s Les tragiques). Whereas the victorious Virgilian epic follows a linear, teleological narrative, the epic of the defeated follows an episodic and open-ended cycle. In an equally significant study, Modern Epic: The World-System from Goethe to García Márquez (1996), Franco Moretti offers a theory of “the modern epic” in which he seeks to account for such monumental works of modern fiction as Faust, Moby-Dick, The Nibelung’s Ring, Ulysses, The Cantos, The Waste Land, The Man Without Qualities, and One Hundred Years of Solitude. These works of modern epics, Moretti argues, represent and naturalize the imperial and colonial European domination of the planet. In this book, I will have multiple occasions and different reasons to refer to these two significant books. In my subsequent chapters you will see me invoke the ideas of these two eminent theorists not to find fault with them but to use their crucial studies as a springboard to think the Persian epic into a renewed worldliness beyond both its nativist readings and cliché-ridden praise deprived of an
y critical thinking. I am not critical of these theorists because they are Eurocentric. They are European and American literary scholars. Why should they not be Eurocentric? Europe and its cultural environs are their area of scholarly interest. Their blind spots, however, are the locations where we can place worldly epics like the Shahnameh as we seek to rethink the notion of “World Literature.” You will see me having multiple reasons in this book to dwell on this Eurocentric limitation.

  These two complementary studies, both offering sweeping theorizations of Comparative and World Literature, contain significant insights into the working of European or what their authors decidedly call Western epics—and yet neither of them has anything (serious or even in passing) to say about any other (what perforce is) “non-Western epic,” be it classical or modern, the Ramayana and Mahabharata or the Shahnameh. This is neither surprising nor indeed any fault of these distinguished scholars, who habitually talk (as they should) about their areas of competence, knowledge, and interest. But given the normative hegemony of scholarship on “Western epics,” what they think and write ipso facto denaturalizes other “non-Western epics,” turns them into oddities, exceptions, abnormalities. That inexorable division inevitably distorts the very assumption that we can critically think through other epics that have already been othered and therefore alienated from their own genre, their own textuality, their own history. When they write in English but effectively privilege certain epics and disregard others they seem to forget that the imperial reach of their scholarly language has already run ahead of them to put the global literary scene on the same pedestal—European and American literary theorists write in colonial languages (English or French) but retreat to their respective literary provincialism when they talk about “epic.” But their imperial English is also a postcolonial English—namely, what they generically theorize, we can, with the very same English, detheorize, meaning what they universalize we must particularize, epistemically dethrone.