The Shahnameh

by Hamid Dabashi

  The task here is not to “provincialize Europe,” as it is now fashionable to say following the publication of Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (2000), a book that in fact recentralized rather than “provincialized” Europe by positing the notion of “translation” as the modus operandi of transition to capitalist modernity.10 We should not even “provincialize Europe,” if that is what we were doing, as in cross-authenticate it but by considering the rest of the world its translations. We need to deuniversalize the self-asserted imperial hubris of Europe (and these are two vastly different projects)—and nowhere is this task more urgent than in the field of literature and the literary, where theorization is integral to reimagining vanquished and repressed civilizations and the worlds they inhabited. Provincializing Europe on the model offered by Chakrabarty assumes its innate (God-given) universalism but wishes to limit it by territorializing it. But Europe was neither a theory nor a province. It was an imperial metaphor of conquest and ravaging of the earth, and it is precisely in that domain and in those terms that it must be deuniversalized to set the world free of its epistemic violence. That deuniversalization does not occur by either aping its terms of self-universalization or through an act of epistemological ressentiment (from Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche to Max Scheller and Gilles Deleuze). You deuniversalize Eurocentrism by exposing its vacuous imperial hubris, by historicizing its systemic colonization of concepts and categories, land thefts and acculturations, enabling alterities and possibilities thus it made impossible. “Europe” became a metaphor for capitalist modernity, cross-authenticated on the ravaged sites of its colonial consequences. You do not “provincialize” that global calamity. You dethrone its universal inevitability.

  It is because of this false and falsifying self-universalization that today if performed in English—or any other “European language” that has so successfully repressed its colonial consequences that it can no longer realize these languages have long ceased to be “European”—works with serious theoretical contentions are always treated suspiciously and condescendingly by their prose being racially profiled. If Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak move to the English department, there to teach and write European literatures as Europeanists, they can be as theoretically mysterious in their prose as they wish, to the point that even their own colleagues in the same department consider them incomprehensible. But if a book has the adjectival Arabic, Turkish, Chinese, Persian, or Malayalam in its title, the author better behave and be just a native informer and refrain from any theoretical speculations and leave that to superior European theorists, merely offer a “close reading” of the “actual literature” so the folks in the English department can easily do their “distant reading” and theorize those literatures too. Theorizing by the First World about their “Third World” is tantamount to literary terrorizing underwritten with full-throttle racism in tow. The issue here is not to solicit permission to theorize from anyone who lacks the authority to issue any such permission. The issue is to mark the unfortunate circumstances of the blindfold horse in the dark and dingy mill of “World Literature.”

  The joy of writing about an epic like the Shahnameh, however, is not merely to dethrone the self-asserted primacy of “the First World” theories. The task is far more pleasant and purposeful. The findings and suggestions of these and similar scholars raise certain significant issues that if we were to present an epic like the Shahnameh to the larger English-speaking world, and the world at large beholden to this world, we need to wonder in what ways it would tally with the insights that Quint or Moretti proffer. I read these scholars as colleagues and comrades and happily acknowledge my intellectual debt to them. But in writing about Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, I too have things to say that might alter the very presumptive notions of “epic” altogether. That is the only way that “the world” of the Shahnameh can have a catalytic effect on the very idea of world literature. I do not plan to add “an Oriental example” to the idea of “World Literature” as we know it today by offering this reading of the Shahnameh. I intend to alter the very notion of world literature, the very assumption of “World Literature,” as developed by scholars entirely alien to epics like the Shahnameh by introducing you to the multiple worlds the Persian epic has historically occupied and but which have been terra incognita to these and similar scholars. It is the “world” that these colleagues have occupied that I propose to be astonishingly provincial and is in dire need of being liberated and let loose into far wider and richer horizons.

  To do so it is not enough to rethink the worlds Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh has occupied, helped define, and in which it has lived. That is necessary but not sufficient. I therefore intend to embed the Persian epic into a renewed readership by reaching out for a far wider domain of critical thinking around it, cultivate and imagine a global audience, a transnational public sphere upon which the Shahnameh now needs to be read anew. The manner in which we can reflect the worldly disposition of the Shahnameh is not to merely invite the world into it but also to take it to the world, to prepare and present it to a new world, a globalized world, make it literarily critical to this world by assessing its worldliness, marking its literary magic, philosophical prowess, theoretical might. Very few people in the English-speaking world (which is both the imperial and the postcolonial worlds in which we now live) have even heard of the monumental Persian epic, let alone read its more than fifty thousand verses in the original or any readily available translation. Chances are the same students and educated public to whose education Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey have been integral have scarcely heard of the Shahnameh. Even those who may know or have been partially exposed to the famous Indian epics of the Ramayana and Mahabharata are still hard-pressed to know a single episode of the Shahnameh. The task is not simply to push the Persian epic on a larger reading public as a piece of antiquarian (“Oriental”) curiosity. The far more pressing and important (and pleasant and joyous I might add) task is to see in what particular way this epic is pertinent, relevant, integral to the world in which we now live, and to the social and psychological issues that preoccupy it. This is how a work of poetic art from bygone ages becomes definitive to a renewed conception of world literature.

  Why has the Shahnameh not been definitive to “World Literature” in the manner I propose here—what is to blame? There are partial or complete, both prose and poetic translations of the Shahnameh available in many European (colonial) languages, especially in English. But who has had the time or the inclination of reading through a thick and forbidding volume without any guide as to how to read it, what to look for, why this epic is so important to its original audiences and beyond, how to make head from its tail, or when and where the original Persian was written and subsequently read and interpreted through millennia and generations? It is easy to blame the public and its increasingly shortened attention span. But has the Shahnameh been interpreted and theorized for them in a manner that speaks to our present-day realities? Have they been told in some simple but significant ways why this masterpiece of world literature is so important and what it means when we call it part of world literature? Translating it into English or other languages is of course absolutely necessary and indispensable, but not sufficient. Like two strangers who meet for the first time, the Shahnameh and its new readers in this fast-changing world need to be properly introduced to each other—in a language familiar to both parties, rooted in the text but at the same time speculative in the spirit of our own age. Assimilating Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh backward to Homer or Virgil is the last thing that must ever happen to a work of literary art systematically alienated from “World Literature” as it has been historically theorized by Western European or North American literary critics who have taken their own provincial world for the world at large. Translating the Shahnameh in a manner that you systematically take the profoundest moral lessons and poetic meditations Ferdowsi has to offer before, after, or during his stories, for they �
��try the patience of the Western reader,” inevitably reduces it to a potpourri of “Oriental tales” told for entertainment and amusement the way The Arabian Nights, for example, have been thus read and Orientalized.

  Studies such as Quint’s and Moretti’s have theorized “epic” in its classical and contemporary registers in the context of a conception of “World Literature” that is decidedly single-worldly, and as such it fetishizes and alienates other worlds from themselves. For them “the West” is the Hegelian end of history. Whatever came before this “West” were the infantile stages of this dialectical unfolding of the Hegelian Geist. “The West” is not just a world, it is the world. It is not just a particular rendition of an imperial map of the world in which we now live—but the very meaning and destination of History. From Hegelian to neo-Hegelian to Marxist, this “developmental” and “progressive” metaphor of history has no theoretical reason or room for an epic like the Shahnameh—except as an object of Oriental curiosity. They have delegated it to the realm of “their Orient,” and if they want to learn something about it they go or refer to “their Orientalist,” their European Orientalists preferably. It is this nasty alienation of a book like the Shahnameh that I wish to undress and dismantle. It is useless to argue that European or American theorists are Eurocentric. Of course they are. The question is that no other epic has any reason, any theoretical justification, to be in the vicinity of Homer or Virgil. It is that Hegelian reason, that theoretical impossibility, not any particularly theorist, that must be dismantled and discredited.

  THE PERSIAN EPIC IN ITS IMMEDIATE HABITAT

  There is a vast body of scholarship in the form of erudite books and essays on the Shahnameh, written by learned scholars and renowned experts, each dealing with a crucial but abstruse aspect of the Persian epic. But strange as it may seem there is not a single volume—short, succinct, reliable, inviting, and authoritative—that a college student or any other educated person can walk into a bookstore, or visit a website, and purchase for a relatively cheap price, go home, and cozy up with in a corner of the sofa with a hot cup of tea or coffee and read cover to cover and learn why it is that generations of scholars have spent their lives trying to figure out the wonder and magic of the Shahnameh. No one in particular is responsible for that unfortunate fact, except of course for those who are capable of writing such a book and for whatever reason have not yet done so. The Persian epic must be brought home to the corner of that sofa and made relevant to that expecting reader—relevant to her and his universe of creative and critical imagination and, right in that very corner of the sofa, to the world that gathers around it: the world of our minor and major fears and hopes, of poverty of nations and wealth of empires. There is no reading or caring to read of any epic if that distant epic does not speak to the more immediate epics ordinary heroes wage in their daily lives.

  Why would anyone care about a poet who lived more than a thousand years ago in a “faraway land” and wonder what he had to say? There are numerous accounts of both Ferdowsi’s life and the significance of his opus available in Persian, the original language in which the Shahnameh was composed. Zabihollah Safa’s Hamaseh Sura’i dar Iran (Epic poetry in Iran, 1942) is a pioneering study in the field. Mojtaba Minovi’s Ferdowsi va She’r-e Ou (Ferdowsi and his poetry, 1967), and M. A. Eslami Nadushan’s Zendegi va Marg-e Pahlavanan dar Shahnameh (Life and death of heroes in the Shahnameh, 1969) are among the most important pieces of scholarship offered on the Persian epic. Shahrokh Meskoub’s two seminal studies Moqaddameh’i bar Rostam va Esfandiar (An introduction to Rostam and Esfandiar, 1964) and Sug-e Seyavash (Mourning Seyavash, 1971) vastly popularized the Shahnameh to a wide reach of younger readership when they were originally published. Mahmoud Omidsalar’s edited volume Justar-ha-ye Shahnameh Shenasi va Mabahes-e Adabi (Essays on the Shahnameh and literary topics, 2002) includes the most recent scholarly encounters with the text. One reads such deeply informed and richly competent works of scholarship and one wonders how deeply and how widely the Persian epic has been explored and yet how sadly unaware of these treasure troves is the world at large—the world in which the Shahnameh needs to be thought through as a work of world literature.

  Europe has of course been deeply informed about the Shahnameh. But Europe is not the world. We need to rethink the world in a manner that includes Europe but is not reduced to “Europe” as a metaphoric hegemony that we need first and foremost to overcome if we are to free our minds from the shackles of mental colonialism. There is a significant body of scholarship in European languages on the Shahnameh, interwoven with multiple critical editions of the original Persian text prepared by both European and Iranian scholars, and numerous partial or complete, in prose or poetry, translations into many languages. T. Nöldeke’s Das iranische Nationalepos (The Iranian national epic, 1920) is a classical study of the text, though now both too recondite in its language and dated in its scholarship. Produced decades later, Amin Banani’s “Ferdowsi and the Art of Tragic Epic” (1988) represents the subsequent generation of literary scholarship. Olga Davidson’s Poet and Hero in the Persian Book of Kings (2006) as well as her earlier book, Comparative Literature and Classical Persian Poetics: Seven Essays (1999), represent a younger generation of significant scholarship, as does Dick Davis’s Epic and Sedition: A Case of Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh (2006). A recent issue of the journal Iranian Studies (2015) has been dedicated to various scholarly treatments by multiple scholars on the notion of “The Shahnameh of Ferdowsi as World Literature.” Mahmoud Omidsalar’s work in English, his Poetics and Politics of Iran’s National Epic (2011) as well as his Iran’s Epic and America’s Empire (2012) are deeply informed polemical responses to works of scholarship done in Europe and the United States. Meanwhile A. Shapur Shahbazi’s Ferdowsi: A Critical Biography (1991) remains a solid biographical account of the poet. No study of the Shahnameh is possible without due respect, acknowledgment, and awareness of these crucial works of scholarship on the Persian epic—and yet none of these books and essays has reached the wider readership they richly deserve. They have been increasingly drawn into the contested domains of equally competent scholars debating significant but arcane issues, crucial for our understanding of the Shahnameh and yet tangential to its articulation outside the existing frames of literary scholarship by self-referential academics.

  Despite their impressive scholarship, none of these sources facilitates a fresh reading of the Persian epic for a wider readership or enables a new generation of students, teachers, and other educated readers to have a solid, reliable, hassle-free, pleasant, and engaging introduction to the entirety of the Shahnameh and its literary and worldly significance. Throughout the English-speaking world (and I would venture to say beyond) there is not a single volume that addresses all the historic, textual, and poetic dimensions of Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh in a simple, accessible, and comprehensive volume that college students and their professors can pick up and start reading cover to cover and even share with their friends and families beyond any course requirements. The Shahnameh needs to be made integral to an educated global public, made meaningful to their daily encounters with such simple questions as, what does it mean to be human, to face adversities, to triumph against all odds, to be ennobled by an innate sense of tragic loss at the heart of any vainglory?

  After a lifetime of intimate familiarity and subsequent scholarly engagements with the Shahnameh in both Persian and English I began teaching it to my undergraduate and graduate students in a yearly seminar at Columbia University, where I teach. Year after year I have witnessed the sparkle of joy and discovery as I have led my students into the obvious and hidden treasures of the text. It is that joy of first-time encounter with the Shahnameh that I now wish to share with a much larger audience in this book: to make it worldly to their lived experiences, the only legitimate way that a piece of poetry from a distant past can become integral to world literature through and beyond the manners in which it has been definitive to multiple worlds it has encounte
red in its long and glorious history.

  I have placed Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh in front of generations of American and non-American students in my classes on epics and empires and asked them to read it and wonder. American students had come from a variety of backgrounds, native to this land or else distant and more recent immigrants to its shores—white, black, brown, men, women, young or old. Sitting next to them were Asian, African, European, and Latin American students, all of them students at Columbia University in the city of New York, an oasis of learning beyond the reaches of time and space. The text created a rare tabula rasa for them, upon which they began to rewrite their own histories anew, as their reading provoked new meaning for me in a book I had known since my childhood. None of them knew anything except perhaps had heard the name of the Persian text—and now the Persian poet began to speak to them from across the ages. They began to read it, cover to cover, story after story, like explorers upon a distant shore. Their initial hesitation to pronounce the Persian names of heroes they had not even known before eventually yielded to a far more confident encounter with the substance of the stories. They soon began to analyze, synthesize, theorize the intricacies of the text. Before the term had ended the Shahnameh had become integral to their moral imagination, to their political consciousness, to their understanding of where in the world they were standing. They remained who they were—American, European, Asian, or African—but now Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh had entered their poetic consciousness. I began writing this book on the Shahnameh with their sense of wonder in me.