I recall the sense of joyous amazement in one of my students when he began to understand the enormity of the phrase “In the Name of God of Soul and Wisdom” with which Ferdowsi begins his Shahnameh. What does the word Jan (Soul) mean, he wondered, and what does Ferdowsi mean when he says Kherad (Reason) in eleventh-century Khorasan? I remember the sense of joy in another student when she came to read of the heroism of the female warrior Gordafarid in her battle with Sohrab. How could that be, she asked with excitement—that changes everything! I have an active memory of a Mexican student who wrote an utterly wonderful essay on the politics of enmity and friendship in the Shahnameh. I remember an African-American student who wanted to jump-cut on every passage in the Shahnameh in which we have color codifications of power. I had a Native American student once whose reading of the Persian epic she constantly compared with stories she had heard from her grandmother. Ferdowsi’s Book of Kings has found a home in North America on my university campus. I write this book on the Shahnameh conscious of that renewed awareness in a land far from its poet’s imagination.
A NEW STORY OF AN OLD BOOK
How are we to tell the story of Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh today in a manner that is true to its historic significance and yet speaks to vastly altering realities of a contemporary learned reader. This is an old book but full of wondrous stories, and their eternal truths continue to resonate with the inner core of our humanity, and may even give it renewed meaning and significance. Ferdowsi and his Shahnameh have been subjects of the most vigorous contemporary scholarship and the centerpiece of a vast body of visual and performing arts. The Persian epic is like a river, now quiet, now thunderous, upon which people have sailed in different vessels of differing speeds. I intend to write my book in a very simple and widely accessible prose for colleagues, students, and other educated readers alike, inviting them to enter this amazing book and find their own whereabouts in the bosom of its wonders. To facilitate the widest possible reach of my book I intend to follow a simple progression of chapters in a straightforward roadmap. The complicated emotions and deeply dramatic events will do the trick themselves.
In chapter 1, “The Persian Epic,” I offer a genealogy of the Persian epic, introduce the whole genre of hamaseh sura’i and its pre-Islamic origin until we get to the eleventh century and the writing of Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, and then carry the history forward to what happens even after this landmark epic was composed. The Shahnameh of Ferdowsi, composed single-handedly by the poet, is based on both written and oral sources available to the poet at the time of his composition. The now-lost prose Shahnameh to which Ferdowsi had access was based on the Pahlavi (Middle Persian) source of the Khvatay-namak (Book of Lords), the early prototype of Ferdowsi’s opus. Before Ferdowsi began the composition of his version, another Persian poet, Abu Mansur Muhammad ibn Ahmad Daqiqi Tusi (ca. 942–980), had begun rendering it into a poetic narrative but was murdered before he could finish his book, a clear indication that Ferdowsi was not the first or the last but certainly the best poet to turn his attention to the Persian epic. Ferdowsi had access to this early attempt at versification of the Persian epic and with due acknowledgment incorporated those verses into his Shahnameh. In this chapter I give a detailed account of the social and intellectual context of this period in which Ferdowsi composed his epic, with equal attention to its mythic, heroic, and historical components.
In chapter 2, “Ferdowsi the Poet,” I provide a biography of Ferdowsi and describe the historical context in which he set upon himself the monumental task of giving the Persian epic its final and most enduring form. At the center of this epic undertaking is the steadfast and singular determination of a young poet from a modest background committed to the truth and power of an architectonic narrative that resurrects the forgotten myths, the neglected heroes, and the scattered histories of a people, made a people precisely by the accumulated drama of these stories. The landed gentry, or the Dehghan, from which background Ferdowsi emerged, dated its origin back to the last pre-Islamic Iranian dynasty of the Sassanids and tucked away in the Khorasan region, which was known for its learned families’ penchant for ancient Iranian mythologies, heroic narratives, and histories. Times were now out of joint. A massive Arab invasion had dismantled an ancient order of things. The power, eloquence, and beauty of the Arabic language were intertwined with the divine message of the Muslim Holy Book, the Qur’an. A new culture and a monumental civilization were dawning and Iranians as millions of other Muslims were integral to it. Iranians had abandoned their ancient Zoroastrian faith and were converting to Islam. Here in this context, it was the power of Ferdowsi’s imaginative gift as a poet that retrieved forgotten stories and gave them a beautiful twist and an enduring significance. Ferdowsi did not just preserve the Persian language with this epic undertaking. He in effect crafted that language and made it possible. Who was he, what animated his urge to write the Shahnameh, what were the political and social circumstances of his rise as an epic poet, who else before him had tried to do the same but failed? These and many other related questions will place the writing of the Shahnameh in its historic context and reveal the manner in which the Persian language developed as a marker of ethnicity (ethnos; nezhad) to a marker of poetic eloquence (logos; sokhan), preparing for the future emergence of the language as a marker of ethical conduct (ethos; hanjar).
In chapter 3, “The Book of Kings,” I break down the Shahnameh into its three main components (the mythical, heroic, and historical) and then discuss its most famous and powerful stories, such as Zahhak the Tyrant, Rostam and Sohrab, Seyavash and Sudabeh, Bizhan and Manizheh, Rostam and Esfandiar, and offer the central significance of each story. My intention in this chapter is to provide a critical inroad into how to read these stories, so that when contemporary readers pick up a story of the Shahnameh to read they will know what themes, clues, ideas, and characters they should look for and how to understand them. The most exciting and rewarding parts of the Shahnameh are its first two parts, its mythical and heroic components, full of amazing stories: how the world was first created, who invented writing and why, how civilization began and social classes were formed. We have stories of just kings who lose their divine gift of grace and become tyrants, tyrant conquerors who grow serpents on their shoulders, albino sons abandoned to the wilderness by their parents to be raised by wild but civilizing birds, heroes born via “C-section” because they were too enormous for natural birth. Fathers deny their sons their kingdom, as other fathers inadvertently kill their own sons, while young stepmothers covet their handsome stepsons. There is an endless succession of exquisite stories, extraordinary deeds, amazing friendships, deadly rivalries, exemplary chivalries, and nasty treacheries. I wish to tell these stories in a manner that will make my own book an exciting read, a taste that will send a new generation of readers to the Persian epic itself but with a set of alerted receptive antennae, sharpened consciousness, informed and critical awareness. I wish to alert my readers to the question of time and narrative: what happens when mythic, heroic, and historical times are woven seamlessly together?
In chapter 4, “Epics and Empires,” I trace the history of the Shahnameh in its immediate Samanids (819–999) and Ghaznavid (977–1186) and all the subsequent empires up to and including the Mughals (1526–1857), the Safavids (1501–1736), and the Ottomans (1299–1923) in which the Persian epic was identically important. Even before these almost simultaneous Muslim empires, the Shahnameh was centrally significant during the Seljuqid (1037–1194), Mongol (1206–1368), and Timurid (1370–1507) Empires, judged by the many illustrated manuscripts of the epic from these periods, it offered political legitimacy to these Persianate empires. Here I explore the link between the commissioning of illustrated manuscripts in the royal atelier of these courts and the evident legitimacy the gesture toward the Shahnameh offered them. What would such a central role of the Persian epic in successive empires tell us about the link between epics and empires, when at the most triumphant point of their ascendency
these dynasties are drawn toward the Shahnameh? I also tell the fascinating story of the Shah Tahmasp (aka Houghton) Shahnameh that was produced during the Safavid period and then given as a gift to the Ottoman sultan Selim II (r. 1566–1574) and eventually reached the American collector Arthur Houghton Jr., who gave Harvard its Houghton Library and who also presided as chairman of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the New York Philharmonic. Houghton tore this Shah Tahmasp Shahnameh to pieces and sold each folio for millions of dollars, although fortunately it was carefully studied and published in two large-scale facsimiles in a limited and expensive edition by the distinguished Harvard curator Cary Welch and Martin B. Dickson of Princeton before its destruction. More recently Sheila Canby painstakingly traced all the pages of that Shahnameh and published a complete copy of it in a handsome edition.
In chapter 5, “Empires Fall, Nations Rise,” I discuss the later history of the text and its political uses and abuses for nation-building projects in Iran and elsewhere in the Persianate world. Here I consider the history of the Shahnameh along two extended lines: its imperial origin and its postcolonial destination in the traumatic heat of nation building. When in 1934 the first Pahlavi monarch, Reza Shah (r. 1925–1941), launched a major millennial celebration of Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, the Persian epic was put to use for the founder of the newly established dynasty to overcome the revolutionary upheaval of the constitutional period (1906–1911), the collapse of the Qajar dynasty (1789–1925), and the chaos of the recently occupied Iran to seek to link his reign back to ancient Persian empires. How did the Shahnameh fare in this transition from empire building to nation building? The Persian epic was a product of an imperial age and not a text pertinent to a postcolonial nation-state. The transition was, however, inevitable, perhaps, given the genealogy of the epic and the manner in which it had been historically appropriated. The appropriation, however, was not entirely successful or one-sided; soon contemporary Persian poets and literati began appropriating the Shahnameh and its heroes for their own oppositional and militant purposes—and Ferdowsi and his Shahnameh were there to oblige. Heroes such as Kaveh the Blacksmith became proverbial to a new generation of the Iranian left appropriating his rebellion against an unjust king to their own political purposes. Poets like Mehdi Akhavan-e Sales and Seyavash Kasra’i, novelists like Simin Daneshvar and Sadegh Chubak, and scholars like Mehrdad Bahar and Shahrokh Meskoub soon emerged as leading public intellectuals appropriating the figures of the Shahnameh for their own progressive causes. But despite all these uses and abuses, the more enduring question to ask in this period is, how exactly did the encounter of the Persianate world from India to Iran with European colonialism affect the narrative cohesion of the Shahnameh from mythic to heroic to historical? It is upon that traumatic experience that we need to rethink the parameters of what it means today to place the Shahnameh in the domain of world literature.
In the conclusion, I bring all these chapters together through a discussion of the Shahnameh as integral to the idea of world literature, once it is liberated from its incurably Eurocentric provenance. Predicated on its historical and textual experiences, the Persian epic must today be placed in its contemporary worldly context with its worldly disposition reasserted and theorized. We have received this epic as the embodiment of successive worlds it has encountered and now remembers. Today the text encounters a different world, but it has never been placed inside this world to make it integral to a worldly literature, which idea remains central to my arguments in this book. How has the Shahnameh been used in its contemporary history? It has been used and abused for a variety of purposes, including postcolonial nation building by successive abusive states. It has been loved and admired by generations of Iranians claiming it all to themselves, and then it has even been maligned by leading poets like Ahmad Shamlou. People name their children after its heroes, use and abuse it for jingoistic purposes, claim it exclusively for themselves for nationalistic purposes, disregarding its transnational imperial pedigree. Artists make movies, authors write children’s stories, playwrights stage plays, and directors stage operas based on its stories. People adopt it into modernist poetry, as the leading Iranian poet Mehdi Akhavan-e Sales did. As they do all these things they have made it worldly to their particular anxieties, hopes, and aspirations. The learned scholars prepare critical editions of it and debate every single word of it in passionate debates. Competent bilingual literati translate it, filmmakers make films based on its stories, poets write new poetries, women’s rights’ activists renarrate its heroines, as court and popular painters have depicted its most heroic episodes and as naqqal (troubadour storytellers) narrate its stories. Critical thinkers like Shahrokh Meskoub and Mostafa Rahimi consider it for deeper occasions of reflections on its dramatic stories. All these engagements with the Shahnameh make it worldly to their immediate and palpable worlds. The Shahnameh is today inhabiting a vastly different world and occupies a prominent space in a transnational public sphere that includes Iranians and non-Iranians alike. That is what is worldly about the Persian epic. How would that fact score with the notion of “World Literature” as deliberated by leading literary scholars like David Damrosch, Emily Apter, or Gayatri Spivak considering the issue in various theoretical contexts? My conclusion is the occasion for me to bring home the notion that the Shahnameh is integral to a liberated and renewed conception of world literature that its rich and empowering history will enable us to redefine and reimagine.
ONE
THE PERSIAN EPIC
Konun razm-e Sohrab-o Rostam Sheno
Degar-ha Shanidasti inham sheno:
Yeki dastan ast por ab-e chashm,
Del-e nazok az Rostam ayad beh khashm.
Come now: Listen to the battle of Sohrab and Rostam
You have heard all the others: now come and hear this one too—
It’s a story full of tears and agony,
The sensitive heart will be angry with Rostam.
Call him Rostam. One fine morning in the prime of his fame and fortune the towering hero of Iran woke up from a restless night and having little or nothing to entertain and tickle his finicky fancies he felt gloomy and bored; with nothing particular to interest him in his immediate whereabouts he thought of taking his legendary horse Rakhsh for a ride and going hunting on the border of Iran and its eternal nemesis Turan to see what if anything fortune would bring him.1
Little did he know.
In the woods near Samangan, border citadel between Iran and Turan, he chanced upon a thick woods and a pack of zebras. He had a splendid time chasing and hunting a few of them. Then he took a whole mighty-looking zebra and skinned and skewered it, ate it, and fell fast asleep. A gang of Turanian soldiers were passing by and saw Rostam and his Rakhsh and decided to capture his noble steed. Rakhsh, true to his name, put up a splendid resistance and managed to kill two of the soldiers, but finally fell into their trap and was captured. They left Rostam there in slumber and stole his horse. Rostam woke up and realized his horse was gone. Furious, he walked toward Samangan, hoping to find his horse. The king of Samangan heard that Rostam was approaching his castle on foot. He rushed to welcome the legendary hero and wondered where his Rakhsh was. “Some bastards have stolen it,” Rostam said in anger, “and you better help me find it,” he further threatened the king. “No problem,” said the king of Samangan, “you come here inside the castle, rest and relax, and partake in our royal hospitality, and we will find your horse for you.” Rostam accepted the invitation, enjoyed the banquet in his honor, and went to his private quarters to rest and sleep. Just as he was about to fall asleep, the door to his chamber opens and a beautiful young princess and her chamber maid walk in, and the Persian hero and the beautiful princess make love. The young princess is Tahmineh, and from this one night of passion soon a valiant son will be born.
The following day bright and early the good news arrived that Rakhsh had been found. Rostam mounted his horse and said good-bye to Tahmineh, giving her an amulet to put onto the
hair of their child if she is a girl and around the arm if he is a son. Off Rostam went back to Iran to keep the world safe for the Iranian monarchy. Nine months later Tahmineh gave birth to a magnificent son she named Sohrab. Sohrab grew up to become a valiant young man and soon demanded from his young mother to know who his father was. “Your father is none other than the great Rostam,” Tahmineh told her son proudly. “Fine,” the young Sohrab said, “I’ll lead an army to Iran, find my father, defeat the bastard kings Key Kavous and Afrasiab together, the emperors of Iran and Turan, respectively, unify Iran and Turan, and put my father on the throne. With him as my father and me as his son, we will conquer the world.” With this pronouncement of Sohrab we are drawn deeply into the dynastic rivalries between Iranians and Turanians and the geopolitics of their regions.
So far so good: but why did Ferdowsi warn us at the very beginning that this would be a sad story? What has the old poet in mind?
SHALL WE CALL IT JUSTICE OR TYRANNY?
The story of Rostam and Sohrab is perhaps the most famous episode of the Shahnameh in and out of the Persian-speaking world. The English poet and cultural critic Matthew Arnold’s “Sohrab and Rustum” (1853) was widely read and admired in Victorian England. Loris Tjeknavorian and Uzeyir Hajibeyov turned it into an opera, one version in the original Persian the other in Azeri. Agha Hashar Kashmiri turned it into a play in Urdu. Rustom and Sohrab (1963) was an Indian Hindi-language film starring Prithviraj, Premnath, Suraiyya, and Mumtaz, and Benyamin Kimyagarov made yet another film based on Ferdowsi’s account in Tajikistan. In Iran and other Persian-speaking parts of the world, children are named after Rostam or Sohrab, parents read the story to their children, young adults study it in high school, wandering storytellers (naqqal) recite it in coffeehouses, dramatists stage it with powerful dramaturgical effect, while cultural critics publish learned books and critical psychoanalytic essays examining various aspects of it. I still remember the street corner in my hometown in southern Iran where as a small child I watched a naqqal tell us the story off his frightfully exiting illustrated canvas. Why this widespread appeal, whence this dramatic attraction, what is in this or any other Shahnameh story that has made them so widely popular with the learned and the uneducated alike?
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