The Shahnameh

by Hamid Dabashi

  Before we turn to this or other stories of Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh we need to have a more detailed account of the imperial, social, and intellectual context of the period in which he composed his epic, with equal attention to its mythic, heroic, and historical components, as it has been usually divided. A narrative genealogy of Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh points to a long history of the Persian epic before and after that momentous text. That genealogy links the composition of the Shahnameh in the Islamic period to its pre-Islamic origins. There is a whole genre of hamaseh sura’i (epic poetry), with its pre-Islamic origins, that comes to full fruition in the writing of Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh. That genre has certain normative particularities and technical components, which Ferdowsi mastered and surpassed. As a landmark epic, the Shahnameh of Ferdowsi is based on existing sources available to him at the time of this composition. This fact both gives his epic narrative an aura of authenticity and predicates his poetic gift of uplifting the genre to unsurpassed levels. The written 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, Abu Mansur Muhammad ibn Ahmad Daqiqi Tusi (ca. 942–980) had begun his own poetic composition of a Shahnameh, but he met a tragic death before he had a chance to finish what he had started. Ferdowsi was not the first or the last poet to try his hand at the composition of the Shahnameh, but he was certainly the best to turn his attention to the Persian epic. He had access to this early attempt at versification of the epic and with due acknowledgment in fact incorporated those verses into his Shahnameh.

  With all its poetic majesty and literary elegance, Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh is the beneficiary of this long and enduring tradition of epic poetry. A genealogy of the Persian epic takes us back to the whole genre of Khvatay-namak before we get to the time of Ferdowsi and his original composition of the Shahnameh.2 Both the oral and the literary traditions of the epic continue apace way beyond Ferdowsi’s time and reach far into the colonial and postcolonial periods. As late as the early nineteenth century Fath Ali Khan Kashani “Saba” (ca. 1765–1822), the Qajar court poet, composed a Shahanshah-nameh on the model of Ferdowsi’s epic for the ruling monarch, Fath Ali Shah (r. 1797–1834). Ferdowsi tells us early in his introductory passages that before he began composing his Shahnameh, Daqiqi had started doing so but left it unfinished at the time of his early and tragic death. The fact that Ferdowsi incorporates this earlier version of the epic composition into his Shahnameh shows that the writing of the Persian epic was something dominant among the court poets of the time, with an obvious rivalry among them to outshine one another. The sustained history of writing the Shahnameh from before the time of Ferdowsi, through his time, and then way beyond his age reveals a continuous spectrum of variation on the theme of elaborating on the Persian epic that holds a sweeping vista of historical consciousness way beyond any pre-Islamic, Islamic, colonial, or postcolonial periods.

  What was the social and intellectual context of the period in which Ferdowsi composed his epic? Who commissioned it and why? How did it survive the test of time?

  THE IMPERIAL CONTEXT

  Ferdowsi composed his Shahnameh around the year 1000 in the Christian calendar in the eastern part of the Muslim empire, at which time the Iranian world was quite ancient in its memorial remembrances of itself—in both the written and oral consciousness of its distant and recent history, successive dynasties, and imperial conquests. The Arab conquest of Iran occurred in the mid-seventh century, with the decisive battle of Qadisiyyah in 636 marking the definitive defeat of the Sassanid Empire (224–651), which had ruled over the Iranian plateau and confronted the Byzantine Empire (ca. 330–1453) to the east. But the historical memory of Ferdowsi and his generation of court poets and literati went much deeper than the Sassanid period and reached deep into what later historians have identified as the Arsacid Empire (the Persian Ashkanian, 250 B.C.E.–226 C.E.), the Seleucid Empire (312–63 B.C.E.), and all the way back to the Achaemenids (550–330 B.C.E.). From these bygone empires, two bodies of literature, one Avestan and the other Pahlavi, had come down to Ferdowsi and his generation, and all of which inform the deep historical foregrounding of his Shahnameh as both a historical and a poetic document.

  This particular chronology of successive empires has been established and consolidated based on archaeological, numismatic, and written sources by later scholarship. But a mythic, heroic, and historical fusion of it was available to Ferdowsi and his contemporaries as the narrative foregrounding of the writing of the Shahnameh. What we know now is the chronological order of successive empires, from the Achaemenids to their defeat by Alexander the Great in 331 B.C.E., to the establishment of the Seleucids by his generals, followed by the Arsacids, and then the rise of the Sassanids, before their collapse under the force of the Arab conquest of Iran in the mid-seventh century. That imperial history was integral to Ferdowsi’s epic consciousness when he sat down to write his Shahnameh. He was, to be more exact, conscious of this history, but in his epic he transcended it in decidedly poetic terms, of which fact I speak in more detail throughout this book.

  The sudden shock of the Arab conquest initially under the Four Rightly Guided Caliphs (632–650) extended into the Umayyad dynasty (656–750) and eventually led to the formation of the Abbasid Empire (750–1258). On the easternmost frontiers of the Muslim lands, the eventual rise of the Saffarids, the Samanids, and the Ghaznavids carved out a major territorial domain for the rise and eventual ascendency of a Persianate world at once Iranian in its consciousness and yet Muslim in its cultural affinities. The Persian language as we know it now, achieving a powerful linguistic register for new modes, manners, and spectrums of knowledge production, took shape at this period. This is the historical domain of the birth and upbringing of Ferdowsi and the writing of his Shahnameh.

  An even fuller recognition of this world requires the crucial understanding that Islam as a mighty metaphysical force now had an expansive claim on the emerging imperial territories of both Arab and Persian domains. A new revelation had descended upon the Arabs, and their Prophet rose from the heart of Arabia to give them cause and momentum for a vastly expansive claim on the fate of humanity. The Prophet of Islam, Muhammad, was born in 570 and died in 632, and in the course of the last two decades of his life he brought his people, and through them humanity at large, a solid claim on being purposefully in this world through a divinely ordained message. He died having consolidated his power over Arabia and bequeathed to his followers a Divine Revelation called the Qur’an they believed to be the salvation of the earth. Soon after his death Muslims began spreading his message with increasing knowledge and a corresponding and unrelenting power. The two mighty empires of the Sassanids and the Byzantines began to crumble under the feet of small but effective Muslim armies. In the battle of Qadisiyyah and that of Nahavand, known to Muslims as Fath al-Futuh (The Victory above All Others, 642), the Sassanids yielded to the Arab generals. The Umayyads rose to power, and soon they yielded to the Abbasids, who laid an expansive claim on a vast imperial territory. But soon the Saffarids under Ya’qub Layth Saffari rose in revolt against their Arab conquerors and founded the Saffarid dynasty (861–1003), and thus began a succession of Iranian or Persianate dynasties in the east, where the Persian language and court poetry now began to have royal patronage. As these developments were happening in the battle of swords, in the field of ideas emerged the Shu’ubiyyah movement, a pervasive cosmopolitan intellectual movement that turned Baghdad of the Abbasid Caliphate into a major urban site of revolt against retrograde Arab tribalism, replacing it with an embracing literary consciousness that eventually elevated the Arabic and Persian languages into the two towering lingua franca of an entire civilization.

  By now the expanded Muslim empire had created its own contradictions in both political and social terms. The rise of the Abbasids in the middle of the eighth century was concomitant with two contradictory consequences: wealth and power at the top, m
isery and revolt at the bottom. Revolts against the central caliphate assumed many forms: sectarian outbreaks like the Shi’ites and Kharijites within Islam, theological disputations like the Mu’tazilites and Ash’arites in its doctrinal foundations, non-Islamist revolts by the impoverished peasantry and the urban poor like the proto-Zoroastrian uprisings in eastern Iranian domains, urban intellectual movements like the Shu’ubiyyah against tribal Arabism of the Umayyads, and dynastic revolts like the Saffarids against the Abbasids. While Islamic scholasticism was consolidating itself in the form of juridical schools and theological and philosophical divergences, a corresponding literary humanism (adab) emerged in conjunction with the increased cosmopolitanism of the Abbasid period in Arab and Persian domains.

  By the time Ferdowsi began writing his Shahnameh in the last quarter of the tenth century, Persian literary humanism and Persian poetry had reached their classical height. Pahlavi sources were either preserved or translated into Persian. A creative adaptation of the Arabic alphabet had liberated the Persian language from its archaic entrapments within the limited courtly readership in the Sassanid period. Soon the rise of Persianate dynasties like the Saffarids and Samanids began to occasion the rise of Persian court poets like Hanzaleh Badghisi and Abu Salik Gorkani, and above them all Rudaki (ca. 858–941) and Daghighi (ca. 935–980), whose work on the Shahnameh Ferdowsi knew and whose initial compositions he borrowed and incorporated into his composition of the Shahnameh. Equally developed by this time was a robust Persian prose—among its earliest texts were the Persian translations of the History of al-Tabari, known as Tarikh Bal’ami, a Persian translation of his Quranic commentary, the composition of the Hedayat al-Mutu’allemin on medicine, as well as Hudud al-Alam on geography, and a prose introduction to the Shahnameh that is also evidenced in Ferdowsi’s composition.

  The Shahnameh emerged on this fertile ground and endured all subsequent historical vicissitudes, and its numerous extant manuscripts are the clearest indication that it commanded the towering attention of dynasties and empires to the east and west of Muslim lands. Of hundreds of existing copies of the Persian epic, Djalal Khaleghi-Motlagh, the eminent Shahnameh scholar of our time, has identified about four dozen copies as most noteworthy in preparation of his and his colleagues’ critical edition of the book.3 The oldest manuscripts of the Shahnameh he identifies are from the thirteenth century, from which we have two copies in Florence (1217) and London (1276). From the fourteenth century are nine copies now in libraries in Istanbul (1330, 1371), Leningrad (1333), Dublin (1340, another undated), Cairo (1341, 1394, a third undated), and Mumbai (undated). From the fifteenth century thirty-four copies are scattered in libraries in Istanbul (1400, 1464, 1482, 1486, 1490, 1494, two dated 1495, two dated 1496, 1497, 1498, and two dated only fifteenth century), Leiden (1437), London (1438, 1486), Cambridge (1438, another dated only fifteenth century), Paris (1438, 1444, 1490), the Vatican (1444), Leningrad (1445, another dated only fifteenth century), Oxford (1448, 1494), Bengal (1478), Vienna (1478), Dublin (two dated 1480), Berlin (1489), Madrid (1496), and Munich (1497). The meandering map of these manuscripts reveals the long and labyrinthine history of the Shahnameh through the imperial and colonial ages when these copies were written and where they are now held. The genealogy of these manuscripts and the critical editions Russian, European, Indian, and Iranian scholars have prepared on the base of their evidence and made available to a global readership links our generation of readers of the Shahnameh to those of time immemorial. When today we pick up a copy of the Shahnameh and start reading it, every word, every stanza, and every story of it resonates with the tonal chord of a history so distant, so remote, so archaic that time and space are humbled in its presence.

  These extant Shahnameh manuscripts point to the favorable historical circumstances of its enduring reception, celebration, and canonization. We must imagine the time when Muslim conquerors had the Qur’an and the words of their Prophet as their unifying force and abiding convictions, and when Iranian and Persianate dynasties saw in the Shahnameh narratives the modus operandi of their own imperial legitimacy. But the Shahnameh spoke of both thriving nations and crumbling empires, of expansive myth and tragic history, of noble heroes and corrupt kings. Its narrative was and remained dialogical; no monarchy or empire could claim one side without the other. The deep-rooted ancient origins of the Shahnameh stories spoke of an alternative metaphysics of historical continuity and political leadership.4 The mythic dimensions of Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh are a clear indication of its origin in time immemorial, pointing to an Indo-Iranian universe rooted in both Vedic and Avestan sources. Names of kings like Houshang, Jamshid, Zahhak, and Fereydun all appear in the Yashts parts of the Zoroastrian sacred text Avesta, and they eventually reach the Sassanid Pahlavi sources, from which they trickle down to the Shahnameh. The Achaemenid emperor Cyrus the Great, for example, has occasionally been identified with Key Khosrow in the Shahnameh.

  As an imperial epic narrative composed in the Motaghareb metric system of classical Persian prosody, Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh was composed at a time when panegyric poetry was paramount at both the Samanid and the Ghaznavid courts. Later lyrical and meditative forms of poetry became integral to Persian poetic varieties and were competing for courtly readership. While epic poetry was known to Ferdowsi’s generation, his lifelong achievement became the singular achievement of the genre. While composing his Shahnameh, Ferdowsi was fully conscious of the historical roots of his epic, and throughout his book he exudes a sense of obsessive responsibility to finish a task he had set for himself. The transition from the Samanids to the Ghaznavids was a crucial historical juncture when Ferdowsi’s epic performed a crucial narrative task for and at the royal court of his Persianate patrons. Most of the stories Ferdowsi had gathered and composed in his Shahnameh were widely known, but his singular composition dovetailed with the imperial age of its composition. He does not invent these stories. Based on the Shahnameh of Abu Mansuri at his immediate disposal, he elaborates and dramatizes them. But there is a sense of historical urgency about his composition of the Shahnameh.

  As the Iranian, Persianate, and Islamic worlds go through successive imperial and dynastic gestations—from the Samanids to the Ghaznavids, the Seljuqids, the Mongols, the Timurdis, the Mughals, the Safavids, and the Ottomans—whatever other sources of the Shahnameh may have existed increasingly fade from collective memories. Throughout these millennia and generations Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh provides a singularly cohesive and coherent narrative to the Persianate world and a sense of historical self-consciousness of bygone ages and a pride of place. From the time of its composition to this day Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh has been an available source of consistent historical awareness and confidence initially within the royal court circles but increasingly reaching out to a wider public readership, until we get into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the exponential expansion of a public sphere that is identified as vatan (homeland).

  As I have argued in detail in my Persophilia, the interest on the part of European bourgeois intellectuals, scholars, and literati in the Shahnameh in the course of the nineteenth century was instrumental in its renewed canonization at the crucial periods leading to the constitutional revolution of 1906–1911.5 The Shahnameh in other words becomes recanonized in the European public sphere and for a variety of social and political reasons before the colonial extensions of that imperial public sphere reached Iran or elsewhere and brought back the Persian epic to Iranians as a people, a nation now forming a postcolonial nation-state beyond its dynastic histories, imperial pedigrees, and royal courts. At this stage the Shahnameh does not just receive its widest-ever readership in history but also in fact becomes definitive to the formation of the public sphere Iranians now occupied and called Vatan. Here I make a crucial distinction between the significance of the Shahnameh in the formative organicity of the idea of national sovereignty rooted in a robust public sphere (on the one hand) and the uses and abuses to which it has been put aggressively for sta
te legitimacy (on the other). The very idea of Vatan, which I have proposed as the functional equivalent of public sphere, is in fact predicated mostly on the poetic antecedent of Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, despite the fact that in the epic itself the word Vatan does not appear, but words like Keshvar, Iran-zamin, or Mihan do. Vatan as a site of the homeland is an almost entirely recent vintage rooted in the tumultuous events of the constitutional period of 1906–1911. Upon this fertile ground, the recanonization of the Shahnameh in the bourgeois public sphere in Europe returns to Iran with renewed synergy. In this final phase, the Shahnameh is still very much read in an imperial context, but this imperium is decidedly European and no longer Iranian, Persianate, or Islamic in its character and disposition. From the transnational public sphere contingent on European empires emerges a renewed reading of the Persian epic that now extends into Iran and the Persianate world at large, with the full paradoxical synergy of an epic that at once sustains and dismantles any and all empires that come close to it. This central textual paradox of the Shahnameh will remain definitive to its contextual history. As its royal form, ceremonious decorum, manuscript commissions, and priceless illustrations and therefore symbolic aura were employed to give emblematic legitimacy to dynasties that came close to celebrating it, its actual stories, its unrelenting dramas of the rise and fall of empires, of megalomaniac monarchs and their murderous plots against their own children, and other courtly intrigues dismantled them. The Shahnameh is not the story of just one empire. It is a miasmatic longue durée account of multiple empires, their rise and fall, arrogance and eventual demise. It embraces any single dynasty that comes close to it just to humble and historicize it.