The Shahnameh

by Hamid Dabashi

  The idea of the Shahnameh as the cornerstone of Vatan I propose here is decidedly predicated on a conception of “the nation” not as a racial category but as the site of a collective consciousness predicated on a shared memory accumulated over a sustained and renewed course of history. People are members of a nation not by virtue of any fictive claim to a singular race but by virtue of gathering around a public sphere (to which a renewed reading of the Shahnameh has been definitive) and there and then generating, sustaining, and accumulating a shared memory to which they continue to contribute through the thick and thin of their history. The idea of “the nation” based on a common race is as ludicrous as predicated on a single gender or a single class. Racialized ideas of the nation are therefore categorically masculinist, misogynist, colonial, and bourgeois in their origin, culture, and disposition. This notion of nation as a racialized category was in fact European in origin and colonial in its nomenclature. It was colonially imposed on other nations and readily appropriated by bourgeois nationalisms around the colonized world. Therefore, I make a categorical distinction between the colonially manufactured idea of racialized nationalism and the idea of anticolonial national consciousness predicated on shared anticolonial struggles of multiple communities within a postcolonial nation-state.6

  It is, moreover, crucial to keep in mind that when Ferdowsi or, after him, other poets like Asadi Tusi in Garshasp-nameh, or Farrokhi in his poetry refer to “Iran” in their poetry, this is to Iran as an empire and not as a nation in the sense I propose here. Up until the Safavid period in the sixteenth century still Iran is an imperial category in contradistinction to the Mughals to its east and the Ottomans to its west. The idea of “Iran” as a Vatan will not emerge until later during the anticolonial and antimonarchic struggles gathering momentum around the constitutional revolution of 1906–1911. This conception of Vatan as homeland is also not to be confused with any Islamic or Islamized idea of “nation” that stands for ummah and as such is a community of the faithful and not a community of shared national experiences, especially when Muslims were fighting against one another along class or sectarian divides. Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, therefore, must be seen as the textual evidence of connecting the fate of the Iranian and Persianate world from its postcolonial predicament back into the deepest recesses of mythic and historical memories.

  SOURCES OF THE PERSIAN EPIC

  What does it mean when we say the Shahnameh is the summation of time immemorial, rooted in mythic, heroic, and historical narratives few scarcely remember any longer except through and because of the Persian epic?

  It has taken generations of painstaking scholarship to piece together the textual evidence of the materials available to Ferdowsi and his generation before he put pen to paper and began composing his Shahnameh.7 Those materials were available to Ferdowsi during the thirty-odd years he spent composing the Persian epic until he finished it before his death. Some scholars believe these materials were of two different provenances: (1) the literary sources available at the royal courts and to their Zoroastrian priesthood or literary circles and scribes and (2) oral traditions available to urban and rural storytellers (known as gosan, or “minstrels”).8 But others, with overwhelming evidence, are absolutely convinced that Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh is based entirely on written sources, more specifically on the prose Shahnameh written by Abu Mansur.9 Either way, what is incontrovertible is the fact that Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh is the poetic summation of an epic consciousness that predates him by centuries.

  Among the pre-Islamic sources of Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, rooting it in a much earlier history, is Ayadgar-e Zareran (Memorial of Zarir), the only surviving example of ancient Iranian epic poetry in the Pahlavi language. It is the story of Zarir, brother to Wishtasp, who has converted to Zoroastrianism and whose authority for precisely that reason is challenged by a rival warlord, Arjasp. In the battle Zarir fights heroically but is killed, soon to be revenged and mourned by his son Bastwar. Some scholars of the period consider Memorial of Zarir to be “a heroic poem, a Sasanian adaptation of an Arsacid original.… The tale became part of the materials amassed by Persian priests for the Sasanian royal chronicle, the Khvatay-namak [Book of lords]; and partly on the basis of that work, partly perhaps from a still living oral tradition in north-eastern Iran, Daqiqi turned it into rhymed verse in the tenth century A.D. His poem was incorporated by Ferdowsi in his Shahnameh.”10 Other scholars contest this linkage.

  Among other sources at the deep roots of the Shahnameh is Kar-Namag-e Ardashir-e Pabagan, a Pahlavi prose narrative describing the life of the Sassanid king Ardashir I (180–242) and his rise to power and the establishment of the Sassanid dynasty. The sole existing manuscript of this text dates back to 1322 in Gujarat. Scholars of this text believe that “there can be no doubt that the contents of the text draw from more ancient Iranian lore, since some traits of Ardašīr’s life as narrated in this work reflect themes known from the legend of Cyrus the Great. Moreover, in all probability a telling of the life of the founder of the Sasanian dynasty close to what is found in the Kār-nāmag existed at least as early as late Sasanian times.”11 The historical roots of these emperors, monarchs, their dynasties, and conquests give additional historical significance to the heroic and mythic dimensions of the Persian epic. What is crucial is the manner in which these components of diverse sources assume unified, consistent, and dramatic dimensions in Ferdowsi’s rendition, no doubt in part because of their common “heroic pattern.”

  Another major pre-Islamic source that is at the root of Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh was Khvatay-namak, a Sassanid imperial history, though there is no indication that Ferdowsi himself knew Pahlavi. The writing of this book, which except for references to it in Arabic and Persian sources of the later periods now no longer exists, was ordered by the mighty Sassanid emperor Khosrow I (aka Anushirvan the Just, r. 531–579) in order “to learn statesmanship better.”12 In this book, its royal compilers “described the Iranian past, from the creation and the appearance of the first man, in four dynastic periods.” The existing accounts of this book indicate how it had influenced the writing of the Shahnameh: “The mythical figures of the Indo-Iranian antiquity were represented as ‘the first kings,’ the Pišdāds … and a coherent historical narrative (derived from various traditions and anachronistic historiography) was concocted for them. They were described as establishers of political institutions, promoters of urban and agricultural developments, inventors of skills and crafts, originators of laws and social classes, and defenders of Iranian people.”13 Based on such bodies of historical speculations, some scholars now believe “by the end of the 6th century, a national history of Iran existed in the royal archive at Ctesiphon.”14 The text of Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh as we read it today is perhaps reminiscent of all these bygone ages and yet transcends them all by virtue of its unsurpassed dramaturgical power.

  What can we conclude about the nature and function of Iranian historiography at the time Ferdowsi composed the Shahnameh? Based on these sources, scholars of the period have concluded that

  Iranian historiography was moralistic, providential, apocalyptic, rather particularistic, and utilitarian … which assigned man a significant place in the universe by making him a partner with the Creator Ahura Mazda in the cosmic fight against Ahriman and his emissaries. Man’s actions were thus part of a cosmic plan, hence memorable. This memory was to serve future generations as a guide, a device for maintaining and promoting national and moral ideals of the state.… God had created man as His active partner for bringing about, within a limited time, the final annihilation of evil, when a Savior would restore the cosmic order on earth. The course of history exhibited a series of conflicts between the forces of good, usually Iranians, and the destructive powers, usually associated with non-Iranians … thus historiographer, far from being an impartial investigator of facts, was an upholder and promoter of the social, political, and moral values cherished by the Sasanian élite.15

  Although much of this descripti
on can equally apply to Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, the text itself has historically assumed a poetic significance and a dramatic force that place it in a unique literary position above and beyond such historiographical description. The Shahnameh will ultimately have to be considered as a poetic text sui generis, though solidly rooted in such normative historiographical foregrounding.

  This history brings us to a number of previous Shahnamehs composed just before Ferdowsi’s. One is a composition by Abu al-Moayyad Balkhi, a Samanid poet who was evidently deeply interested in ancient history.16 Abu Ali Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Balkhi is the next poet who had composed a detailed Shahnameh just before Ferdowsi did.17 Finally, there is a prose Shahnameh that was compiled by the order of Abu Mansur Muhammad ibn Abd al-Razzaq, a prominent aristocrat from the famed Dehqan class of the landed gentry in Tus.18 Although the actual text of this prose Shahnameh is now lost, its introduction has survived. Ferdowsi in his own Shahnameh refers to this book. Like a towering cypress tree rising from fertile ground, Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh remains a landmark sign of an entire political and literary history that had anticipated it.

  CANONIZATION OF FERDOWSI’S SHAHNAMEH

  Both contemporary with Ferdowsi and long after him epic poetry continued to attract many gifted poets. This includes books like Garshasp-nameh (1063) of Asadi Tusi, Bahman-nameh (126), attributed to Hakim Iranshah ibn Abi al-Khayr, or, in the same tradition, also Faramarz-nameh, Kushnameh, Banu Goshasp-nameh, Borzu-nameh, Shahryar-nameh, Bizhan-nameh, Lohrasp-nameh, Sawsan-nameh.19 Other poets attended to the historical components of the Shahnameh, such as Iskandar-nameh, Shahanshah-nameh, Zafar-nameh, Bahman-nameh. An equally important genre of religious epics attending to Muslim saints and heroes soon joined this rank, among them Khavaran-nameh, Sahebqiran-nameh, Mokhtar-nameh.20

  What is particularly important about these minor and tangential genres of the Shahnameh is the manner in which in effect they have paradoxically helped centralize and canonize Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh. Based on the singular and overriding evidence of successive royal patronage of the writing of the lavishly illustrated copies of the Shahnameh and its systematic and consistent canonization internal to the Persianate world from the Mughal to and through the Safavid to the Ottoman Empires in the most recent stages we can argue that Ferdowsi’s epic has had two basic functions, one iconic and the other substantive. Iconically it has been chief among the paraphernalia of legitimacy, while substantively it has offered the royal dynasties with a sustained body of stories as admonitory lessons in kingship.21 Through such functions the Shahnameh has sustained its systemic course of self-canonizing itself throughout the ages.

  The canonization of Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh extends from the royal court and its illustrated manuscripts to court and noncourt poets and literati who used and referred to it as a model of eloquence, or else prepared selections from it, or tried to imitate it, or even more extensively expanded upon one of its stories and developed it in ever more florid directions. Later in Iranian history, the Shahnameh exits the royal courts and enters what we can now call the public domain, the public sphere, and through the popular storytelling practices of the naqqal in coffeehouses and other public spaces the Persian epic reaches a much wider audience and readership. These naqqal did for the Shahnameh what the Muslim (Shi’i) clerical order did for the Qur’an, Shi’i saints popularizing it far beyond the limited court audiences or the madrassa system. A cosmic order of the universe was contingent on these stories that was made subterranean to the Persian-speaking world that extended from the Indian subcontinent through Central Asia and Iran all the way to Asia Minor.

  EPICS AND EMPIRES

  In what way can we talk about the Shahnameh as an epic? The Persian and Arabic term we ordinarily use for “epic” is hamaseh, and epic poetry becomes hamaseh-sura’i. Another bifurcation in Persian poetic traditions divides court-related poetry into razm (battle) and bazm (banquet), with romance corresponding to bazm and epic to razm. The simplest frame of reference is to see the Shahnameh as an epic in the tradition of Hamaseh-sura’i and razm in the imperial contexts of its production and canonization. Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh was produced in an imperial courtly context, and until much later it continued its survival as a court-related document. It certainly has a gradual and eventual transition into a colonial and postcolonial nation-building context in the aftermath of the collapse of the last three Muslim empires of the Mughals, the Safavids, and the Ottomans. But from its conception during the Samanid and Ghaznavid dynasties, predicated on its written and oral sources in the pre-Islamic imperial contexts going back from the Sassanids to the Achaemenids, both the genre of writing the Shahnameh and Ferdowsi’s specific Shahnameh are imperial products, and as such warrant the designation of “epic” in a very generic sense of the term. If so, if we consider Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh in the more universal context of epic poetry, the next question is, how does it fare in comparison with other epic traditions, extending from the Indian texts of the Ramayana and Mahabharata to European genres of epic poetry from Homer’s Iliad (ca. 1194–1184 B.C.E.) to Virgil’s Aeneid (29–19 B.C.E.) and beyond?

  In the introduction I briefly referred to David Quint’s Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton (1993) by way of an example of how the active theorization of the genre of epic in its European context effectively alienates an epic like the Shahnameh from itself by taking the specific world in which the Greek or Roman epics are produced as the universal world in which those epics are naturalized. The study of the Shahnameh is thereafter delegated to the realm of Orientalist specialization, and thus that alienation is epistemically consolidated. To reverse and alter that premise I wish to play Ferdowsi’s Book of Kings against the grain of Quint’s theorization of epic to see how the two sides of the theoretical disequilibrium fare in the interface. My purpose here is not to dismiss Quint as irrelevant to the Shahnameh but to mark the boundaries of the literary provinces within which Eurocentric theorization operates. The task at hand is not to mark anyone’s provincialism but to map out the multiple worlds outside the blindfolded geography of “World Literature.”

  In his Epic and Empire, David Quint offers a thorough examination of the relationship between epic poetry and the political dynamics of empire building in Europe and the manner in which ancient Romans, for example, were inspired by Virgil’s Aeneid in pursuit of their imperialism.22 In Quint’s estimation there are basically two trajectories in epic poetry in their European domain: the triumphant epic of the winners and the defeatist epic of the losers. As early as Homer’s Iliad (triumphalist, linear, teleological, and deterministic) and Odyssey (contemplative, redemptive, repetitive, and circular) this dichotomy, he believes, is evident, but it later becomes narratively codified in Virgil’s Aeneid. The link between political context and epic poetry therefore leads Quint to a generic distinction between the Virgilian epic of conquest and empire building and what he terms the epic of the defeated. If the Aeneid, Luís de Camões’s Lusíadas, and Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata are the examples of the former, then Lucan’s Pharsalia, Ercilla’s Araucana, and d’Aubigné’s Les tragiques are examples of the latter. For the victorious epic, Quint detects a linear, teleological narrative and for the defeated an episodic and open-ended narrative.

  Quint proposes that this binary is essential for an understanding of the historical contexts of epics and their sustained political implications. In effect both the winners and the losers have their respective form of epic poetry, one beating its chest triumphantly, the other is lamenting in defeat. While in the first part of his book Quint traces the history of Virgil’s epic, in the second part he examines the more recent cases of Tasso and Milton. The epics of winners, he proposes, issue from the vantage point of the victors through a linear narrative, but the epics of losers narrate from the defeated perspective in an episodic and circular motion. While the former equates power with the power to tell its story, the latter doubts that cohesion, defies a linear teleology, questions power as reaso
nable, and negates the possibility of superimposing cohesion on an otherwise interrupted history. The ideologically charged confidence of the former is questioned by the fragmented fact of the latter. The former is triumphantly masculinist, unitary, and identitarian condemning the latter to be feminine, chaotic, and foreign.

  If we were to place Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh on this scale of epics as examined by David Quint and divided between the epic of winners and the epic of losers, where would it sit? Is the Shahnameh an epic of conquest or an epic of defeat? Actually neither of the two. It is simply astonishing how radically different the Shahnameh is from both sides of this Manichaean binary Quint detects in European epics. Quint’s theorization is entirely tangential to Ferdowsi’s epic, and yet precisely for that reason quite helpful in guiding us to make a few comparative observations. Quint’s persuasive and elegant theorization is partially helpful in guiding us to ask similar but decidedly different questions. Ferdowsi wrote his Shahnameh not ex nihilo but in fact based on a consistently imperial pedigree of the Iranian dynastic heritage, from time immemorial down to the collapse of the Sassanid Empire. So the dominant dialectic of his epic is one of loyalty to his sources and creativity with his dramatization. This makes of his epic a judiciously balanced temperament. Moreover, the Sassanid Empire, from which much of the written and oral foregrounding of the Shahnameh emerges, was in fact the prototype of all other triumphant empires that came after it, whether Arab, Persian, Indian, or Ottoman, and in fact arguably even into European empires. Though the Sassanids were defeated by the invading Muslim armies, once Muslims became the leaders of a new empire of their own they had nowhere to turn for a model of how to run a vast territory but to the Sassanid model for their own imperial administration. The Barmecides (Barmakids)—an influential Iranian family, originally Buddhist, who became highly powerful under the Abbasid dynasty—were a significant link between the Abbasids and their Sassanid predecessors, offering them generations of competent viziers to run their empire. Even the Byzantines were arguably modeled on the Persian prototype of the Achaemenids ever since the canonical significance of Xenophon’s Cyropaedia (370 B.C.E.), which was evidently a favorite of Alexander the Great’s and Julius Caesar’s and competed with Plato’s Republic for classical attention, a fact completely (and surprisingly) absent from Quint’s analysis of the relationship between epics and empires.