THE PEN THAT WRITES
Who is the author of all such fabulous tales and legends we read in the Shahnameh? What do we know about him, and what drove him to narrate the stories of the Shahnameh in a compelling poetic composition? Today when we say the Shahnameh we mean Ferdowsi, and when we say Ferdowsi we mean the Shahnameh. The poet and his poem have become intertwined. He came to this world to write that epic, and the legacy of that epic from time immemorial was waiting for him to immortalize.
We can think of Ferdowsi’s biography, his poetic person, his authorial persona, and social significance and character in multiple ways. One of course is as the man who was born around the year 940 on the Christian calendar in Tus, in the northeastern region of contemporary Iran, and grew up to become a magnificent poet and, after he completed his magnum opus the Shahnameh, died in the year 1025 according to the same calendar. Those are certainly the most basic facts about his life that we can know given the scarcity of sources. But there are other, equally if not even more important ways in which we need to have an understanding of his life and character. A literary history of the rise of Persian poets as definitive to the courtly culture predates the emergence of Ferdowsi and embraces him within its social context. The social function of poets in those bygone cultures foregrounds the writing of the Shahnameh. The actual biography of Ferdowsi must therefore be located in this context. But most important, we need to come to grips with his poetic voice, with the manner in which he speaks in his poetic persona when introducing a story, beyond the voice of the omniscient narrator he assumes when telling those stories. In such occasions, Ferdowsi has a biographical voice, a consciously self-referential voice, a meditative voice, a voice of poetically plotting his stories, a voice of moral meditation. All these voices constitute the person and the persona we today call Ferdowsi.
When we put all these voices together what emerges is a polyvocal poet as a participant observer in his real and imaginative world, in the world he has inherited and his masterpiece embodies, animating the moral imagination that occupies and informs that world. The world into which Ferdowsi was born and raised was worldly, meaning fully aware and conscious of itself, materially robust with its own place in an already rich history. That world is violently deworlded, robbed of its self-consciousness when the readers of Ferdowsi are today divided between “the natives” and the “nonnatives,” between a fictive “Western reader” and the rest of the world that might come to read the Shahnameh.1 Thus deworlding the world of the Shahnameh, depriving it of its innate worldliness, bars it from becoming worldly in a new world by making it falsely Eurocentric. The task of positing the Shahnameh as a literary work in world literature must first and foremost begin by de-Europeanizing its reception, restoring to it its own world and other worlds it can occupy. An English or French translation of the Shahnameh is not for “the Western reader” only, whoever that fictive creature might be. It is for the world at large, the world the English and French languages have conquered and subjected to their cultural hegemony. Those languages have been confiscated and repossessed by people from India to Africa. Once we thus distort the Shahnameh, rob it of its universe, it no longer matters what world the Shahnameh has occupied, it no longer matters what world the Shahnameh can occupy today. What matters is what “the Western reader,” a figment of a colonial imagination, has made of the Shahnameh. Equally damaging to the full respect and recognition for the world the Shahnameh embodies are the multiple voices its author speaks, the worlds those voices had occupied, and the future worlds it has continued to engender and occupy. Entirely subversive of these worlds is the false binary presumed between “a medieval audience” and a modern “general reader.”2 Iranian historiography has its own inner logic and has nothing to do with the European periodization of its history into “ancient,” “medieval,” and “modern.” We do not have such historical periods anywhere except in Europe—perhaps perfectly logical for European history (though many contemporary historians of Europe have in fact challenged such periodizations), but they have absolutely nothing to do with the inner logic of historical epochs, or the very assumption of such epochs, in India, China, Africa, Latin America, the Islamic or Iranian worlds. The violent superimposition of these temporal and spatial categories distorts the realities of these worlds, deworlds and forces them into an obedient servitude to European historiography. There can never be any conception of world literature before the very idea of “world” and how it is inhabited is liberated from its quintessentially Eurocentric gestations.
In coming close to Ferdowsi’s biographical life, social significance, and poetic persona we need to keep this overcoming of distorting forces paramount in mind and seek to retrieve and reconceptualize his person and persona in a manner definitive to our understanding of his enduring masterpiece. First and foremost, Ferdowsi was and remains the author of his Shahnameh, and the Shahnameh foregrounds our understanding of its author. It is in the productive domain of that dialectic that we need to locate the author and the text. Any biography of the poet that compromises the literary primacy of his work, or, alternatively, any reading of the text that compromises the world in which its author lived, will do irreparable damage to our understanding of who Ferdowsi was and what the significance of his epic masterpiece is.
BEING BORN POETICALLY
Before Abu a-Qasem Ferdowsi Tusi (ca. 940–1025) was born in person he was born poetically—the literary imagination of the world into which he was born willed and gave birth to him. The world of Persian literary humanism anticipated and “gave birth” to him. By the time Ferdowsi was born in Tus and raised in Khorasan, where he reached his professional maturity as a poet, the category of “Persian poet” at the royal court was a fully functional component of the accoutrements of power in the eastern parts of the Muslim empires. By the time Nezami Aruzi, a prominent literary critic and one of the earliest biographers of Ferdowsi, wrote his seminal book, Chahar Maqaleh (Four treatises, 1156), the crucial craft of a Persian court poet was well placed next to the crafts of astronomer, physician, and scribe (the four subjects of this book) as most essential to a royal court. Ferdowsi was among the seminal figures definitive and integral to that prototype at its most nascent historical moments. A dialectic of reciprocity was therefore formed between the prototype of a court poet and the figure of Ferdowsi that defined and foregrounded the task of writing the Persian epic.
A number of prominent court poets had emerged and consolidated their profession long before Ferdowsi entered the scene to define the very prototype of the “court poet.” Abu Abdollah Ja’far ibn Mohammad Rudaki (ca. 858–941) is usually referred to as “the Adam of poets” for being the prototypical court poet who inaugurated the type that would last for centuries. The rising reputation of Rudaki eventually reached the eminent Samanid prince Amir Nasr ibn Ahmad Samani, who summoned him to his court, where he amassed a sizable fortune and reached great prominence.3 Rudaki was evidently born blind, and among his compositions was a versed version of “Kelilah and Dimnah.” He is reported to have become a very rich man as a court poet. Other prominent poets like Abu Mansur Muhammad ibn Ahmad Daqiqi Tusi (ca. 942–980) were in fact contemporaries of Ferdowsi’s. The apocryphal story of Ferdowsi’s encounter with the three court poets Farrokhi (ca. 980–1038), Onsori (d. ca. 1040), and Asjadi (d. 1040) speaks to the dominance of court poets in this era and Ferdowsi’s dramatic entry into that scene.4 The rise of Manuchehri Damghani (d. 1040) to prominence in this era marks the height of panegyrical poetry as the modus operandi of royal propaganda—so much so that poets like Manuchehri in fact received their noms de plume from the patron prince they served.5 These poets were integral to the calculus of power and propaganda, and the dominant genre particularly favored among them was panegyrical poetry, although attraction to epic poetry was evident among some other poets before Ferdowsi became totally identified with the genre. The monumental figure of Abu Sa’id Abi al-Khayr (967–1049) in this era, however, marks the significant presence of non-cou
rt-affiliated poetry cultivated by Sufi masters of Khorasan.6 The towering presence of Ferdowsi in this environment speaks of a cultural and political context where Persian poetry, both of a panegyrical and epic vintage, pushed the significance of the composition of the Shahnameh to a historic stage.
Ferdowsi was therefore born into a character type that existed before him, for the circumstances of Iranian dynasties farthest removed from the central Abbasid Caliphate in Baghdad had politically demanded and culturally produced it. A biography of Ferdowsi will therefore have to be placed in the context of this larger social history into which he was born as a poet. The historical context in which Ferdowsi set upon himself the monumental task of giving the Persian epic its final and most enduring form was predicated on the active formation of a poetic prototype that was politically foregrounded on a social construction of literary genres. At the center of the Shahnameh dwells the singular determination of a young poet from a modest background committed to the truth and power of an architectonic resurrection of forgotten myths, neglected heroes, and scattered histories of a people to whom Ferdowsi felt he belonged. Iranians of his and previous generations knew these stories and had transmitted them orally and in written form long before Ferdowsi, but after Ferdowsi these stories assumed a sustained dramatic narrative never before achieved. After every recitation of these stories before and after Ferdowsi, the ideas of these people of themselves were ever more intensified and poetically sublated. Ferdowsi’s biography is therefore also the biography of an imperial epic, consistently reclaimed by generations of Persian-speaking peoples.
The family background of Ferdowsi, of the mostly impoverished landed gentry, or the Dehghans, from which he emerged had exposed him to the ancient stories and the heroic deeds of earliest Iranian dynasties long before the Arab invasion and the Muslim conquest of Iran. But a general familiarity with the Persian epic narrative was not limited to any particular class. As the politically dominant narrative of Muslim culture ruled and thrived supreme in former Sassanid domains, so did an element of cultural and linguistic resistance to it. By and large Iranians had converted and perforce joined the new religion, and in their scholarship and even literary preferences and achievements they had opted for Islam and Arabic. Ferdowsi’s task of putting into a singular poetic narrative these ancient stories had therefore an urgent political purpose. Here we need to keep in mind that the monumental work of Ferdowsi’s epic did not just preserve but in fact also helped to reinvent the new Persian language for posterity. This reinvention, done over centuries and by myriad poets, historians, scientists, and Qur’anic scholars, in turn gave a new birth to the very person of a Persian poet (both before and after Ferdowsi), now charged with a towering historical task. In his life and lifetime achievement, Ferdowsi in effect created a new mandate for the Persian poet. While the younger generation that had come before Ferdowsi and had resisted the total hegemony of the Arabic language and Islamic culture had used the Persian language as a marker of ethnicity (ethnos; nezhad), Ferdowsi had single-handedly changed that ethnocentricity to a marker of poetic eloquence (logos; sokhan), preparing for the future emergence of the language as a marker of ethical conduct (ethos; hanjar).7
Because of this singular significance of his poetic achievement, far more than his mortal life it is his life as a poet that underlies his enduring relevance in the history of Persian letters and a liberated conception of world literature. In that sense, we need to heed his own conception of his life and immortality. At one point toward the end of the Shahnameh he turns to his autobiographical voice and says he is now seventy-one years old, and his old age is dawning on him with illness and pain. He says he needed to write a history of kings, as he thanks two local dignitaries who had helped him. He praises the ruling sultan Mahmoud before turning to himself and boasting about his epic and then adds,
Az an pas Namiram keh man zendeh-am
Keh tokhm-e sokhan man parakande’am
Thenceforth I will never die for I am alive
For I have spread the seeds of eloquence.8
This self-assertion puts the whole notion of “the death of the author” under a whole new perspective. Ferdowsi, in his own words, dwells in his poetic voice, thrives in his poetic birth, an immortality he knows, and rightly so, he has secured for himself in the very quintessence of his existence: the Shahnameh.
“I WILL NEVER DIE FOR I AM ALIVE”
His name was either Mansur or Hassan or Ahmad. His father’s name was Hassan, Ahmad, or Ali. His grandfather’s name was Sharafshah. His patronymic name was Abu al-Qasem, his nom de plume Ferdowsi. He was also known by the name of the city in which he was born, and thus al-Tusi. Why was he called by the sobriquet Ferdowsi? Perhaps because his patron, Sultan Mahmoud, first called him that, meaning the man from Ferdowsi, the man from Paradise. He was born circa 940 to a family of landed gentry in the village of Bazh in the Tabaran district near the major city of Tus in Khorasan. As a class, this landed gentry had converted to Islam while safeguarding its deeper roots in the local, regional, and imperial lore of the Sassanid Empire (226–651).9
Ferdowsi began composing the Shahnameh in the year 977, when he was in his midthirties and at which time he was a married man and the father of a seven-year-old boy. There is no factual evidence as to who his wife was—her name, her background, nothing. We know that initially he had intended to travel to the Samanid capital, Bokhara, where a manuscript of the prose Shahnameh of Abu Mansur ibn Abd al-Razzaq was held in the royal library, but he changed his mind and remained in Tus when a friend made available to him another copy of the same text. From Tus, however, he was supported by the Samanid nobleman Mansur ibn Abd al-Razzaq, whom he praises posthumously. Ferdowsi was evidently quite attached to this patron. The year 987, in which Mansur was arrested in Nishpur and taken to Bokhara, where he was then executed, was a turning point in Ferdowsi’s life: “From this moment onward,” Djalal Khaleghi-Motlagh reports, “there is no mention of anything to indicate either physical comfort or peace of mind, rather we find frequent complaints concerning his old age, poverty, and anxiety.”10 Indications therefore are that he happily began the composition of the Shahnameh under the patronage of the Samanids and had his happiest years while protected and rewarded by them. The latter part of his life and thus composition of the Shahnameh were not as happy.
Did Ferdowsi compose any poem other than his Shahnameh? The attribution of the narrative poem “Yusuf and Zuleika” (Joseph and Potiphar’s wife) and many other shorter pieces are certainly apocryphal. Legends attribute the “Joseph and Potiphar’s Wife” poem to a younger brother of Ferdowsi’s named Mas’ud or Hossein.11 The towering accomplishment of the Shahnameh overshadows any other poetic composition he may have produced. Ferdowsi finished the first draft of the Shahnameh in the year 994 but continued to work on it well into Sultan Mahmoud’s reign, until 997, and then by 999 he began working on the reign of Anushirvan in the historical part of the epic, while periodically complaining of old age and his failing health in his epic. Nevertheless, by the year 1000 he had finished most of the story of Anushirvan. Subsequent parts of the historical period were composed by 1002. In 1006, when the poet was sixty-seven, a deeply troubling tragedy befell him, and he lost his son and recorded the incident while continuing to work on his opus. On March 8, 1010, he is believed to have finally finished the Shahnameh.12 He therefore spent approximately thirty years of his life composing his epic.
Perhaps the most traumatic tragedy in Ferdowsi’s life was the death of his young son, for which he interrupts the flow of his narrative in the course of the reign of Khosrow Parviz in the historical part of the Shahnameh to mourn and reflect on its untimely occurrence. He says he is sixty-five years old when this tragedy befell him. It would be unbecoming of him, he says, to think of worldly riches after this tragedy. Then he says he must heed his own admonition and think of his young son’s death.
It was my turn but my young son is gone,
Leaving my lifeless body in pain—
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I rush forth to catch up with him
And when I do will I scold him, saying,
“It was my time to leave,
Why without my permission,
Did you leave and take my peace with you?
You were my support in times of trouble,
Why did you leave the company of an old man?
Did you find younger companions?
Is that why you left me in a rush?”
My young son was only thirty-seven
Did not find this world to his liking and left,
He was always contentious with me,
So suddenly he became angry and left.
He left, but his pain is here with me—
My heart and my eyes are drowning in tearful blood.
Now he has joined the light,
To find a place for his father.
A long time has thus passed, and none of my fellow travelers
[who passed away] has ever returned.
Now he is waiting for me impatiently
He is angry that I linger behind.
He was thirty-seven and I was sixty-seven—
He did not worry about me and left.
He was in a rush and I hesitant,
What we will gain of our deeds, we shall see.
May your soul the Creator keep in light!
And may He make of reason an armor around your soul!
The only thing I ask from God Almighty—
Who sustains us openly and in secret:
To forgive all my sins,
And enlighten my darkened abode.13
Based on his references in the Shahnameh biographers of Ferdowsi have concluded that he lived in relative poverty much of his life, and Sultan Mahmoud was not forthcoming in providing for him, while copyists and reciters of his poetry were being rewarded by various courtiers during his lifetime. Based on the earliest sources, however, his biographers believe that by the year 1010 Ferdowsi’s manuscript was already in the capable hands of both copyists. But the royal acknowledgment of his achievement was not forthcoming. Legend has it that he was paid much less than he was promised and that he “was extremely upset by this and went to a bathhouse; upon leaving the bathhouse he drank some beer and divided the king’s present between the beer seller and the bath attendant. Then, fearing punishment by Mahmud, he fled from Ghazna by night.”14 Much of these latter parts of his biography, especially his hostility with Mahmud and the satirical poems about him, are entirely apocryphal and hagiographic with little factual evidence. The dramatic narratives of these events are in fact further proof of their fictive character. “Later … Mahmud regretted his behavior toward the poet and … had camel loads of indigo to the value of 20,000 dinars sent to Ferdowsi, but as the camels were entering Tus by the Rudbar gate Ferdowsi’s corpse was being borne out of the city by the Razan gate.”15 The dramatic story does not end there: “In the cemetery the preacher of Tabaran prevented his being buried in the Muslim cemetery on the grounds that Ferdowsi was a Shi’ite, and so there was no choice but to bury the poet in his own orchard.… Ferdowsi left only one daughter, and the poet had wanted the king’s payment as a dowry for her. But after the poet’s death, his daughter would not accept the payment.”16
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