The Shahnameh

by Hamid Dabashi

  All these dramatic stories, with a grain of historical truth to them, perhaps point to the immense popularity of Ferdowsi’s character to his ordinary audiences. His date of death is given as either 1020 at the age of eighty-two or 1025, at the age of eighty-seven.

  The fundamental problem with any attempt in reconstructing Ferdowsi’s biography is the fact that there are no contemporary sources, and much of the rest is in fact apocryphal and hagiographical—information that is of course of immense importance in its own right but not sufficient or reliable for us to re-create a solid, consistent, and detailed biography. The result of venturing into his Shahnameh to extrapolate information about his personal life, if it is not done very judiciously, is the fact that before we know it we will have perpetrated systemic violence on Ferdowsi’s poetic poise and persona to extrapolate biographical information from it. Djalal Khaleghi-Motlagh, one of the most eminent Shahnameh scholars of our time, chief among many others, uses Ferdowsi’s poetic persona to extrapolate his “mood” and “disposition,” far beyond simple biographical facts. This is a very dubious exercise. To use autobiographical passages to guess at Ferdowsi’s age, for example, or mark the point when he is mourning the death of his son is one thing, but to use the introduction to the magnificent story of Bizhan and Manizheh to surmise Ferdowsi’s personal life,17 the social status of his wife, and so on is entirely speculative, unreliable, and in fact does epistemic violence to his poetic voice—plus the fact that such speculations introduce serious contradictions in guessing at Ferdowsi’s “mood.”

  Another major issue giving rise to spurious speculations about Ferdowsi’s life as a court poet is his troubled relationship with Sultan Mahmoud, leading to his lampooning of the Ghaznavid monarch, which, again, has to be understood in the context of a popular poetic imagination appropriating the poet for itself and away from the royal court of both the Samanids and the Ghaznavids over many centuries and epochs. In this respect, Ferdowsi in effect becomes the figurative replica of his own chief hero in the Shahnameh, Rostam, whose presence in the royal court is always tension ridden, as, for example, when Key Kavous summons him to fight Sohrab and he takes his sweet time partying with his fellow hero Give and does not show up at the royal court, and when he does finally come to the court and Key Kavous admonishes him for being late, he denounces the king and leaves his court in anger. It is that prototype, we can surmise, that the popular imagination has borrowed and followed to distance Ferdowsi from the Ghaznavid court. Some scholars have questioned even the validity of the satire Ferdowsi presumably wrote against Sultan Mahmoud; others believe it existed but that some of its lines are spurious.18 But the whole supposition of Ferdowsi satirizing Mahmoud can also be understood in the context of successive generations of later poets, scribes, and their audiences wresting the towering Persian poet away from the royal court and claiming him for themselves. This possibility opens a whole new perspective on the organic presence of the Shahnameh among its readers far beyond the dubious speculations about a historically founded hostility between the poet and his patron to the point of producing an entire satirical poem by Ferdowsi against Sultan Mahmoud.

  An equally contentious point of exaggeration concerns the raising of issues of “religion in the Shahnameh,” wondering about his relationship with Zoroastrians, followed by the presumed sectarian hostilities between Ferdowsi and his patron.19 The attribution of this sectarian animus by Sunni authorities close to Mahmoud toward Ferdowsi’s Shi’ism might indeed have an element of truth to it, but it does not completely account for the effervescence of popular poetic appropriation of Ferdowsi away from the royal court, as evident in subsequent manuscript compilations. It is dynastic power versus the popular poetic imagination that is at work here rather than a cliché-ridden and even ahistorical Sunni-Shi’i rivalry. The Khorasani Isma’ili poet and philosopher Nasser Khosrow (1004–1088) is reported to have seen “a large caravansary and was told that this had been built with the money from the gift that Mahmud had sent to the poet, which, since he had already died, his heir refused to accept.”20 Such accounts, if proven trustworthy, indicate that the effervescent popular imagination about Ferdowsi, based on scant facts, had arisen to legendary proportions very soon after his passing in Khorasan. Much of Ferdowsi’s praise for Sultan Mahmoud (though not all) is either spurious and inauthentic or insincere and hyperbolic in comparison with his praise for the Samanid prince Mansur.21 All indications are that Ferdowsi was not sufficiently rewarded for his lifetime achievement by Sultan Mahmoud. Satirizing Mahmoud when he was assured no reward would be forthcoming is the clearest indication that this confrontation between the poet and the patron would feed into future popular sentiments.

  Both Ferdowsi and his Shahnameh are also too enthusiastically and ahistorically assimilated into the presumed “cultural resistances of Iranians” to the Arab conquest of the mid-seventh century. The political, linguistic, and cultural resistance to Arab conquest was perfectly evident in the northeastern region of Khorasan from proto-Zoroastrian revolutionary uprisings like those of Babak Khorramdin (ca. 795–838), Ustadh Sis (fl. 767), and Al-Muqanna (d. ca. 783) in the eighth and ninth centuries to dynastic formations like those of the Saffarids (861–1003) and the Samanids (819–999) in the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries. These developments should not, however, be so broadly racialized, for along with the rise of the Shu’ubiyyah movement from Baghdad itself they offer a glimpse at the transregional social and political changes and imperial expansions in which Ferdowsi was born and raised. At the heart of his Shahnameh, however, is the archetypal articulation of an imperial pedigree that transcends his own particular history and reaches out for a far deeper conception of history. Too much undue attention to these historical circumstances by much later Iranian nationalist historiography has in fact paradoxically diminished the epic, dramatic, and above all archetypal dimensions of his masterpiece. There can be little doubt that Ferdowsi was very much a product of the political circumstances of his time. But reducing the poetic, literary, and dramatic dimensions of the Shahnameh to such factors does irreparable epistemic violence to something beyond, beneath, and above these circumstances. They can potentially blind us to the literary idiomaticity of the text itself, the manner in which it reveals and stages its own inner poetic logic and rhetoric.

  Along the same lines, much speculation has also been made about Ferdowsi’s “education,” again at the expense of compromising the evidence of his exquisite erudition and poetic gift of grace in his masterpiece.22 In the absence of any relevant and reliable biographical data, the proof is in the pudding. It is the Shahnameh itself that stages a deeply perceptive poet missing no occasion in his vast and varied gifts of storytelling to muse and reflect on the nature of human folly and destiny. Did he or did he not know Arabic and Pahlavi? This is like asking if Shakespeare or Dante or Goethe knew Greek and Latin. Perhaps they did, perhaps they did not. How does that probable knowledge or ignorance add or subtract from the force and elegance of their respective poetry or gift of storytelling? These are biographical questions that might occasion some convoluted scholarly debates but add very little, if anything at all, to our understanding of Ferdowsi’s poetry. Potentially in fact they can exacerbate that epistemic violence on his poetry every time we go near it to extrapolate one or another useless biographical datum from it. Ferdowsi’s possible knowledge of Arabic or Pahlavi is a diversionary question almost entirely irrelevant to any understanding of the substance of his poetry, which is delivered entirely in a sublime poetic Persian.

  The same is true about the endless and useless discussions about Ferdowsi being a Shi’i, what kind of Shi’i, or a Sunni, or even having Zoroastrian sentiments.23 The fact is solidly established that he was a Twelver Shi’i. But that fact adds or subtracts nothing from our reading of his magnum opus and again might in fact cast a wrong shadow on over- or underinterpreting him in entirely extratextual ways. A literary masterpiece like the Shahnameh generates and sustains its own moral universe
and ethical idiomaticity. It is ludicrous to reduce that universe to a theological systematicity outside that text. A perfect example of the confounding of Ferdowsi’s Shi’ism with an Iranian ultranationalist reading of Ferdowsi is when the two aspects are conflated to suggest that Ferdowsi’s Shi’ism had to do with his Iranian nationalism.24 Even deducing theological positions from Ferdowsi’s poetic speculations are suspect, for they are in fact occasioned by various story lines. We cannot conclude any such position when we read Plato’s dialogues, for example, as to what Plato’s “theology” was. Ferdowsi is a poet not a theologian, as Plato was a philosopher and not a mystic. It is the dialogical disposition of such positions that matter, and not any conclusion about Ferdowsi’s personal sectarian or theological preferences, or even affinity with pre-Islamic Zoroastrian thought. All such misguided speculations occur when we do not pay closer attention to the moral and ethical speculations that arise from the stories themselves. Ferdowsi was a Muslim, a Shi’a, an Iranian of very proud and self-confident descent, all of which are evident in his lifetime achievement, the greatest Persian epic poem ever composed in this language. He does not teach by admonition but by dramatic reenactment of stories, by the judicious, periodic, and polyvocal introduction of his poetic voices. It is a fundamentally flawed hermeneutics to take any one line of his epic and interpret it as an indication that Ferdowsi as a person said this, that, or the other thing. This is a violation of the poetic disposition of his work and does irreparable damage to his dramatic narratives. The nationalist abuse of the Shahnameh has turned him into an anti-Arab, anti-Turk “patriot,” all at the unconscionable expense of damaging his poetic dramatization of history.

  The study of the Shahnameh in fact needs to progress exactly in the opposite direction, not taxing it to squeeze nonexistent biographical data about Ferdowsi (more than is possible and trustworthy) but toward a renewed attempt at coming to terms with the work’s literary character, its poetic disposition, and above all its dramatic idiomaticity. It is true that, as major scholars of the Shahnameh have duly noted, Ferdowsi’s masterpiece “has not received its rightful attention in works written in Persian on the art of poetry … which works consider eloquence and poetic style largely as a matter of particular figures of speech.”25 It is also true that “in discussing Ferdowsi’s achievement one must consider, on the one hand, the totality of the Shahnameh as a whole and, on the other, his artistry as a storyteller.”26 But precisely such legitimate concerns and projects are conceptually subverted by extracting dubious biographical material from the selfsame text. A remarkable feature of Ferdowsi’s epic narrative, for example, is his exquisite “cinematic” techniques: the manner in which he “cuts” and edits a scene. In that regard, his characterizations of his dramatis personae, too, exude polyvocality, intimacy, and confidence. The manner in which Khaleghi-Motlagh aptly describes Ferdowsi’s character development must remain central to our reading of his masterpiece:

  Many of the narrative poets who followed Ferdowsi were more interested in the construction of individual lines than of their stories as a whole. In such narrative poems, the poet himself speaks much more than the characters of his poem, and even where there is dialogue, there is little difference between the attitudes of the various characters of the story, so that the speaker is still the author, who at one moment speaks in the role of one character and the next moment speaks in the role of another. The result is that in such poems … the characters in the story are less individuals than types. In contrast, the dialogues in the Shahnameh are realistic and frequently argumentative, and the poet uses them to good effect as a means of portraying the inner life of his characters.27

  To do as Khaleghi-Motlagh rightly suggests, the task of producing a biography of Ferdowsi must not task the text in abusive and violent ways. “Ferdowsi was also a master as a lyric poet,” he tells us, “such moments in the Shahnameh distinguish it from other epics of the world … due to their simplicity and brevity, however, they do not harm the epic spirit of the poem, rather they give it a certain musicality and tenderness; in particular, due to the descriptions of love in the poem, these lyric moments take it beyond the world of primary epic.”28 This is an apt and incisive observation. To allow this lyricism of the epic to reveal itself we need to pay particular attention to the poetic persona of the epic narrator and see how Ferdowsi actually stages it. Let us now turn to one specific such case in the Shahnameh and see how it works.

  ONE POET IN THREE PERSONAE

  Let us look at one such opening gambit of a story of the Shahnameh and see how Ferdowsi’s narrative voice (the poetic summation of his “biography”) sets up the plot.29 For this story, “Bizhan and Manizheh,” we have an utterly exquisite translation of the opening lines, though alas only partial. But it is still long enough to help us find our way back into the original. Dick Davis’s beautiful translation captures the soul of the original:

  A night as black as coal bedaubed with pitch,

  A night of ebony, a night on which

  Mars, Mercury, and Saturn would not rise.

  Even the moon seemed fearful of the skies:

  Her face was three-fourths dimmed, and all the night

  Looked gray and dusty in her pallid light.30

  The sense of the original, perfectly captured here, is a deeply dark night, marked by no star except a thin sliver of moon, that in fact demarcates the pitch-darkness surrounding the narrator, a witness to the standing still of the universe: absolute, utter, frightening darkness.31

  On plain and mountainside dark henchmen laid

  Night’s raven carpet, shade on blacker shade;

  The heavens seemed rusted iron, as if each star

  Were blotted out by tenebrous, thick tar;

  Dark Ahriman appeared on every side

  Like a huge snake whose jaws gape open wide.32

  The only crucial point lost in this otherwise perfect translation is when Ferdowsi suddenly and subtly in the original introduces his own voice and says nemudam, “to me appeared,” where Davis opts for the passive voice “appeared.” That first-person pronoun -m is critical to our detection of how Ferdowsi’s poetic voice gets introduced and articulated in the rest of the opening stanza. For it is to the poetic voice of Ferdowsi himself that “dark Ahriman appears on every side / Like a huge snake whose jaws gape open wide.” Fortunately (and cleverly), Davis recaptures that personal pronoun in the following section:

  The garden and the stream by which I lay

  Became a sea of pitch; it seemed that day

  Would never come, the skies no longer turned,

  The weakened sun no longer moved or burned.

  Fear gripped the world and utter silence fell,

  Stilling the clamor of the watchman’s bell,

  Silencing all the myriad cries and calls

  Of everything that flies or walks or crawls.33

  The only point I would add here is where Davis says “Fear gripped the world” in the original and more closely we have Jahan-ra del az khishtan por haras, “the world was filled with fear of itself.” It is imperative for us to see the source of fear in the world is not external but internal to it. This adds to the sense of fright and despair Ferdowsi generates. From here on the poetic voice of Ferdowsi becomes more pronounced:

  I started up, bewildered, terrified;

  My fear awoke the woman at my side.

  I called for her to bring torches, light;

  She fetched bright candles to dispel the night

  And laid a little feast on which to dine,

  Red pomegranates, citrons, quinces, wine,

  Together with a polished goblet fit

  For kings and emperors to drink from it.34

  Here we need a bit more crucial specification. There is no “woman” at the poet’s side. The narrator simply says when he jumps from his bed in fear and despair, yeki mehrban budam andar saray, “There was a kind person with me at home.” To be sure, Davis is taking a perfectly plausible poetic license here f
rom his own heterosexual perspective—nor indeed do we have any indication that Ferdowsi’s narrator did not mean a female companion by that “kind person.”35 It could be a male, a female, or just a figment of Ferdowsi’s poetic imagination, or what I propose to be simply a narratological trope. By falsely gendering it we rob the metaphor of its poetic potency. The fact is in Persian we do not have gender-specific pronouns, so we don’t know if this person is a he or a she (though, again, it is perfectly plausible to assume, as Davis does, that it is a she, though others, like the much earlier Arabic translator of the poem, Bundari, thought it was a young man). But keep in mind that Ferdowsi’s poetic persona simply says “at home” and not “at my side.” I insist on this difference because anachronistically projecting the liberal bourgeois morality implied in the image of a husband’s waking up next to his wife in twenty-first-century North America back to the time and texture of Ferdowsi and his poem is a bit forced on the poor poetic voice invoked in this line, and we need to be aware of it. All we know is from the commotion that the poet’s voice generates a kind person in the same house wakes up. There are other subtle differences. Where Davis says “I called,” in the original we have khorushidam, which is more like “I screamed” or “I moaned,” indicating the poet’s degree of fear and despair. The rest of the incident is captured perfectly fine by Davis but alas much abbreviated.