The Shahnameh

by Hamid Dabashi

  “But why do you need candles now?” she said.

  “Has sleep refused to visit your soft bed?

  Drink up your wine and—as you do so—I

  Will tell a story from the days gone by,

  A story full of love and trickery,

  Whose hero lived for war and chivalry.”

  “Sweet moon,” I said, “my cypress, my delight,

  Tell me this tale to while away the night.”

  “First listen well,” she said, “and when you’ve heard

  The story through, record it word for word.”36

  The fuller account of this mise-en-scène in the original is here sacrificed to this utterly beautiful but much-abbreviated rendition. Let us now leave Davis with much gratitude behind and turn to Ferdowsi himself and see what happens next.

  A more literal translation of this introductory passage (based on Julius Mohl’s edition) informs us that Ferdowsi’s narrator was frightened by all these apparitions and the darkness surrounding him. The kind companion he has is awakened and “comes to the garden,” presumably where the poet was sleeping in the open air, where in fact he could make all those astronomical observations about the sky and the moon and stars, and thus presumably the kind companion was sleeping somewhere else. He or she asks the poet why is he upset, why he needs a candle, and why he cannot sleep. “I told him/her,” the poet says, “I cannot sleep, please bring me a candle bright like the sun / Put it next to me and play music for me, bring the lute and some wine too.” The kind companion leaves the garden and brings a candle and a light as the poet wants, as well as some wine, and a few pomegranates, oranges, and quinces. So, while a mini banquet is prepared for the frightened and disconcerted poet, the companion starts drinking and playing beautiful, magical music. The companion satisfies the poet’s every whim and turns the dark night bright as day. There is a festive and warming and even erotic scene clearly suggested here, an eroticism that is neither homo- nor heteroerotic, could easily be either, but the ambiguity makes the scene ever more potent.

  Now the poetic voice does something quite crucial (again based on Mohl’s edition) that seriously changes the entire mise-en- scène before the story begins and introduces a new dramatis persona. The narrator turns to us and tells us, “Listen to what this kind companion said to me, soon after we began drinking together.” So now “we” enter the scene, we the readers of these lines, and we become integral to the scene via this direct evocation by the poetic voice. That lovely companion prays for the poet and wishes him all the best luck. “Drink your wine,” the companion says, “while I read you a story from the Ancient Book, and when you hear what I have to tell you, you will wonder about the nature of this universe.” The companion proceeds to tell the poet how strange and adventuresome is this story. The poet asks his companion to tell him the story right away and teach him a lesson about the nature of this life. At this point the companion says fine, I tell you this story from a book in Pahlavi, but you must turn it into Persian poetry. The poet assures the companion that he will do precisely that, for his own poetic impulses have now been provoked. “Since you are telling me a concealed secret,” the poet assures his companion, “my uncouth poetic disposition will be much refined.” He then assures his companion that he will compose the poem precisely and point by point as the companion tells him the story. “I will gratefully turn the story into a poem,” he assures the companion. Then he again turns to us and informs us, “That lovely companion recited the story to me, which was written in time immemorial, now listen to my poem, let your reason be alert and your heart wakened.”37

  There is not one but three dramatis personae in this prolegomena to the story of Bizhan and Manizheh—the poet, his companion, and us. The triangulated mise-en-scène is central to our reading of the drama that unfolds. There is no biographical “I” here in this as indeed in many other crucial moments of the Shahnameh. Literary respect for such passages means not to violate their poetic disposition and ask them to respond to mundane and quite bizarre questions as to the social status of Ferdowsi’s wife!

  THE MAN REDEEMING MANKIND

  Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh reads on the porous borderlines of myth, heroism, and history—all brought together into a seamless epic narrative. It is precisely on the fluidity of those lines forming and feeding on one another that his life and lifetime achievement need to be read. “A chronicler who recites events without distinguishing between major and minor ones,” wrote Walter Benjamin in “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” “acts in accordance with the following truth: nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history. To be sure, only a redeemed mankind receives the fullness of its past—which is to say, only for a redeemed mankind has its past become citable in all its moments. Each moment it has lived becomes a citation à l’ordre du jour—and that day is Judgment Day.”38

  What is a “redeemed mankind” that is solely deserving of a fullness of history? In what way has this “redeemed mankind” merited “fullness of its past … citable in all its moments”? A “redeemed mankind,” for both Benjamin and beyond, is humanity fully conscious of itself, not of every minutia of its existence but in possession of a historical consciousness that allows for such a consciousness. To become a “citation à l’ordre du jour” means to be deserving of such a citation, again not merely in the details of the action reported but far more pointedly in the full historical consciousness that allows for such reporting to be registered, made meaningful and significant. Benjamin sums up the occasion of all such moments and suspends them on “Judgement Day.” “Judgement Day,” as Ferdowsi understood it, is the day of return, when we return to our point of origin and revisit our creator and try to answer in the affirmative the question He put to us just before he created us that He is our Lord. Benjamin suspends that totality on the fragmented moments of the history that we, and with us the whole world, have lived. Ferdowsi’s archetypal narrative is the practice of that universality, gathering together what Benjamin saw scattered around, the occasion of the worldliness we live. The salvation Benjamin sought in imagining a whole different history, in his case in messianic Judaism, was to fuse a sacred certitude with his dialectical materialism. The fusion had an entirely different archaic gestation embedded in Ferdowsi’s gift of storytelling, with the metaphysics of his universe rooted in the poetic intuition he had invested in his epic.

  A redeemed mankind is rooted, fully flowering, from its imagined and poetically documented past to its unforeseen future. In that sense Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh is both history and philosophy of history, a manner of historiography that has successfully fused its own mythic and heroic dimensions into its historical consciousness. That transfusion of fact, myth, and heroism provokes an intuition of transcendence rooted in the Shahnameh narrative itself. The abusive manhandling of the text to extract useless and misguided assumptions as to what Ferdowsi’s “religion,” “nationalism,” or marital status were misses this metaphysics of the epic altogether. Ferdowsi’s poetic metaphysics is always cosmic, proverbial, invoking the power of reason and reasoning, of existential being there, and the necessity of righteousness, none of which is reducible to any known or institutional religion. Reducing that cosmogony that is first and foremost poetically produced to Islam, or Shi’ism, or Zoroastrianism is as violent and abusive as trying to project a Ptolemaic or Copernican astrophysics from his astrological references. Let us dwell on one such metaphysical moment more closely:

  In the Name of God of the Sun and the Moon,

  For in His Name Reason has shown the Path:

  The Lord of Being and the Lord of Righteousness

  Who does not expect from you waywardness or shortcoming:

  The God of Saturn, Mars, and the Sun—

  The One who has given me the good tidings, and in Whom I Trust.

  I cannot praise Him,

  Thinking of him casts my soul into despair.

  He created Time and Space,

  The trace of a tiny a
nt points to his Existence.

  From the turning sun to the dark soil,

  From fiery stars to pure water:

  They all testify to the existence of the Lord

  Acquainting your soul with Him.

  Towards that Creator who is free of want—

  You will not find any path: Do not waste your time!

  He is not in need of any ministers, or any Treasurer, Crown, or Throne,

  He will not be lessened or increased, beyond good or bad fortune.

  He is entirely Needless and we his servants,

  Standing in reverence of his command and wish.

  The soul and reason without a doubt,

  Can figure out the firmament and stars.

  Call no one but him Almighty God,

  For He is the source of our happiness and him we need.

  He created the day, the night, and the turning firmament,

  He created hunger, sleep, anger, and love.

  This is how this fast-moving heaven is built,

  It brings pain sometimes and at other times solace.

  There is much wonder about Rostam,

  Many people have many stories of him in their heart.

  He is the towering source of chivalry and war,

  He is the standard of wisdom, knowledge, and dignity.

  Like an elephant in land and a serpent in sea,

  A wise hero and a man of war.

  Let me now tell you the story of Kamus,

  Transforming it from [old] books into my poetry.

  Let us now rerun to the narrative of Dehghan:

  Let’s see what the wise man has to say.39

  This is the metaphysical sum total of the Shahnameh itself, the inner dynamics of its moral imagination, the ethical subconscious of its text made poetically self-conscious. The proverbial expressions Ferdowsi uses may sound familiar to a Persianate world, but they become idiomatic to his own epic universe. This metaphysics makes sense only in the aftermath or just before or while reading his stories. If you surgically remove them when you translate the Shahnameh into another language, or if you consider them repetitive, boring, or samples of “moral sententiae” you need to go back to learn the Shahnameh anew. The epistemic damage done to the text by trying to extract a known religious position from such references is predicated on yet another structural violence that disregards the ways in which these poetic implosions point to speculations embedded in the stories themselves. Without coming to terms with the inner world of the Shahnameh itself there is no placing it onto the spectrum of something we can legitimately consider world literature.

  THE WEST AND THE REST

  The inner world of the Shahnameh and its innate literary worldliness, pivoted toward its poetics of transcendence, correspond to the changing world around it. If the two worlds are not allowed to converse, the inner worldliness of the Persian epic and the outer worlds that have embraced it, the Shahnameh will be reduced to a bizarre object of curiosity for the natives and their Western interlocutors. In his fine study of the Persian epic, Epic and Sedition, Dick Davis begins with a casual division of various interpretations of the Shahnameh into “Western” and “Iranian”: while “Western” receptions have been rather “grudging,” Iranians have been laudatory and expressive of their “amour propre.”40 Though he proceeds to dismiss many of the non-Iranian criticisms of the epic, Davis’s binary ends up positing a hermeneutic bifurcation that deworlds the Shahnameh by making it the subject of an Orientalist and object of a nativist curiosity—thereby disallowing the text itself the possibilities of a sustained historical unfolding. In between these two worlds—“Western” and “Iranian”—there is another world, the world itself, that engulfs both these and any other readings that might approach the Shahnameh. Then there is the world of the Persian epic itself, with a sustained disposition of prolonged self-revelation. In and of itself, therefore, this binary disallows the possibility of someone’s reading the Shahnameh and not falling into the “Western” and “Iranian” camps—as I have had for decades reading it with Asian, African, and Latin American students, lately using Davis’s excellent translation. Suppose someone in Senegal wants to read the Persian epic, someone in Argentina, someone in India, someone in Cairo, someone in Tokyo—and they by and large read it through its English translation. Are these potential readers “Iranian” or “Western”? Neither. This deworlding of the text, denying it a world readership, forcing it into a false binary, and therefore denying it a worldly hermeneutic circle beyond “the West and the Rest” is at the heart of the ways in which the Shahnameh is prevented from reclaiming its place in literary worldliness, indeed in world literature.

  The spirit of such a systematic alienation of the Shahnameh from itself and from becoming a worldly part of literature is still very much informed by the Virgilian belligerence that persists in Dick Davis’s manufactured binary between the natives and the Westerners. It is from Virgil that the world of epics had been divided into two opposing camps of enemies, one by “cosmic order” and the other by “chaos.”41 That spirit is entirely against the very grain of the Alexander Romance that was generated in Persian in the Iranian world, chief among which is in Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, and worked precisely in the opposite direction of that Virgilian division of the world between “the West and the Rest” and in fact became the far more inclusive conception of world literature. The historical adventures of Alexander the Great (356–323 B.C.E.) became the material of expansive legends in and out of Europe. From its Greek origin in the Pseudo-Callisthenes version, the Alexander Romance eventually spread far and wide into Latin, Armenian, Syriac, Hebrew, and most medieval European vernaculars. Through its Syriac rendition it also reached Arabic (including the Qur’an), Persian, Ottoman Turkish, and found one of its most potent renditions in Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh.42 What is remarkable about the Alexander Romance and its widespread reception is how it gave multiple nations an opportunity to claim it into their own literary worldliness. I propose this inclusive, pluralistic, and open-ended tradition of the Alexander Romance as exactly the opposite of the Virgilian tradition and its pernicious impact on dividing the world to conquer it better. Precisely through the world-conquering figure of Alexander, but entirely in the opposite direction of the Virgilian epic, the Alexander Romance, in which Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh has a towering presence, is a far superior site of rethinking world literature than the vindictive site of the Aeneid still evident in the proverbial assumptions of literary scholars who keep dividing the reception of the Shahnameh between Iranians and non-Iranians, or “the West and the Rest.”

  MOTHERS AND SONS

  After yet another dispute with his father—following Seyavash’s refusing to kill hostages he had captured on the border between Iran and Turan—Seyavash finally defects to Turan and hopes to resume a more peaceful life in the land of the enemy. The Turanian king Afrasiab receives him lovingly, and Piran, his trusted vizier, becomes Seyavash’s close confidant. Seyavash marries two princesses in Turan, one Jarireh, the daughter of Piran, and the other Farigis, the daughter of Afrasiab, and becomes close and very dear to his royal father-in-law. This eventually provokes the jealousy of some powerful men at Afrasiab’s court, chief among them Garsivaz, the brother of Afrasiab, who plots to set Seyavash and Afrasiab against each other and once and for all get rid of the Persian prince. Afrasiab mobilizes an army against Seyavash, defeats him, and orders his execution, while his wife, Farigis, and his young son Key Khosrow eventually return to Iran.

  The tragic fate of Seyavash is interwoven with the story of a city he had built while in exile from his homeland. He, we must remember, is the child of a marriage between his royal father, Key Kavous, and his Turanian mother, whom he loses upon his birth. He becomes a tragic figure from the moment of his birth, when astrologers foretell a tragic end for him, and he is entrusted to Rostam to bring him up with moral and physical rectitude and courage. From this point forward Key Kavous consistently sends his son away, perhaps for fear of his tragic en
ding affecting him. Soon after the Sudabeh scandal, Seyavash leaves Iran for the border with Turan, with Rostam in his company. After a fearful dream, Afrasiab refuses to fight him and asks for peace. Seyavash agrees and sends Rostam with the great news of victory to his father. Key Kavous gets angry with him and orders him to kill the hostages he had taken from the Turanian army and invade Turan. Seyavash refuses to renege on his peace treaty with the Turanians, writes a letter to Afrasiab, and asks for safe passage through his kingdom to go somewhere beyond to build a city. The city of Seyavashgard that Seyavash establishes and where he and his wife, Farigis, lived shortly together is the idyllic utopia of the Persian prince’s tragic ending. The presence of Afrasiab’s brother, the treacherous Garsivaz, is the diabolic force of evil that mars this utopian moment. What particularly angers the Turanian leadership and causes their suspicion and anger is Seyavash’s introduction of Iranian figures as a fresco on buildings he had ordered constructed in this city. In telling the stories of these Persian figures and designs Ferdowsi’s account is replete with nostalgia and homesickness. The idea of a home, where the tragic hero is born and raised, chases after Seyavash from one land to another and stabilizes and anchors all and every notion of imperial conquest in the case of this most tragic hero of the Shahnameh. To achieve that sense of home and homeliness in the midst of a massive imperial epic is the singular achievement of Ferdowsi in his Shahnameh.