The Shahnameh

by Hamid Dabashi

  Legend has it that from the spot where Seyavash’s blood drops when he was killed a plant grows that is eventually called Par-e Seyavashan, around which name a ritual of remembrance emerges. The traumatic event has a lasting impact on the Persian poetic and literary imagination. Hafez has a poem remembering the tragedy of Seyavash:

  The Turkic king hears the words of those who badmouth others:

  Shame on him for the blood of Seyavash he spilt.

  Generations later, the eminent novelist Simin Daneshvar’s Suvashun (1969) emerged as the most widely popular literary articulation of Seyavash’s legend, set against the backdrop of the British occupation of Shiraz during World War II. The traumatic life and tragic death of Seyavash has fascinated generations of poets, novelists, dramatists, and literary scholars. Something innocent, something tragic, something irretrievably sad remains at the heart of the story of Seyavash. But a close reading of his encounter with his stepmother, Sudabeh, as Ferdowsi describes it in detail, reveals something beyond a mere illicit love affair. She is not as diabolic as you might think, nor is he as innocent if we understand Ferdowsi’s luscious description of their erotic encounter at least in part from the young prince’s perspective. Seyavash and Sudabeh represent two provocative characters whose proximity becomes erotically charged and politically combustive and therefore threatens the whole patriarchal culture of the Shahnameh. Here we encounter a mother figure who wishes to conspire with a son figure to overcome the father and place the son king over the father king. But the son refuses and ends up going through hellfire. Seyavash’s refusal is much less moral than political, all his moral protests in fact a clear indication of “protesting too much.” He already sees himself on his father’s throne and does not wish to compromise that eventuality by engaging in a court intrigue.

  Ferdowsi’s description of Seyavash’s entry into Sudabeh’s private quarters and marking of his nervous trepidations allows for an interpretative space where we can see him enticed by this encounter. But he refuses to have anything to do with Sudabeh ostensibly on moral grounds but also for fear of compromising his political ambitions. Seyavash never forgives his father and thus becomes a tragic hero and by substituting his own body for the body of his father and by inflicting pain on himself seeks revenge on his father. So in him we have a peculiar case of regicide by proxy, regicide via suicide as parricide. The result, his final sacrifice, is parricide through filicide, homicide via suicide, murder of the self for the father by proxy. He goes to Turan and, by submitting his body to his father’s mortal enemy, “kills” his father by being killed in his chief enemy’s hands. From that mortal body’s union with his father’s enemy’s daughter Farigis a son is born, Key Kavous, who will go back to rule Iran. The psychodrama between the father and the son here becomes substitutional, and therefore the murder of Seyavash is the final regicide within the patriarchal order of the Persian epic.

  THREE

  THE BOOK OF KINGS

  Zeh bolbol shanidam yeki dastan

  Keh bar khand az gofteh-ye bastan.

  From a nightingale I once heard a story

  Recited from the most ancient times:

  One night drunkard Esfandiar returned

  From the royal court of his father in anger

  To his mother the Roman princess Katayoun

  In the pitch-dark of night

  He held her tightly and asked for more wine.

  Esfandiar was a divinely ordained Persian prince who championed the prophetic cause of the ancient sage Zoroaster and promoted his new vision of the world. Esfandiar was invincible, triumphant, valiant, and destined to greatness, if only his father, Goshtasp, were to deliver on his promise to abdicate in his favor. Goshtasp would dispatch his fearless son to one dangerous and impossible mission after another. The valiant prince would perform all his father’s commands, and on top of them venture into other heroic deeds—slaying monstrous wolves, man-eating lions, a dragon, a wicked enchantress, mythical birds—while braving storms and crossing deadly deserts. The Persian prince performs all these heroic deeds, rescues his sisters from bondage, returning to his father’s court hoping to ascend his throne in due course. But the father refuses to do as he promised and decides to send his son on one more deadly mission, knowing full well he will not return from this last task alive.

  EPIC AND THE WORLD

  How are we to read the Shahnameh and its fantastic stories today? Over the years that I have taught the Persian epic at Columbia University in New York to generations of my students from around the globe I have grappled with a central question: how can I make this book as exciting to them and their diverse backgrounds as it has been to me? This succession of students from Asia, Africa, Latin America, as well as from North America and Europe, has taught me a singularly significant lesson: the Shahnameh has been hitherto trapped inside a false and falsifying binary—the assumption that it has an Iranian versus a “Western” reader. First and foremost, the Persian epic needs to be liberated from this distorting entrapment. The only way the Shahnameh can be restored to its worldly character and discussed as integral to world literature (beyond the provincial limitations of the discipline as it is practiced today) is first to place it in its own worldly context, the imperial habitat in which it was first crafted, and, second, to map out and theorize its own poetic worldliness, and, third, to allow it to unfold in the wide world in which it now finds itself. Read this way, the English translation of the Persian epic does not belong exclusively to English people, or even to that delusional abstraction called “the Western reader.” It belongs to anyone anywhere physically or culturally subjected to British colonialism and who now therefore has a legitimate claim upon the English language and whatever is produced in it—anywhere from South Africa to Canada, from India through Africa to Mexico down to Argentina. It belongs to anyone who reads Persian from Central Asia to South Asia to Iran and beyond, as it belongs to anyone who can read it in any European language to which non-Europeans have perforce found a colonial inroad.

  On the Columbia University campus the Persian epic has spoken in our common English language of instruction. New York, where my students and I read the Shahnameh on the Columbia campus, is a bilingual (English and Spanish) or indeed multilingual city. We pride ourselves that there are hundreds of restaurants in our city offering local cuisines from around the globe, and then with justified pride we add that you can order your food in those languages. My own younger children go to a local public school, where my wife and I regularly go to teach their classmates about the stories of the Shahnameh on various occasions, such as the Persian New Year of Noruz, where we tell them the stories of the mythical king Jamshid, during whose reign this festivity was inaugurated. From elementary public schools to classrooms in a major Ivy League university we are witness to the resurrection of the Persian epic in languages and climes not dreamed of in Ferdowsi’s wildest imaginings. Both English and Spanish are colonial languages; their “Western” provenance was globalized from Asia and Africa to Latin America by a planetary imperialism that has now proved to be a two-edged sword—we have appropriated the language of our colonizers and speak back to them in their (now our) own languages. In the Shahnameh former colonies of these languages have found their own epic.

  In addition to the world in which it was initially produced, and the world in which the Persian epic now finds itself, there is another world, a third world, the world of the Shahnameh itself, the inner dynamics of its textual coherence, the manner in which its stories come together and make a dramatic theater of the human condition. The Shahnameh is usually divided into three major components: the mythical, the heroic, and the historical, each seamlessly connected to the other by a singular and singularly self-conscious poet, creating a narrative cohesion entirely rooted in its dramatic thrust. Its most famous and powerful stories—such as of Zahhak the serpent shouldered; Rostam and Sohrab; Seyavash and Sudabeh; Bizhan and Manizheh; Rostam and Esfandiar—are all from its mythic and heroic parts, loved,
admired, recited, and performed around the world. The central significance of each story holds the Persian epic together, gives it dramatic continuity, and offers a share of sustained moral continuity to the epic.

  How are these three components of the Shahnameh connected to one another and how do they gel to make its world coherent? How are we to read the stories each section entails, and how can a reader today pick up a story of the Shahnameh and relate to it? In the first two parts of the Shahnameh we come to understand its most universal thematic: how the world was first created, who invented writing and why, or how civilization began and social classes were formed. The Shahnameh is full of amazing stories of just kings who lose their divine gift of grace and become tyrants, tyrant conquerors who grow serpents on their shoulders, white-haired sons abandoned to the wilderness by their parents to be raised by wild but civilizing birds, heroes born via “C-section” because they are too enormous for natural birth. But why are these stories important—beyond a mere antiquarian interest in a very old book and the even older stories it relates? In the Shahnameh we come to know fathers who deny their sons their kingdom, and other fathers who inadvertently kill their own sons. We read about young stepmothers who covet their handsome stepsons. The Shahnameh is full of extraordinary deeds, amazing friendships, deadly rivalries, exemplary chivalries, and also very nasty treacheries. As we read these stories we need to ask ourselves, what happens when mythic, heroic, and historical times are woven seamlessly into one another? What happens to the force of time and the power of narrative when mythic, heroic, and historical epochs are all integral to one another, pointing to a whole different spatial and temporal domain.

  These three worlds—the world of the poet, the world of the poem, and the world in which we live and read the Persian epic—come together to make the Shahnameh command a worldly presence beyond which no conception of world literature has any claim to legitimacy; it is in fact childish and juvenile. It is simply astonishing how long this world has gone without realizing its own vacuity. Only an imperial hubris could have so sustained it. Today the Eurocentric world has theorized itself into universal nullity. It is clueless about other worlds it has not just ignored but also in fact concealed. Perhaps the most important lesson for me after teaching the Shahnameh year after year has been this extraordinary sense of wonder when my students do not quite know the contours of the this-worldly and otherworldly domains of the Persian epic they were experiencing. The multilayered temporality of the Shahnameh, and the fusion of multiple worlds it contains and maps out, is initially vertiginous and then exhilarating for students. Intentionally, I never taught only a segment of the Shahnameh. I insisted on the totality of the experience. The result was an initially formidable fear of the total at the beginning eventually yielding to the pleasure of discovery. The world of the authorial voice of the poet yields to the world of the mythic universe he crafts, before reaching its zenith in the heroic world of its chief protagonists and then descending upon our own time with gentility and grace. The movements from one world to another were organic, imperceptive, transpositional—the effect transformative. “To tell you the truth, Professor Dabashi,” one well-read sophomore student once told me, “I shiver with excitement and bewilderment—how is it that I did not know this book even existed?”

  THE TRIALS AND TRIBULATIONS OF LITERARY NATIONALISM

  As we move to place the Shahnameh into its new global context and read it as an epic integral to an expanded revised conception of world literature, we need to be equally aware of its false and forced “nationalization” into a nativist corner in the course of postcolonial state building. The Shahnameh is not a “national epic.” That forced nationalization of the Persian epic is a key element toward a literary nativism that in and of itself precludes the Persian epic from being read in the domain of “World Literature,” as it is understood today. Though markedly different from Virgil’s Aeneid (29–19 B.C.E.) in its imperialist projections, the Shahnameh is equally definitive to a particularly poignant moment in the formation of Muslim empires. It therefore belongs to a decidedly imperial age, and yet as such it has been subjected to a massive epistemic violence to “nationalize” it. We need to mark this epistemic violence and overcome it if the Shahnameh is to find its rightful place in world literature in terms domestic to its own literary prowess.

  With the commencement of the European Enlightenment in earnest late in the eighteenth century and its subsequent colonial extension into the four corners of the globe, both colonial and anticolonial nationalist movements undertook extended projects of linguistic and literary nationalism. A national language, a nationalized literature, culture, and heritage, and thereafter the official commissioning of an encyclopedia, a demarcated map, a colorful flag, an airline, a rousing anthem, and soon a film festival became chief among a whole accoutrement of symbolic suggestions that were to hold the new state together and force it to forget its recent vintage, imagining a history and a continuity for itself since time immemorial and thus ad infinitum. The aggressive nationalization of a singular and official language and literature became the principal ideological project of colonial modernity for the making of a “nation-state,” an entirely colonial product. Nations were violently tagged along these forced state-building projects. The active canonization of a language and a corresponding literature was achieved at great expense to both subnationalized and supranational languages and literatures. In the case of Persian, a patently imperial and supranational language, any number of subnationalized languages and literatures—Kurdish, Baluchi, Gilaki, Azari, and so forth—were aggressively suppressed under Reza Shah’s state-building ideology, as was neglected the supranational fact of the spoken and written Persian in non-Iranian contexts such as in Central and South Asian territories. Persian was the lingua franca of successive empires, from the Samanids through the Mongols and beyond. That language was subsequently integral to three simultaneous empires of the Mughals, the Safavids, and even the Ottomans, including major regions of the Russian Empire. All that historical reality was overshadowed in the course of the fateful encounter with European colonial modernity when Persian eventually emerged as the official language of a single postcolonial state, Iran, disregarding its presence far beyond the colonially drawn Iranian borders in its neighbors, including but not limited to Afghanistan and Tajikistan.

  The fact that Arabic was the lingua franca of much of an intellectual history to which Iranians were historically a party, the fact that the official Tehrani dialect was not the spoken and written Persian of much of the newly consolidated nation-state, the fact that the overwhelming majority of Iranians spoke their Persian in a slightly or drastically different accent and dialect from that of the Reza Shah central administration, and ultimately the fact that people from the Mediterranean shores to the walls of China spoke and wrote Persian without being “Iranian” in the newly coined postcolonial sense of the term did not bother the officiated project of linguistic and literary nationalism as a state ideology that was brought to brutal exactitude during the reign of Reza Shah and his state-building project—forcing the language of an imperial civilization into the tight narrows of a postcolonial state. Contingent on this manufactured project of linguistic and literary nationalism as a state ideology was a concomitant sense of “racial purity” that—odd as it may seem in a geographical hybridity that had Iranian, Turkish, Mongol, Arab, African, and Indian heritages running through its history—inevitably collapsed to bigoted depth during the flirtations of the Pahlavis with the racist sentiments of Nazi Germany. Ferdowsi’s masterpiece was dragged into the nasty domain of such suspect state-building projects with jingoistic nationalism as its dominant ideology borrowed and expanded from Nazi Germany.

  The orchestral canonization of the masterpieces of Persian literature into a fabricated linguistic and literary state-sponsored nationalism soon led to their iconic adaptation as the soaring symbolics of state building, elemental to a politics of postcolonial identity that ultimately detextualize
d these works of art and caused the pacification of their internal poetic tensions—tensions that at once constituted these texts and yet by pulling them in contradictory directions sustained their immortality. Literary historiography, whether by competent Orientalists like Carl Hermann Ethé, Jan Rypka, and E. G. Browne or by the patristic generation of modern Persian literati like Mohammad Qazvini, Badi’ al-Zaman Foruzanfar, and Zabihollah Safa, became the principal mode of operation in a concerted effort to canonize the masterpieces of Persian literary imagination into the iconic signposts of its historical continuity. These discursive constitutions of linguistic and literary nationalism as state ideology in turn became the towering markers of a politics of identity that both the colonial nationalism of the Pahlavis and the anticolonial nationalism opposing it partook in unhealthy doses. Ideologically canonized, symbolically iconicized, and massively instrumentalized at the service of a state-building project, these texts were forced to repress their characteristic and definitive moments of narrative poetics, their paradoxical self-contradictions as they moved from a decidedly imperial to a national context, their innate nonnational politics, their in fact antinational sentiments (“national” in the postcolonial sense of the term), their countercanonical aesthetics, their multifaceted hermeneutics, and ultimately their richly multifaceted semiotics. The result was the violent deworlding of the world of the Shahnameh, robbing it of its patently imperial pedigree, as a particularly susceptible text to such abuses.

  In the making of a long literary historiography that fit state-sponsored nationalism, masters of poetic imagination like Nezami Ganjavi (1141–1209) were placed next to any number of old versifiers simply to narrate the continuity of a literary history. Iconoclastic rebels like Omar Khayyam Nishapuri (1048–1131) were either pacified for a cliché romanticized reading or canonized for the sake of a consistent quietism. Cosmogonic visionaries like Maulana Jalal al-Din Rumi (1207–1273) were foregrounded to anticipate their later and lighter versions like Abd al-Rahman Jami (1414–1492). Sa’di and Hafez lost their universal differences and became iconic choices without substantive alterities. The inner dialectics constitutional to the making of any literary work of art were therefore perforce repressed in a concerted effort to manhandle these texts to violate their definitive characters as works of art and appropriated them into a militarily regimented project of textual state building. Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh was caught in the snare of this forced manufacturing of a singularly national history for entire traditions of multiple imperial pedigree. The result was the systemic subversion of a literary tradition wrested away from its historical habitat and placed at the service of colonial and postcolonial state building. This violent epistemic distortion has categorically prefigured Persian literary historiography.1