Yet as all other forms of suppression, these politically punctuated textual repressions have continued to agitate in the subconscious of the texts, as the blinded and unread subtexts of the Persian epic, and await future critical attention. No other text in the history of Persian literary masterpieces has been so consistently used and abused in the services of state-sponsored linguistic and literary nationalism as has the Shahnameh. Ferdowsi’s hemistich Ajam zendeh kardam bedin Parsi (I revived Iranians with this Persian) and his poetic rendition of the letter of Rostam Farrokhzad at the Battle of Qadisiyyah have been systematically abused to turn him into the very father of modern Persian linguistic and literary nationalism as a potent state ideology. In an anachronistic misreading of the early Islamic history in Iran, literary historians began to place Ferdowsi in the line of a succession of poets like Mas’udi Marvazi (896–956) and then Daqiqi, who had sought to collect and versify old Iranian epics in order to preserve the pre-Islamic Iranian heritage.2 In this ultranationalist agenda to legitimize the Pahlavi dynasty, Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh lost any narrative complexity constitutional to its text that did not add up to serve that abusive overriding project. The poetic elegance of Ferdowsi’s diction and the magisterial composition of his Shahnameh were in no need of casting the Persian epic against Arabs, Turks, or any other people. But it was precisely in such extratextual terms that Ferdowsi’s masterpiece was now read, abused, and canonized.
The fact that the first major translation of the Shahnameh was made in the thirteenth century into Arabic by Qawam al-Din Fath ibn Ali ibn Muhammad al-Bundari (of Kurdish origin) for an Arab prince, a translation that even today is one of the major sources for preparing a critical edition of the original text, and the fact that the second extant translation of the Shahnameh was made into Turkish by Ali Afandi early in the sixteenth century, did not prevent such ideologically foregrounded literary nationalism from racially abusing what it scornfully labeled “the Arabs and the Turks.” The literary significance of the actual text of the Shahnameh in its immediate and distant neighborhoods, its repeated translations in prose and poetry and then subsequent scholarship in Arabic and Turkish, in the Ottoman and Mughal Empires, are all further testimonies to the postcolonial manufacturing of literary nationalism as a critical component of the colonial project of state-sponsored nationalism in which Iranian, Arab, and Turkish variations of the theme have competed against one another. No literary masterpiece—Arabic, Persian, or Turkish—can ever retrieve its worldly origin in such a nasty colonial context in which they are to plead to European or American literary theorists for recognition.
In its colonial context, Iranian nationalism as a potent state ideology is worse than Arab nationalism, and they are both worse than Turkish nationalism and vice versa, ad infinitum, ad absurdum, and ad nauseam: all of them systematically distorting the content and context of their literary masterpieces to manufacture a colonially conditioned sense of selfhood. Colonial nationalism, whether in conjunction with or in opposition against colonialism (and in both cases as a state-building project), has been a persistent plague at the colonial ends of capitalist modernity, systematically distorting the cultural heritage of peoples. Specific forms of colonial nationalism—Arab, Iranian, Turkish, and so on—represent the classic case of divide and rule, where the Arabs are pitted against the Persians, the Persians against the Turks, and then each one of them against the rest. Colonial nationalism in effect, and in the most self-denigrating manner possible, partakes in a deadly dose of white identification, where Iranians in fact denigrate the Arabs, the Arabs the Iranians, both the Turks, and the Turks the rest, precisely in terms articulated for them by their moral and material colonizers. Subnationalized cultures—such as the Kurds, the Baluchis, the Berbers, the Copts, or the Turkmens—are particularly short-circuited in this global project of colonial nationalism. The result is not just the most pernicious forms of self-lowering tribalism with terrifying political consequences, all to the benefit of those in the position of power. Equally damaged in the process is the literary and artistic heritage of these cultures that are trapped in a deadly cycle of empty self-aggrandizement and iconic ossifications, categorically distanced from their creative effervescence and emancipatory potentials. In the specific case of the Shahnameh, this literary nationalism has perpetrated lasting epistemic violence on the Persian epic, deworlded its enduring worldliness, and weakened its poetic power and rightful place in any meaningful understanding of world literature.
HOW ELSE TO READ THE SHAHNAMEH?
The state-sponsored nationalization of literature and the blindness and insights it simultaneously occasioned in the reading of the masterpieces of world literature have now exhausted their epistemic energies. Today texts such as the Shahnameh no longer yield themselves to merely iconic adaptations for outdated state-building projects. As literary works of art they have survived the uses and abuses to which they were subjected in the course of linguistic and literary nationalism. What I now cautiously propose here is a preliminary attempt at retrieving the hitherto unnoticed and decidedly unresolved, in equal terms imperceptible and irresolvable, paradox at the heart of the Shahnameh as an epic narrative—namely, the tension between its politics and its poetics, or between Ferdowsi as a storyteller and Ferdowsi as a history teller. My principal proposal is that there is a narrative tension, a poetic paradox, in the text of the Shahnameh, a discursive dialogue, as it were, between its political narrative and its poetic discourse, between the historical matters it evidently reports and the storytelling manners it deliberately purports. The Shahnameh is a book of stories composed in poetry: that fact in and of itself constitutes a combustive narrative tension in the text and agitation of its poetic registers. My argument is that Ferdowsi’s poetry formally revolts against the content of the stories it records. In the disguise of telling the history, Ferdowsi’s poetry in effect subverts it and liberates the hidden story from the hideout of that history. The playful storyteller in the Shahnameh is up against all the subsequent serious historians who come to abuse the text, as the story plays itself against any and all sober histories.
As we know, Ferdowsi inherited all these stories and reported them faithfully, but my contention is that in his poetic rendition, in the manner he reports these stories, he contrapuntally subverts them. The question is, what does it mean to say that these stories existed before and that Ferdowsi put them into poetry? Before Ferdowsi, we know that Mas’udi Marvazi and Daqiqi Tusi are also reported to have put parts of the Persian epic into poetry. What is this urge to rewrite history as poetry? What happens to prose when it becomes poetry? Ferdowsi deliberately sets himself the task of turning these stories into poetry. The enduring poetry dismantles the politics of its prosaic intention, as the storyteller negates the history teller it carries along. The text of the Shahnameh is thus against it context. Story after story, the text against the context, the poet against the politics, the story against the history, the Shahnameh undermines its own task, and yet in that very self-negating act of undermining, the Persian epic effectively defines its ulterior task—the task of poetry. To be noble in the Shahnameh is to be against nobility, to be civil is to be against the normative power of civilization—and that is the poetic paradox at the heart of the Shahnameh. Ferdowsi reports the story of Rostam and Sohrab, but as tragedy. He narrates the innocence of Seyavash, but his judiciously staged mise-en-scène leaves little doubt that Seyavash is tempted by Sudabeh. The point of this argument is to see how the poetics of the Shahnameh undermines and agitates its politics, or how Ferdowsi the storyteller undermines Ferdowsi the history teller, or how the manner of the Shahnameh cuts through its matter, or how its ideal subverts its real and then keeps up the hope of a constellation of sentiments it thus generates. The Shahnameh is thus at one and the same time a political diagnosis of a disease and the aesthetic prognosis of a release. As a work of art, the Shahnameh does not commence from an ideality but from a reality, which it then subverts into and through an emancipatory a
esthetics. The Shahnameh reports of political atrocities of all sorts but then assures its readers of an emancipatory release, embedded in its own poetic disposition. The Shahnameh explicates a political culture as the predicament of a people and then implicates an emancipatory way out. Without coming to terms with that animating paradox of the Shahnameh, we will fail to read it. In this sense, we might even suggest that the Shahnameh has the Qur’an as its narrative prototype. While the Qur’an narrates biblical stories in order to push them forward toward new metaphysical and moral conclusions, the Shahnameh, too, reports of ancient stories in order to sublate them toward superior poetic, aesthetic, and moral reflections.
To make this point clear, it is useful to compare the poetic composition of Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh early in the eleventh century with the political disposition of Nezam al-Molk’s Siyasatnameh later in that same century.3 If the Siyasatnameh is a diagnosis of a disease, the Shahnameh is the prognosis of a cure. In the Siyasatnameh, stories that the eminent Saljuqid vizier and political theorist has gathered are subservient to the political purpose of the prose, while in the Shahnameh exactly the opposite takes place, and the political purpose of the composition is subservient to the poetic it privileges. In the Siyasatnameh, Nezam al-Molk sets his discourse by first postulating a theoretical proposition on the art and craft of statesmanship, or guidelines for princely behavior, and then by way of demonstration of his point he narrates a story. The confinements of the story are so tightly controlled, so hermetically sealed, that their agitating energies can scarcely escape their straitjacket detention and disturb the deadly peace of the treatise. In the Shahnameh, on the contrary, that peace is perpetually disturbed, melodiously meandered, and the poetically emancipated stories—pagan kids let loose from a long day’s incarceration in a Catholic school—roam the streets and alleys of the narrative in their rambunctious roaring toward freedom and emancipation of the whole universe they create, washing their innocent memories clean of every and all sad sagas they were just taught.
Ferdowsi achieves this dialectic through his poetic diction: the Shahnameh is the defining moment of its language as an act of worldly civility. What the Persian-speaking worlds have done to and with the Shahnameh suggests the civilizing panorama of their literary culture. In the cherished tradition of adab, which ranges across a number of languages and literatures in the context of Islamic empires, the Persian version of the movement has historically celebrated the very fact of the written language as the supreme art that marks and distinguishes a civilized human being. First and foremost, the defining moment of the Shahnameh is its language, its logos, its sokhan, with the praise of which it in fact begins. There are devoutly literate Persians who treat the text of the Shahnameh the same way an Orthodox Jew treats the text of the Torah, a Christian the Gospels, or a Muslim the Qur’an. During the heyday of linguistic and literary nationalism, the Shahnameh was elevated to the canonical text of the nation. But long before that, the Shahnameh had been celebrated as the very measure and model of Persian diction and poetic sublimity. Immediately related to the centrality of language in the Shahnameh is its poetic elegance, the crowning achievement of Persian poetry. What we read in the Shahnameh is the celebration of the poetic occasion when language delivers all its hidden promises, and then more. Ferdowsi’s poetry is the very measure of where the lyrical and the epical collapse into a singular act of poetic confirmation of moral agency. Then comes the performative aspect of the Shahnameh in stagings in public recitations by the naqqal. Immediately related to the narrative performance of the Shahnameh is its calligraphic performance in manuscripts. The calligraphic performance of the Shahnameh is immediately linked to painting, or manuscript illustration. The Shahnameh is a single, sustained act of creative ingenuity—from the manner in which it is composed to the ways it is recited, written, and illustrated. The Shahnameh is a singular site of all such creative occasions, in its entirety the poetic composition of one historical person, a poet, Hakim Abolqasem Mansur ibn Hasan ibn Sharafshah Ferdowsi (ca. 940–1020), born, raised, and ultimately buried in the Bazh village in the Tabaran province of Tus in Khorasan. As a storyteller, Ferdowsi mobilizes the earned nobility of his characters over the routinized nobility of the caste into or against which they are born, the civility of the sole individual personas he narrates against the categorical institution of monarchy into which they are located. The name Shahnameh today is the embodiment of all such sentiments. Reading the Shahnameh must begin with this hermeneutic site of its effective history.
To read Ferdowsi as a storyteller requires a closer examination of the text of the Shahnameh and its habitual division into three sections: the mythological, the heroic, and the historical.4 The mythological section begins from the commencement of the reign of Kiyumars to the uprising of Kaveh on behalf of Fereydun. This period is considered mythological because it deals with the Iranian myths of creation, from that of humanity at large to elementary forms of civilization, as we know them now. The heroic age commences with Kaveh’s uprising and ends with the murder of Rostam. This period is considered heroic because it deals with the trials and tribulations of Rostam and other heroes of the Shahnameh. The historical phase of the Persian epic commences with the reign of Bahman, the son of Esfandiar, and ends with the collapse of the Sassanids after the Arab invasion, which brings Iranian history to Ferdowsi’s own time. To be sure there is certain validity to this division of the Shahnameh. But the exaggerated anxiety over the oral and written sources of inspiration for the Shahnameh has been at considerable cost to the integrity of the text as a singular act of creative consistency. Today we no longer worry much about the historical sources of Shakespeare’s dramas, nor should we be any more attentive to the textual and oral sources of Ferdowsi’s stories. The fact that Abu Mansur’s Shahnameh was the written source at the disposal of Ferdowsi, or that Ferdowsi had access to a written text on Alexander, or that such oral historians like Makh or Azad Sarv were the source of his other stories should not and does not detract from the compositional originality of Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh as an act of artistic ingenuity. It is now an established fact that Dante had access to the Mi’raj stories about the Prophet Muhammad, and that The Divine Comedy was most probably influenced by, if not modeled on, these stories. But that supposition says nothing about The Divine Comedy as a singular act of creative inspiration. Such false anxieties over the historical origins of the Shahnameh, and the fact that its stories appear in any number of other prose texts, are a direct result of the aggressive overnationalization of the Persian epic and the insistence to read it more as historical evidence of a postcolonial nation-state rather than the creative work of an artist who inevitably takes liberties in any number of directions and for any number of poetic and aesthetic purposes.
If we were to take the text of the Shahnameh as a singular work of art, odd as it seems to insist on this (because it is like saying, “If we were to take the text of The Divine Comedy as a singular work of art …”), and then control our anxiety over sources and influences, and rescue it from the exhausted project of state-sponsored literary nationalism, then the text itself would be a solitary sign of its creator’s poetic ingenuity, from its mythological, to heroic, and then to its historical aspects, all of which are the integral components of a single work of art, issued from the creative corner of one astonishingly ingenious poet. Between the abuses perpetrated on the text by generations of its enforced canonization by literate Iranians into literary nationalism and now an insane assault on it by the proponents of the “oral formulaic” theory,5 the text of the Shahnameh needs to be rescued for a whole new generation of close and attentive literary readings. If it is not exaggerated to the level of categorical breakdown in the making of the text, the division of the Shahnameh into mythological, heroic, and historical components can in fact facilitate a theoretical perspective on its narrative composition with lasting insights into its specific poetic disposition. The division is in fact remarkably akin to Giambattista Vico’s theory o
f history, in which he divides the course of human life into divine, heroic, and human phases, presided over by gods, heroes, and humans.6 But while Vico proposed these three phases as “the course that nations run” in realizing their nature and then articulating their corresponding customs, civil states, languages, characters, jurisprudence, authority, and then even reason and judgment, in the case of Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh what we have is a particular mode of poetic disposition toward history that we can call pararealism—of being at the supplementary side of reality, alongside it and as a result a going beyond its tight grips, and thus resting in a shady location by the side of history, beside it, passing by it to one side, which results in being aside from its controlling demands. There is a sense of being amiss in pararealism, beyond and subsidiary to reality. It is that sense of being narratively parallel to and yet having a catalytic effect on how we read reality that I have in mind in the idea of a pararealist disposition of the Shahnameh’s poetics.
The Shahnameh Page 13