The Shahnameh

by Hamid Dabashi

  Human fragility and imperial rivalries now commence apace. Fereydun is concerned that after his death his eldest son will conspire against Iraj, his youngest. So while he is still alive he divides his realm among them: to Salm, his eldest, he gives the west; to Tur, his second son, he gives the east (China and Turkestan); and to his youngest, Iraj, he gives Iran and Arabia. Salm and Tur are jealous of Iraj and his more opulent realm and conspire against their brother. They lead their respective armies from east and west, encamp in the vicinity of Fereydun’s palace, and send him a message to the effect that he has been unjust in dispatching them to the east and west of his realm and giving the best portion to Iraj. Iraj is reluctant to fight his brothers. He carries a friendly message from Fereydun to his brothers and pleads with them not to fight him. Salm and Tur are relentless, especially when they see that their respective armies are entirely drawn to Iraj and his Divine Gift of Grace. They take him to a tent and angrily behead him. The fratricide shakes the fabric of the epic narrative. We no longer think we are reading a work of fiction. We are in the bosom of murderous history.

  When Iraj is killed by his two brothers, one of his courtier companions, Mahafarid, is found pregnant. Months after Iraj’s death, Mahafarid gives birth to a girl. When this girl grows up, Fereydun marries her off to Pashang, his nephew, a valiant and chivalrous general in his army. From this marriage a son is born, Manuchehr, whom Fereydun holds as dear as if he were Iraj. Manuchehr grows up to become a valiant prince and is crowned by Fereydun as his successor. Salm and Tur again wage war, now against Manuchehr. But this time around Manuchehr kills them both. Fereydun dies soon after, and Manuchehr becomes the solitary and just king. Between Iraj and his grandson Manuchehr, generational successions in the Shahnameh have extended from the mythic to the heroic, giving a sense of historical continuity to the very idea of “Iran” as an imperial destiny. By now we have a sense of that imperial destiny as both worldly and otherworldly, material and moral, factual and imaginative. The imaginative geography is self-transcendental. It banks on stories it has already told us and it anticipates the stories we are yet to read.

  It is during the reign of Manuchehr that Rostam, arguably the greatest hero of the Shahnameh, is born. The story of his birth begins with that of his grandfather Sam, the son of Nariman, who is the most valiant general in Manuchehr’s army and rules in Zabol. After a long time of expectation, finally a beautiful woman bears Sam a son, who is perfect in every respect except his youthful hair is completely white. Sam is embarrassed to show his infant son to his court lest they laugh at him. He has the infant boy taken away from his mother and abandoned at the foot of the Alborz Mountain. The legendary bird Simorgh is flying down from Alborz in search of food for its children when it sees the infant and takes him to its children. He grows up with Simorgh and its children to become a beautiful and valiant hero. Meanwhile, Sam has nightmares over his abominable act of abandoning his own son to beasts and goes to find him on Alborz. Ahura Mazda forgives Sam his sin and Simorgh returns his son to him, telling the young lad that it has named him Dastan. Dastan is reluctant to leave Simorgh and his mountainous habitat. Simorgh assures him that a better future awaits him with his natural father. To alleviate his anxieties, Simorgh gives Dastan one of its feathers and tells him that anytime he is in trouble all he has to do is to burn the feather and Simorgh will be there to help. Dastan follows his father to his court, where he receives his second name, Zal-e Zar, on account of being white haired. With the story of Zal, the son of Sam, the Oedipal (or what we might call Sohrabaneh) complex at the heart of the Shahnameh assumes its most potent form. Here we have to be careful neither to approximate such “Oedipal” moments to their Greek referents nor leave them theoretically mute. A father inadvertently killing his own son remains archetypal to the enduring significance of the Persian epic.

  Zal becomes a valiant hero in his father’s court. Soon Sam leaves his court to his son’s care and leaves for Mazandaran to fight against Manuchehr’s enemies, where demons had again revolted. Meanwhile Zal travels from Zabol to Kabul, a country that was under the authority of Mehrab. Mehrab, the king of Kabul, is a descendant of Zahhak’s but a wise and good-natured man. Zal and Mehrab meet on a hunting expedition near Kabul. Zal hears of Mehrab’s beautiful daughter Rudabeh and falls in love with her. Mehrab finds Zal a worthy hero and invites him to his palace. Zal refuses because he believes his father, Sam, and his king, Manuchehr, will object to his affiliating with a descendant of Zahhak’s. Mehrab goes back to his palace and describes the valiant Sam to his wife, Sindokht, and his daughter Rudabeh. Rudabeh in turn falls in love with Zal and dispatches her five beautiful ladies-in-waiting to his hunting encampment. They meet Zal and invite him to come to Rudabeh’s palace. Zal goes to Rudabeh and expresses his love to her, but, alas, he fears that his father, Sam, and his king, Manuchehr, will not allow him to marry a descendant of Zahhak’s. Rudabeh bursts into tears and confesses her love for Zal. Zal in turn prays to God Almighty and promises to ask his father and his king to allow them to marry. Sam agrees to his son’s request after he consults with astrologers and they assure him that from this union a hero of unsurpassed nobility and power will arise. But he stipulates that he needs to secure Manuchehr’s permission. Zal and Rudabeh constitute one of the most beautiful love stories of the Shahnameh. Such stories border the Persian epic with intensely romantic episodes that enrich the sense of war and love, heroism and romance in a mutually enabling way. The text by now has become self-sustained, a world entirely independent of the uses to which it will be put throughout its long and tumultuous history.

  Meanwhile, Sindokht, Rudabeh’s mother, discovers her daughter’s secret love for the Persian prince and is horrified by the prospect of exciting the Persian king’s ancient animosity against Zahhak and his progeny. Mehrab is enraged at the news of his daughter’s falling in love with Zal but controls his anger when he hears that Sam has in fact agreed to the union. He is baffled as to how Sam or Manuchehr could agree to a union with one of Zahhak’s descendants. His fears are justified when Manuchehr hears of this story, is fearful of a son being born of this union and coming to take away his throne and return it to one of Zahhak’s descendants, and he thus commands Sam, before he has a chance to plead with the monarch, to go to Kabul and destroy Mehrab. Sam leads his army to Kabul to perform his duty to Manuchehr, his king. Zal hears of this and intercepts his father’s army and pleads with him not to attack Kabul, reminding him of the hardship he has endured since childhood. Sam is desperate and sends a letter to Manuchehr asking him please to spare Mehrab and allow Zal to marry Rudabeh. Mehrab is enraged by this whole episode and wants to kill his wife and daughter. But Sindokht asks her husband to allow her to take some gifts and go and talk to Sam. Sindokht meets with Sam and persuades him not to attack her kingdom and allow their children to marry. Meanwhile Zal himself carries his father’s letter to Manuchehr and pleads with his king to allow him to marry Rudabeh. Manuchehr asks him to stay awhile until he consults with his advisers. His advisers and astrologers convene for three days and happily inform him that this indeed is an auspicious marriage and beneficial to his kingdom. Manuchehr keeps Zal at his court for another couple of days and tests his wisdom and courage. Finally, Manuchehr writes a letter to Sam and agrees to Zal’s marriage to Rudabeh. The two lovers finally marry in happiness. Zal becomes the king of Zabol, and Sam returns to his services to Manuchehr in Mazandaran province. Ferdowsi is at his absolute storytelling height in telling the story of Zal and Rudabeh. He is intense, passionate, engaged, crafting the cliff-hangers with impeccable dramatic precision and psychological depth. We are no longer in the grand sweep of epic history. We are in the grips of the minutiae of palpable passions. The subconscious of the text now reverberates with the most potent human emotions. How did we get here, from those grand mythic beginnings to these detailed miniatures of worldly affairs? The Shahnameh is delivering itself from its own textual subconscious.

  Soon after her marriage to Zal, Ru
dabeh becomes pregnant. After about nine months she is extremely heavy but cannot give natural birth. In desperation, Zal burns the feather received from Simorgh, who instantly appears and congratulates Zal that he is about to have a valiant son, but that he is too big to be born naturally. The mythical bird instructs that a very wise and skillful physician ought to be summoned and surgery performed on Rudabeh so that her infant can be born from her lower abdomen. So Rostam is born through a “Caesarian” (or what we might even venture to call Rostamaneh) operation. Rostam grows up to become the most valiant hero of the entire world, beginning with his childhood and his showing signs of an extraordinary physical power and moral rectitude. Among the early manifestations of his heroism is his avenging the death of his great-grandfather, Nariman, who was killed by a stone thrown from the Sepand Citadel. The Persian kings never conquered this citadel, and Nariman was dispatched by Fereydun to conquer it, but he lost his life in the process. Rostam follows his father’s advice, disguises himself as a salt merchant, and infiltrates the citadel, disarming its guards and conquering it for his father and grandfather. The birth and emergence of Rostam as the imperial hero of the epic becomes a momentous occasion in the Shahnameh narrative. His triumphs and tragedies become definitive to the traumatic nexus of the text. Both his own tragic history and the stories in which he is involved define the Persian epic for what it is: the subconscious of a people, aware of their imperial past, cast into postcolonial destinies beyond their control.

  The stories of Sam and Simorgh, Zal and Rudabeh, and ultimately the birth of Rostam are narratively the most important events during the reign of Manuchehr. But the most important political event of his reign is his battle with Turan. As Rostam grows to become a valiant hero, Manuchehr dies and entrusts his throne to his son Nozar, alerting him that Turan is about to invade Iran and assuring him that his three generations of heroes, Sam, the son of Nariman, Zal his son, and, most important, his grandson Rostam, will be his staunchest supporters. Soon after the death of Manuchehr and as soon as his son Nozar ascends the Iranian throne, Pashang, the king of Turan, seeks to avenge the humiliating defeat of Tur at the hand of Manuchehr and dispatches his son Afrasiab to invade Iran. Nozar is defeated and killed by Afrasiab. Rostam and Zal mobilize the Iranians against the Turanians, while Zav Tahmasp and Garshasp, two inconsequential kings in an apocryphal part of the Shahnameh, hold the monarchy together. This is the moment when we have a premonition of the rise of Rostam as a central moral core of the Persian imperial order. Rostam becomes definitive to the Persian epic, his consistent heroism and tragic end emblematic of the moral predicament of the heroic age. On the moral map of the Persian epic, he is the allegorical sign of the uneasy parental predicament of history: born out of chaos, father to a tragic end, putting an end to his own posterity.

  Finally, Zal and a group of Iranian nobles select Key Qobad as the monarch. Key Qobad is a just and effective monarch who expels the Turanians from Iran. Key Kavous, Key Qobad’s son, succeeds his father. His reign is inundated with one mishap and catastrophe after another. He attacks the demons of Mazandaran and is captured by them. Rostam has to go and save him. He attacks the kingdom of Hamavaran and is captured by his future father-in-law, the beautiful Sudabeh’s father. Rostam goes and rescues him. He fancies being able to fly and has himself built a throne and carried by eagles but crashes in enemy territory. Rostam goes and saves him. Narratively, the most exciting event of Kavous’s reign is Rostam’s Seven Trials, canonizing him as the greatest hero of the entire Shahnameh. The most tragic episode of the entire Shahnameh also occurs during the reign of Kavous, when Rostam inadvertently kills his own son, Sohrab. (Matthew Arnold’s “Sohrab and Rustum” is based on this story.)

  An equally tragic and politically far more consequential trauma during the reign of Kavous (as I have had occasions to refer to it before) is the story of Seyavash, Kavous’s valiant son. Rostam, as will be recalled, raises Seyavash to become a gallant prince, worthy of the Persian throne. Upon his return to his father’s court, Sudabeh, Kavous’s young wife, falls in love with her stepson. He, however, refuses to return her love, which enrages the stepmother, who in turn accuses Seyavash of trying to rape her. Seyavash submits to a public test of his innocence and gallops triumphantly through a bonfire. Disheartened, however, by the whole episode, Seyavash leaves his father’s court and leads the Iranian army against the Turanian forces and defeats them at the border. He signs a treaty with the Turanians and sends a message to that effect to his father, Kavous. Kavous is enraged by the treaty and orders Seyavash to kill the Turanian entourage at his court. Seyavash refuses to betray the terms of his treaty with Afrasiab and seeks political asylum in Turan. He is initially welcomed but subsequently killed in a plot by Garsivaz, King Afrasiab’s jealous brother, whom Seyavash had defeated in his battle against Turan. Seyavash marries two women while in Turan, initially Jarireh, daughter of Piran, Afrasiab’s vizier, and subsequently Farigis, Afrasiab’s daughter. Seyavash’s son from Farigis, Khosrow, escapes from Turan, returns to Iran, succeeds his paternal grandfather Kavous, and wages a war against Turan to avenge his father. Among the casualties of the war, however, is Forud, Khosrow’s half brother. The wars between Iran and Turan end with the killing of Afrasiab and the subsequent death of Kavous.

  The tragic ends of Sohrab, Seyavash, and Esfandiar will collectively constitute the traumatic epicenter of the Shahnameh, where its mythic and heroic phases prepare the way for its historical consciousness. That historical consciousness is always already conscious of its mythic and heroic dispositions. In all these seminal cases, arrogant and self-centered fathers cause the death of their respective sons—changing the course of history with a tragedy that had predestined the fate of the Shahnameh heroes. Filicide of varied forms and dispositions connect the heroic phase of the Persian epic as the foregrounding of its historical drama. But around these three acts of deliberate or inadvertent filicide the three components of the Shahnameh—mythic, heroic, and historical—will ultimately lose their temporal distinctions and come together as a fusion of fact and fiction definitive to the entirety of Ferdowsi’s masterpiece.

  With the death of Key Kavous and Afrasiab the heroic age of the Shahnameh eventually comes to an end. The history of Iran as mapped out in the Persian epic is thus divided into three successive dynasties, each corresponding to a main narrative theme of the text: the Pishdadids in the mythic age and its early legendary kings, who established civilization against forces of chaos and mayhem; then come the Kiyanids in the heroic age, whose kings and heroes see their empire to its highest achievements as they fought against the external enemy, the Turanians; and finally comes the historic age of the Sassanids, the last dynasty to rule a unified Iran before the advent of Islam. Via a beautiful Alexander Romance, Ferdowsi links the end of the Kiyanids to the rise of the Sassanid period and ends with their defeat by the Arab army. Each era and dynasty is seamlessly linked to the next, producing a narrative suspension of stories and episodes in one panoramic view of transhistoric sweep, compared with which the limited span of Homer’s epics pales, and yet the Shahnameh remains Shakespearian in its detailed dramatic episodes. The fact that we need to link two different European hallmarks, Homer and Shakespeare, to make the Shahnameh familiar to present-day readers is among other indications that its global reception will need to come closer to its own inner worldliness, held together by successive traumatic episodes.

  THE IMPOSSIBLE MISSION

  This detailed account of the Shahnameh through its varied narrative suspense has allowed me some comfortable space in which to draw you closer to its logic and narrative. Let me now take you back to some more specifics.

  The impossible mission of Esfandiar on which his father sends him is to go and do nothing less than to capture, bind, and bring the world champion Rostam to his court, knowing too well this is an impossibility. It is a homicidal mission. Goshtasp wants his son Esfandiar to be murdered by Rostam, for his ambitious presence at his court he considers a
threat to his throne. Rostam will never allow anyone to tie him and bring him to the royal court. He is a kingmaker, not the subject of any king. Esfandiar travels to Rostam and commands him to accompany him as his father has demanded. Rostam loves Esfandiar and pleads with him to refrain from asking him an impossibility. He is willing to accompany Esfandiar on foot while he is riding on his horse as a sign of his humility. Esfandiar is blinded to reality and demands Rostam’s total surrender and to be publicly humiliated and tied. Rostam refuses, and the two begin their tragic and doomed battle, despite their deepest love and admiration for each other. Rostam is almost defeated just as in his battle with his son Sohrab, but Simorgh instructs him that he can kill the otherwise immortal Esfandiar only by targeting his eyes, which he does and thus kills the ambitious prince. The battle of Rostam and Esfandiar is perhaps the most dramatic, the most “cinematic,” of all battles in the Shahnameh.

  At this point it is imperative to remember that the Shahnameh stories are stories not histories, left for us since time immemorial, however rooted in some distant historical fact they may be. Whatever roots they may have had in history, it is in the majestic hands of Ferdowsi the poet, the storyteller, that they are turned into works of art, very much as King Lear or Hamlet or any other work of Shakespeare may have had roots in some history. This means that the Shahnameh characters are narrative tropes not human beings, personae not persons. As literary tropes these characters transcend history to enter the realm of mythic realities. This means that these characters are not caught in actual familial but in a symbolic societal web of affiliations, integral to the world of the Shahnameh as an epic. From Deleuze and Guattari’s collective work we have learned how desires are the products of social narratives not of familial relations. The production of social desire is therefore a plot narrative domestic to the world of the Persian epic. While for us this means a closing in of the social and the psychoanalytical, a literary-critical extension of it means that in the Shahnameh these stories are narratively performed, and as such the social context of the characters and the world in which they live becomes indicative of the human condition that has occasioned them. Theorizing that world therefore must begin from the structure of desires it invokes and move forward toward the manner in which such desires become conscious of their worldliness. At the dramatic heart of the major Shahnameh stories dwells this narrative constitution of desire.