The Shahnameh

by Hamid Dabashi

  It is during the Samanids that the writing of the Shahnameh in both prose and poetry reaches its epochal height. This is not a coincidence. The Samanid monarchs see a decidedly political significance in the composition of these Shahnamehs. In those Shahnamehs the Iranian monarchs already detect (and rightly so) an alternative imperial consciousness to Islamic empires that were rooted in the Prophet’s legacy, the Qur’an, as well as the active formation of an Islamic scholasticism and Arabic humanism that had culturally facilitated and instrumentalized Muslim empires. The genre of the Shahnameh posits a decidedly different political genealogy, and in their compositions these Iranian monarchs detect an alternative source of political consciousness for their reign, almost entirely independent of an Islamic lineage and pedigree. As the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphs were increasingly rooted in that Islamic consciousness, the Samanid shahs and amirs were aiming at an entirely autonomous source of legitimacy in the mythic and historic consciousness of Shahnameh narratives. Without a full grasp of this genealogical origin of Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh no comparative assessment of it is possible.

  A number of key factors come together to occasion the phenomenon of the Shahnameh and give it particular political significance—the first and foremost among them is linguistic, where the Persian language assumed increased dynastic and therefore cultural significance. The second is location. The eastern provinces of the Abbasid Empire were too far from Baghdad logistically to control them with the hegemony of the imperial Arabic in any serious way. To be sure, there were many learned men who left Khorasan and went to Baghdad to join in the intellectual effervesce of the Abbasid capital and caliphate. But at the same time there was enough political autonomy and intellectual gravitation in the east to keep people of Ferdowsi’s poetic and political persuasion happy and content. The third factor is the factual evidence of the continuity of a cultural heritage in the region that demanded and secured the attention of gifted poets like Ferdowsi or, before him, Daqiqi. The fourth factor was the political need for a radically different and autonomous political and imperial consciousness, which the Shahnameh genre amply provided.

  These and related factors came together and culminated in the Samanid period when Ferdowsi began the composition of his Shahnameh, which in turn became even more significant for the Ghaznavids, who were of Turkic origin and even more in need of a local and regional imperial consciousness independent of both their own Central Asian tribal origins and of the central caliphate in Baghdad whose nascent Islamic pedigree and Arab tribalism were at the root of both the Umayyad and the Abbasid Caliphates. From the Ghaznavid dynasty forward the writing of the Shahnameh becomes a key and critical factor for securing political legitimacy for both Persianate and Turkic dynasties, so much so that when the Mongol conquest happened in the thirteenth century, both the Persian language and the Shahnameh became definitive to their imperial imagination. Having originated in the Iranian, expanded to the Turkic, and now reached the Mongol Empire, the Shahnameh became positively archetypal in its reach and resonances, pushing against the whole spectrum of scholastic and humanist traditions that the Qur’anic revelation and the prophetic traditions (Hadith) had enabled in the eastern parts of Muslim empires. Eurocentric theorization of “comparative literature” to this day remains categorically ignorant of this or any other imperial context of production of epic narratives. These theorists take Homer and Virgil and their limited (however magnificent) localities and injudiciously universalize them into “epic and empire.” There is something dialogical, contestatory, competitive about the very origin of the Persian epic that remains definitive to its genealogy. That dialectic must always be kept in mind when we place the text of the Shahnameh next to any European epic, classic or modern.

  I use “eastern” and “western” provinces of Muslim lands only in an indexical way, for Islamic scholasticism and Arab humanism were very well represented in Khorasan in the east while the significance of the Shahnameh and Persian humanism extended well into Mesopotamia in the west and ultimately became integral to the Ottoman Empire in Anatolia. By the time we get to the fragmentation of the Mongol Empire (1206–1368) in the Ilkhanids and the Timurids the Shahnameh is categorically dominant in Persianate and Islamicate empires. By the time we reach the Mughals in India, the Safavids in Persia, and the Ottomans in Asia Minor and beyond the Shahnameh is definitive to the vast spectrum of the last three Muslim empires. This latest phase of Muslim imperial imagination gives three complementary registers to the Shahnameh, its stories and sentiments holding the widest reach of Muslim territorial expansion together. This consistent and expansive reach of the Shahnameh ipso facto gives it a global and comparative significance long before and beyond what European literary theorists have called comparative literature. In short, the significance, endurance, and multifaceted presence of the Shahnameh in global imperial formations from the Samanids and the Ghaznavids through the Seljuqid and Mongols, down to the Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals, is simply too large to fit in the limited, provincial imagination of a comparative literary theory that begins with the Greek city-states and ends with the Roman Empire, before it reaches modern European imperialism and the rise of what Moretti calls modern epics.

  The Shahnameh began neither as an epic of triumph nor as a eulogy of defeat. It is written neither by a triumphant Arab nor by a defeated Persian. It has victorious stories and it has plenty of tragedies. It is an epic, but it does not emerge from a militaristic logic of defeat and victory. It is neither exclusively triumphalist nor consistently tragic. It is both. It is therefore neither. It will refuse to succumb to any militarist logic of epics or empires. It casts old stories its author had collected as the modus operandi of political legitimacy, a book for Persian kings and princes, offering them a universal frame of reference and thus eternal and archetypal legitimacy. But it does so never abandoning its own internal poetic logic of a traumatic reading of history. Its internal narrative logic overrides the limited patience of royal courts and their scribes, calligraphers, and painters. It revives old stories and bygone empires and casts them as the blueprint of a new world order. By doing so it gives meaning, significance, and purpose to an otherwise chaotic and meaningless world. Contrary to the universe enabled by the Qur’anic revelation it does not reference itself on any metaphysical belief in Divinity, the Holy, the Unseen. It is its own poetics that posits its sense of transcendence. To be sure, the Shahnameh does not consciously posit itself as an alternative to the Qur’an. Ferdowsi was a Shi’i Muslim, and his book begins with praise for the Muslim God, his prophets, and other Shi’i saintly figures. But the fate of the Shahnameh as a royal text implicitly assigns it this significance. To understand the transhistorical significance of the Shahnameh we need to come to terms with the internal logic of its own temporality.

  TIME AND NARRATIVE

  The world is today fully conscious of successive empires that have come and gone ruling it: the Babylonians, the Achaemenids, the Romans, the Sassanids, the Abbasids, the Byzantines, the Ottomans, the Mughals, the Spanish, the British, the Americans. Each one of these empires have told their stories in epic or in other imperial forms. Are these epics and stories signs of a triumphalist assuredness or perhaps indexes of anxiety? What do the epics of empires past and present reveal about them? Quint tells the story of European empires and their genres of triumphalism or jeremiads of defeat. Moretti reads “modern epics” as indications of the triumphant “world system,” of globalized capital, and thus he updates that triumphalism of “the West” in more specifically literary terms. When we look at the Shahnameh, however, we see how it presents itself as a self-consciously moral narrative, exposing empires it narrates or embraces as inherently anxiety-ridden, fragile, made sure of themselves only by epics that will do more to expose their anxieties than assure them of their triumphalism. Empires have been at the mercy of the Persian epic far more than the Persian epic has been in need of their endorsements. “There has never been a document of culture,” Walter Benjamin observe
s in “On the Concept of History” (1940), “which is not simultaneously one of barbarism.”4 All empires are conscious of this fact and by virtue of it conscious of their original sins. They know and they see their signs of civilization as rooted in barbarity. This fact gives empires a consciousness of their fragility, mortality, temporality. The Shahnameh is a document celebrating its own triumphant moral rectitude marking the barbarity of empires that have failed to heed its wisdom. For this very reason, all empires have come close to the Shahnameh at their own peril. They have seen its name and nomenclature and did not bother with its poetic text and moral imagination. The Shahnameh is a like a Trojan Horse, to borrow a metaphor from a different epical context. It has entered the citadel of imperial legitimacy only to discredit it.

  While teaching the Shahnameh to students at Columbia University in the first decades of the twenty-first century, many times they drew comparisons with the epics of their own time, epics pertinent to the American empire. The HBO series Game of Thrones, for example, or even comic heroes like Batman or Spiderman would come to their minds. My students and I would occasionally wonder what would Shakespearean histories reveal about their time. Discussions of Shakespeare inevitably drew us to their cinematic adaptations, particularly those of the Japanese master Akira Kurosawa. On one such occasions I took David Quint’s reference to Sergey Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky (1938) toward the end of his book Epic and Empire at its face value and complicated it by adding to it three other archetypal cinematic epics that he does not consider, for his reference to Eisenstein’s epic points to other examples of this genre and thus charts a more expansive frame of comparative reference. In cinematic epic, I told my students, we can detect at least three dominant paradigms of (1) projecting an epic narrative into an imminent future in John Ford’s Westerns, (2) an expostulation of foregone empires in David Lean’s cinema, and (3) the archetypal positing of imperial power and violence in Akira Kurosawa’s cinema.5 The advantage of this cinematic typology of epic narratives over Quint’s, though instigated by his reference to Alexander Nevsky, is that it is far more universal, for it embraces three modes of epic narratives: about a fallen empire by a British filmmaker, about a rising empire by an American filmmaker, and then about the archetypal articulation of empire by a Japanese filmmaker. Between the three, Ford (future), Lean (past), and Kurosawa (archetypal) pretty much exhaust the cinematic modes of epic filmmaking, and all other epic filmmakers—from Sergey Eisenstein to Richard Attenborough, are subsumed under these three exemplary epic filmmakers. If we place Quint’s reference to Alexander Nevsky in this context, his ahistorical and atypical reference becomes both historical and typified. Once we do that, time and space, temporality and location, are brought back to our reading of epics, the two critical factors that Eurocentric theorists categorically camouflage under their false universalization of their nativist limitations.

  However anachronistic these may appear, these cinematic samples were drawing my students ever deeper into seeing aspects of the Persian epic and its contemporary worldly significance we had not explored (or even suspected) before. It now occurred to me that my students did not have any issue with such apparent “anachronism,” because the time of the Persian epic was atemporal, its frames archetypal, its world omnipresent. The fusion of the mythic, heroic, and historical time/narrative spectrums of the Shahnameh had crafted its own textual temporality. This recognition, dare I say this discovery, came about only by allowing the text of the Persian epic to speak to the lived experiences of my students, coming from the four corners of the globe, neither Western nor Eastern in any artificial bifurcation of their poetic sensibilities, without painting the text they were reading “Oriental” or “Western” but by allowing its foreignness to become familiar through a temporal encounter with their own lived experiences. Such moments were revelatory. I was more of a student in these classes than teaching them. The text I was supposed to know and to teach to my students was now speaking to me in a different, unsuspected, powerful new language.

  If we were to carry Quint’s typology forward to more modern epics it would have the advantage of expanding the typology from the literary to also include the operatic. Quint’s reference to Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) and Paradise Regained (1671) and his treatment of Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky point to the comparative assessment of more modern epics. With Moretti’s Modern Epic, we finally come to a systematic classification of such masterpieces as Goethe’s Faust, Melville’s Moby-Dick, Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen (1848–1874), Joyce’s Ulysses, Ezra Pound’s The Cantos (1922–1962), T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities (1930–1942), and even Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) as “modern epics,” which Moretti defines as literary, poetic, and operatic master narratives that reflect the European domination of the planet, in which political will to power and literary will to formal inventiveness go together and reflect each other.

  Why is it, we were now ready to ask, that Moretti included Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude in his Western epic narrative of “world system,” when in fact it comes from a Latin American colonial site of resistance to that economic and cultural domination, and this is precisely the issue that exposes the principal fault line of his theory? Cast in his proverbial magic realist register, Márquez’s novel does not corroborate but in fact dismantles the “world system.” The chief feature of Moretti’s theorization is that it is decidedly synchronic. The “world system” is a status quo whose hegemony he takes for granted as global, and therefore all his “modern epics” are diachronically deterritorialized and dehistoricized, both those that dominate and those that resist. They are taken out of their temporal and spatial habitat to be fed into a globalized “world system” that knows and recognizes no boundaries. The key distinction that is effaced here is the particular kind of abuse of labor by capital we call colonialism. This is where his inclusion of Márquez becomes the key factor in forcing Latin America into Moretti’s Eurocentric imagination.

  The timing of a narrative, epic or otherwise, is crucial in its structural-functional or subversive presence in an imperial order. The temporal and spatial location of an epic determines at what point and where it has served and where and when it has dismantled the legitimacy of an empire. Taking “the West” for the world at large and turning its particularity whimsically universal and thereafter ahistorically mapping it against a defiant world is where comparative literature has started on the wrong foot and perpetrated its epistemic violence against the very texture of world history. This is where the multilayered temporality of the Shahnameh (its mythic, heroic, and the historical times) will have to teach world literature a new meaning of worldliness.

  The comparisons with more modern epics—literary or cinematic—revealed a crucial fact. Having its own innate temporality, the Persian epic cannot be simply assimilated backward into the existing Eurocentric conception of “World Literature” for the simple reason that the dominant theorists of that worldliness have so far failed to come close to the unique temporality and the multilayered unfolding worldliness of the Shahnameh. We cannot simply “extend” the existing idea of “World Literature” as dreamed in Goethe’s or Damrosch’s generous imagination chronologically and geographically to include the Shahnameh. That will do irreparable epistemic violence to the Persian epic. The inner dynamics of the Shahnameh’s worldliness and the polychronic temporality upon which it thrives will have to be navigated and understood first before we know why the theorists of “World Literature” as we know it now must go back to the drawing board.

  THE TRAUMATIC UNCONSCIOUS OF THE SHAHNAMEH

  Framed in these comparative contexts, is Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh an epic of conquest or an epic of the vanquished, a linear or an episodic narrative? Is it a Virgilian triumphalist narrative or a Lucanian epic of defeat? In cinematic terms, does Ferdowsi in the Shahnameh project a future empire, a promised land, the way John Ford does in his cinema, or reflect
on a bygone age, the way David Lean offers in his films, or does he pause for a paradigmatic moment on the nature and disposition of power in the making of any empire, as Kurosawa does in his cinema? And then when it comes to the question of modernity—which for the colonized word spells out as colonial modernity—how does the modern reception of the Shahnameh in the course of the nineteenth to twentieth-first centuries reflect the position of Iran and Iranians in “the world system”?

  The reason we are led to ask these questions is not because of the potential insights that we might have into the inner working of the Shahnameh in a thematically, narratively, generically, and theoretically comparative context. We ask these questions because the very idea of “World Literature” is stacked against anything other than the self-designated hegemony of the Western canon. We need to ask these questions given to the world by “World Literature” in order to draft a different worldliness for the very idea of world literature beyond the epistemic limitations and aging blind spots of the discipline. But the even more compelling reason for asking these questions is the fact that we have invariably considered the Shahnameh as a national epic—and the key term “national” inevitably places the Persian epic on a political plateau of power and postcolonial nation building, of the imperial expansionism and narrative primacy of “the West,” of colonial conquest and anticolonial resistance, of the formal courage to defy that hegemony and the literary and poetic imagination that has sustained that courage. In other words, by asking these questions we are not doing damage to the formal or poetic provenance of the Shahnameh—we are in fact, in a global and contemporary imperial context (the context of the inner narrative logic of the Shahnameh), paying homage to it.

  Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh does follow a linear and teleological narrative, which makes it a Virgilian epic of conquest in David Quint’s dichotomy, and yet it also offers deeply emotional and episodic narratives, as in the case of Rostam and Sohrab, or Seyavash and Sudabeh, or Rostam and Esfandiar, which Quint would call an epic of the vanquished. Obviously, instead of cutting the Shahnameh to pieces to fit Quint’s typology, we are better off overriding and expanding his dichotomy to accommodate the Shahnameh. The Shahnameh is linear, but that linearity is punctuated on a temporal spectrum ranging from the mythic to heroic to historical—namely, along three distinctly different temporal registers. The Shahnameh is episodic, too, but through poetic implosions of deeply dramatic stories that give renewed significance to that linearity. Ferdowsi does not follow Quint’s dichotomy. The Shahnameh decidedly dismantles it.