The Shahnameh

by Hamid Dabashi

  THE WORLDINGS OF THE SHAHNAMEH

  The Shahnameh has moved from being the singularly symbolic epic of successive Persianate empires to an epic claimed by postcolonial nation-states, chief among them Iran. The empires that have laid claim to the Persian epic, from the Samanids all the way down to the Safavids, have included territories that are now divided among multiple nation-states, each of which has a legitimate claim on the Persian text, with Iran, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan as the epicenter of the Samanid and Ghaznavid Empires that witnessed the initial composition of Ferdowsi’s towering text. Be that as it is, from India to Turkey—namely, from the Mughal Empire, through the Safavids and its successors, down to the Ottoman Empire—all have a legitimate claim on the Persian epic. To reworld the Shahnameh, to place it in its existing world, we need to pay particular attention to the ways in which it has been deworlded, used and abused in the context of colonial modernity.

  To look at the Shahnameh as a “modern epic,” as an epic that has reached to inform postcolonial nations in their encounters with European colonial modernity, we need to consider three interrelated factors: (1) how the fate of the Shah Tahmasp Shahnameh became emblematic, (2) how the Pahlavi celebration of the Persian epic for its state-building project and after that dynasty even the Islamic Republic reflected the postimperial fate of the Persian epic, and (3) how poets like Mehdi Akhavan-e Sales and Seyavash Kasra’i, or scholars like Shahrokh Meskoub, or the preparation of critical editions by Djalal Khaleghi-Motlagh and others have come together to locate the text at the center of a national consciousness. We need to do so in order to see how the Shahnameh has moved from an imperial epic into a postcolonial allegory.

  Before we consider these factors we must first remember how the Shahnameh was preserved, literally, in the course of its long imperial history. First and foremost, it was preserved through royal patronage, copying and illustrating, and calligraphy, and giving it as political gift. It was equally preserved via popular painting and reciting. The emulations of Ferdowsi’s masterpiece by aspiring poets were equally instrumental in preserving it for posterity, as were various selections in subsequent generations, as well as citations in biographical dictionaries and books on poetry.

  FRAGMENTS AS ALLEGORIES

  The story of the Shahnameh as a “modern epic” is epitomized in the fate of the Shah Tahmasp Shahnameh and its dismemberment (literally) as an imperial text into colonial and postcolonial state-building projects.1 As I indicated in some detail in the previous chapter, the destruction of this precious copy of the Shahnameh is a perfect allegory of what has been the postcolonial fate of the Persian epic. The text of this Shahnameh was given as a royal gift from a Safavid to an Ottoman emperor. Its destruction and dismemberment by forces of greed and disrespect for anything inherently and in its totality priceless is the story of the epic itself and its manhandling by political forces of one persuasion or its opposite.

  The Pahlavi dynasty subjected the Persian epic to monarchical state building by overinterpreting its content to its own advantage, while the Islamic Republic that succeeded it did the same abuse to the text by the over-Shi’ification of its author. Meanwhile, leading oppositional poets like Mehdi Akhavan-e Sales and Seyavash Kasra’i put the Persian text to exactly the opposite use of turning it against tyranny. Either way, the Shahnameh was turned into an allegory, bereft of its own power and prudence. Meanwhile, learned Shahnameh scholars began preparing erudite critical editions of it, which inevitably resulted in its systemic fetishization beyond its imperial poetic habitat. The Iranian diasporic communities soon joined forces and appropriated the text for their desperate identity politics—the best example of which are the expensive and luxurious editions of the text as published by Mage Publications in Washington, D.C., which had originally commissioned a new translation by the learned British poet Dick Davis. Another contemporary artist based in the United States, Hamid Rahmanian, updated that appropriation for a younger generation by preparing a new translation by Ahmad Sadri and adding to its state-of-the-art internet-facilitated collages. Financed by rich expatriate benefactors, Cambridge University established a whole center for the study of the Shahnameh.

  Against this background, the prominent Shahnameh scholar Mahmoud Omidsalar published deeply informed polemical monographs on the book,2 while “oral formulaic” theorists abused the Persian epic for their own whimsical reasons. Art historians began to pay exclusive attention to the various aesthetic qualities of the paintings that accompanied old manuscripts, almost entirely independent of the substance of the epic. Art dealers were of course not to be disregarded, for they too began to partake in the lucrative market of selling torn-out folios from old manuscripts. Private collectors prided themselves on possessing such copies, while museums competed to have more copies than any private collector. Encyclopedia entries about the author and the text of the Shahnameh soon began to appear, as well as learned essays in academic journals examining the minutiae of the epic. The fragmented fate of the Shah Tahmasp Shahnameh becomes emblematic of its postcolonial allegorization in ever more fragmented context, and thus paradoxically the Shahnameh went back to the state that it was in before Ferdowsi had started collecting and putting it into a singular poetic narrative, though this time in fact worse for now the Persian epic was both there and not there, ever evident in fetishized form, emptied of its ennobling aura and myth.

  ABUSING AN EPIC FOR AND AGAINST THE RULING STATE

  Memories of old empires have animated the postcolonial state formations that have laid a false and falsifying claim on the Shahnameh, dragging it deeply into their limited political imagination. In this transition the tumultuous seas of bygone empires are being poured into the tight torrents of postcolonial nation-states—and no postcolonial state has represented this abuse better than the Pahlavi dynasty (1926–1979) and its systemic epistemic violence against the Shahnameh. The Pahlavis were of course not the only perpetrators of this violence. While during the Pahlavi dynasty it was heavily abused to lend legitimacy to a discredited monarchy, during the Islamic Republic that succeeded it, it has been officially ignored, or overtly Shi’ified by virtue of its Shi’i author, or sought to be compromised by the recently discovered manuscript of Ali-nameh, an epic composed almost at the same time as the Shahnameh about the first Shi’i Imam. At the center of all these ideological abuses has remained the text of the Shahnameh itself. As Iran and its neighboring countries have entered the colonial and postcolonial stages of their encounter with European modernity, so has the Shahnameh been dragged left and right to sing and dance to melodies not its own.

  Not just the violent forces of state building over the past two centuries but also even forces hostile and opposed to it—all the way from the Qajars to the Islamic Republic—have resorted to the Shahnameh, abusing the Persian epic for their own anti-Qajar, anti-Pahlavi, or anti–Islamic Republic rhetoric. The Shahnameh has thus been pulled and pushed by multiple political forces all categorically oblivious or indifferent to the inner logic and rhetoric of a primarily poetic text. In all these cases what is ignored, disregarded, and distorted is the text itself, its poetic logic and rhetoric, its aesthetic power and literary audacity. In this environment, the perfectly competent and lucid English translation by recent scholar-poets like Dick Davis and Ahmad Sadri are assimilated backward into a fetishized antiquarian interest in “Persian heritage” integral to an iconography of exilic identity politics. The epic poem is here overfetishized, hypernationalized into lucrative, oversized coffee-table publications useful mostly as a centerpiece of the expatriate Iranian diaspora for gatherings—burying deeply the gems that are thus decorating someone’s living room. There are of course exceptionally learned pieces of scholarship in both Persian and English dealing with various minutiae of the Persian epic. But the general contour of such scholarship is framed within a nostalgic remembrance of bygone empires, now falsely finagled to be assimilated forward to a “national heritage.” Over the past two centuries, the Shahnameh has bee
n the epicenter of such systematic abuses. Gaudy internet-based vanity shows based mostly in Los Angeles—invariably featuring a verbose, vulgar dilettante staring into a bewildered camera—are the depth of this depravity.

  The origin of all such political abuses might be traced back to the earliest generations of Orientalist-colonialist encounters with the Shahnameh. By the late nineteenth century, the Shahnameh had become the focus of the attention of leading European Orientalists in Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom, France, and elsewhere in Europe. The publication of Matthew Arnold’s “Sohrab and Rustum” (1853) might be considered the epicenter of this age of European attraction to the Persian epic.3 It is important here to keep in mind that the European reception of the Shahnameh extended well into its colonial dimensions, as, for example, when the Persian epic was published in India, with the same anti-Arab sentiments rooted in European racialized modernity, or during World War II, it was abused by the Allied forces in a series of propaganda postcards.4 The title of the Shahnameh in one of its earliest editions published in Calcutta (1811) reads as follows: “The SHAH NAMU, being a series of HEROIC POEMS on the ancient HISTORY OF PERSIA from the earliest times down to the subjugation of the Persian Empire by its MOHUMMADAN CONQUERERS under the reign of KING YUZDIRD.”5 The origin of such a racialized reception of the Persian epic was of course Europe, where literary critics like Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve (1804–1869) were totally enamored of Ferdowsi’s masterpiece: “If we could realize that great works such as the Shahnameh exist in the world, we would not become so much proud of our own works in such a silly manner.”6 From this colonial context of racialized identities, and at the threshold of the constitutional revolution of 1906–1911, a strong ethnonationalism emerged rooted in a deeply flawed reading of Ferdowsi’s masterpiece.

  In the course of the twentieth century, following this colonial pretext, both Pahlavi monarchs (1926–1979) had sought to appropriate the Shahnameh as the epic narrative of Persian monarchy to which they had now laid a dynastic claim, hoping that it would provide the ideological foregrounding of their short-lived house. For the Pahlavis and their project of monarchic nationalism, Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh became a key poetic text in their ideological project of state building, with monarchy as the definitive institution and defining moment of that nationalist modernity. Reza Shah had decidedly modeled his persona and monarchy on pre-Islamic Persianate legacies. By 1934 he was constructing a mausoleum over the grave site of Ferdowsi in Tus. He made a recognition of Ferdowsi’s epic a bedrock for his “modernization” ambitions. Leading Iranian scholars of his time were encouraging Reza Shah to honor Ferdowsi and publicly celebrate him. The monthlong millenary celebrations he decreed were launched in 1934. “The main thrust of the millenary celebration … was the gathering of some 100 distinguished scholars and dignitaries in Tehran and Mashhad for a conference that would be responsible for the flourishing of Iranian studies in general and for research on Ferdowsi and the Shahnameh in particular.”7

  At the height of the reign of the second Pahlavi monarch, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (1941–1979), and soon after the 1971 celebration of the two thousand five hundredth anniversary of Persian monarchy, an annual lecture series was established on Ferdowsi at Mashhad University. These and similar celebrations of Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh by the Pahlavi monarchy marked the widespread institutional project of a political apparatus to assimilate the Persian epic into its anxiety-ridden legitimacy consciousness. Much of the nationalistic scholarship of the Pahlavi period has its origin in this inaugural moment. As Ali Ahmadi Motlagh rightly argues, the most important result of such celebrations was the “re-entry of Iran into the global community as a tenable, sovereign nation-state that by virtue of having a national epic could be considered a culturally legitimate civilization. This latter motif can also be detected in the 1990 celebrations of Ferdowsi as Iran attempted to rebuild its image and pick up the pieces after a brutal 8-year war with Iraq.” But long before that war, and still at the time of the Pahlavis, in the words of the program leaflet handed out during the millennium celebrations of Ferdowsi at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London in October 1934, “Ferdowsi … gave to Persia what Homer gave to Greece and Virgil to Rome, an epic that not only perpetuates the tradition of her ancient greatness, but makes a universal appeal to the spirits of man … Firdausi’s Shahnameh consecrated their heroic past and voiced their national pride. A thousand years later, Persia, resuming her place in the family of nations, salutes his memory as the earliest precursor of her renaissance.”8 Ferdowsi’s epic was by now a cornerstone of nation building for the Pahlavi monarchy.

  The oppositional forces to the Pahlavi regime were of course not to be left out of this battle for the soul of Ferdowsi. The leftist intellectuals soon realized the symbolic significance of the Persian epic and sought to appropriate it to their advantage. Late in the nineteenth century, and in the wake of the constitutional revolution of 1906–1911, Mirza Aqa Kermani (1854–1897) wrote his Nameh-ye Bastan (The book of antiquity) as a conscious imitation of the Shahnameh. This tradition remained constant with other critical thinkers throughout the Qajar and Pahlavi monarchies. Opposing the Pahlavi monarchy, leftist literati, poets, and scholars like Abolqasem Lahuti, Abd al-Hossein Nushin, Bozorg Alavi, and F. M. Javanshir (pseudonym of Farajollah Mizani) had their own take on the Persian epic, seeking, for example, to appropriate the story of Kaveh the Blacksmith for their own (however legitimate) political purposes. “Leftist readings of the Shahnameh,” as Ali Ahmadi Motlagh rightly puts it, “gravitated towards depictions of the plight of the proletariat, most significantly manifested in the story of Kaveh and Zahhak, whose resolution involves an uprising by the people under the banner of a blacksmith.”9 There were of course plenty of royal injustices in the Shahnameh to lend support to such abusive readings. The Persian epic was being manhandled decidedly to meet the political ends of the time—in one way or another.

  Later the ruling regime of the Islamic Republic sought to appropriate this leftist proclivity and carve Ferdowsi’s poetry to its own size and measures. Soon after the end of the Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988), in 1990, the state organized a major conference to commemorate the millenary of the composition of the Shahnameh. The Islamic theocracy sought to up the ante against the background of the 1934 conference of the Reza Shah period. As Ali Ahmadi Motlagh sums up the event, “Going simply by the numbers, it blew away the 1934 millenary conference. No less than 104 papers, out of 270 candidates, papers were delivered by more than 120 people from 23 countries alongside who [sic] joined 170 scholars from Iran.” Tehran University was the host of the international gathering. In welcoming remarks, the Shahnameh was suggested to have been inspired by the Qur’an, its author a devout Shi’a.10 the Islamic Republic was now actively competing with the monarchy it had toppled in claiming Ferdowsi and his Shahnameh.

  For millions of Iranians leaving their homeland for a life abroad the Shahnameh was not to be entirely irrelevant either. They soon began to abuse the Persian epic for their own political purposes in opposition to the Islamic Republic. They began featuring it as part of their wedding ceremonies, substituting it for the Qur’an. “What is most significant about the reception of Ferdowsi among the Iranian community in exile,” Ali Ahmadi Motlagh suggests, “is an overriding anxiety that has naturally resulted from the limbo of being an outsider in both one’s original and one’s adopted society.”11 Soon a second and third generation of Iranian-Americans emerged who now sought to have a reappraisal of what their parents had told them was a significant text. Some of these younger Iranians ended up at Columbia University taking my course on the Shahnameh. In the first few sessions of our course, I had to compete with the extended shadow of their fathers and grandfathers as to what the Shahnameh was and what it signified.

  THE SHAHNAMEH AS METAPHOR

  Appropriation of the text of the Shahnameh or the figure of Ferdowsi as an insignia of cultural modernity (on a European prototype) or, alternatively, literary national
ism was not limited to the political domain, but political purposes certainly conditioned and facilitated them. The writing of learned essays, encyclopedic entries, literary historiographies, and above all the preparation of a critical edition of the Shahnameh based on all the extant manuscripts became the defining moment of scholarly “modernity” and literary nationalism, a practice that European Orientalism proper extended to the realm of Persian studies from the domain of European classics, but which the Iranian scholarly literati picked up in the twentieth century and pushed forward with an abiding sense of national pride and even prejudice. Iranian scholars of the Shahnameh outperformed their Orientalist predecessors in collecting even more scattered manuscripts, collated and compared them even more diligently, and sought to prepare a critical edition that surpassed anything that had been done by Europeans before. Preparing the most accurate text of the Shahnameh thus emerged as the modus operandi of a scholarly pride that in and of itself laid the claims of “modernity” on the Shahnameh. The Persian epic was “modern,” or more accurately became “modern,” because modern textual criticism was so diligently applied to it.12 Preparing a critical edition of the Shahnameh, previously done by Russian or French scholars, was now integral to Iranian literary nationalism, with or without a formal state sponsorship.