The Shahnameh

by Hamid Dabashi

  The Persian epic once gave a lending hand to rising Persianate empires before it narratively dismantled them. Today there are no such empires, and no postcolonial nation-state has any exclusive claim on the Shahnameh. The Persian epic has escaped them all. Today the Shahnameh belongs to a global readership that reads it in its original Persian or English translation fully conscious of its fragmented allegorical power and poetry. Today the Shahnameh is a “modern epic” to the degree that modernity is colonially mitigated. Today that epic is a “world text” to the degree that its worldliness helps to overcome the postmodernity of an empire that no longer has any claim to hegemony and rules the world with brutish vulgarity. Today the Shahnameh can rely only on its infinity overcoming its totality. Today chances are millions of more people can read the Shahnameh in its English translation than in its original Persian. Chances are more millions of people read it in English outside Ferdowsi’s birthplace of Khorasan than either in Khorasan or in multiple postcolonial nation-states around his birthplace. Yes, Iranians, Afghans, and Tajiks have an equally legitimate claim on him. But chances are these very Iranians, Afghans, and Tajiks are reading him in Persian or English outside the postcolonial boundaries of their recently manufactured political divides. How does the Shahnameh speak to them beyond these manufactured colonial borders depends entirely on how the stories of the Shahnameh are liberated from their fetishized commodification as identity totem and into the liberating domains of poetic emancipation from the power and prosody of political power.

  TRANSGENDERING DESIRE

  Afrasiab’s treachery in trying to use Sohrab to kill Rostam and defeat Iran is indicative of the subplot of the ensuing trauma of a father inadvertently killing his son. Afrasiab thought he would either kill Sohrab if the son triumphed over his father, Rostam, or else exact a terrible revenge upon Rostam if he ended up killing his own son, which is what he did. In the advancing army of Sohrab therefore the political order of the two empires of Iran and Turan is being mitigated by the remissive space of Samangan, where Sohrab was in fact conceived, born, and raised. That remissive space is where we have a premonition of Gordafarid as the simulacrum of a “transgender” warrior. It is important to remember that Ferdowsi makes the point that the reason Gordafarid went fighting was that her younger brother Gostaham was too young and therefore her father, Gazhdaham, conceded that his daughter should fight Sohrab. Ferdowsi also makes the point that Gordafarid hid her long hair under her helmet. That Gordafarid is a beautiful young woman disguising herself as a man is therefore a major theme in her battle with Sohrab.

  In the battlefield of the erotic encounter between Sohrab and Gordafarid the transgender desire in the Shahnameh finds its fullest display. This transgender desire as the productive unconscious of the text overwhelms and subverts the reproductive organism of desire and stages the pure desire as the poetic will of the epic against the patriarchal order of the empire. Here is where the bazm (feasting) component of epic overtakes its razm (fighting). The battle scene between Sohrab and Gordafarid is the simulacrum of a lovemaking scene in disguise. From the armament they use to Ferdowsi’s deliberate phrasing, Sohrab and Gordafarid are making love in this scene in a disguised scene of fighting. The final delightful recognition that Gordafarid is a woman and not a man has a decidedly orgasmic tone to it. Gordafarid’s running back to her fortress and teasing Sohrab invites him to penetrate the fortress for more. The erotic ruse is the suspension of patriarchy, replacing of pure desire for reproductive coupling as a precondition of patriarchal tension that will soon result in Rostam’s killing his own son. The battle between Sohrab and Gordafarid is therefore a dramatic staging of the trauma of filicide, where the Shahnameh the epic poem dismantles the Shahnameh the imperial narrative.

  CONCLUSION

  Chonin ast kerdar charkh-e boland …

  In one a crown and in the other a rope

  When a man sits happy with his crown

  With a tie of a rope someone brings him down from his throne

  Why would one fall in love with this world

  Since we all have to pass by those who went before us?

  The story of Alexander the Great occurs at the end of the heroic period in Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh just before the beginning of the historical. It is a transitional story in which the mythic and the heroic feed and fuse into the historical, a crucial fusion of multiple narratives to generate a whole new register on the time and place of the Persian epic. In this story, the historical account of Alexander is brought to bear on the heroic age of Dara, who stands for Darius III, the last Achaemenid king, who was defeated by the Macedonian general in 330 B.C.E. The key character trait of Alexander in the Shahnameh is his keen inclination toward justice, wisdom, and fairness. This segment of the epic, along with the sections on Ardeshir and Anushirvan, reads like a mirror for princes, a manual of leadership and governance with equanimity and justice. Upon ascending the Persian throne, and following a well-established tradition, Alexander delivers a royal sermon in which his first prayer is to wish upon all kings to have their soul blessed with kherad (reason).1 He reminds himself that the only victorious might is truly that of Almighty God, and good kings fear Him most. He considers Time the only true judge and promises his subjects to have his court always open and welcoming to those who seek justice. This he says is in gratitude for his victorious fate. He forgives taxes for five years. From the poor he says he expects nothing, nor will he put any pressure on the rich. Alexander then proceeds to marry Roshank, the daughter of Dara, ascend the Persian throne, and rule and unify Iran, Turan, and China before he moves to conquer India.

  There is an active transformation of the historical Alexander (356–323 B.C.E.), who had destroyed the Achaemenid Empire, into a wise and worthy Persian king. In both the Shahnameh and other Persian sources, based on Arabic, Persian, and Pahlavi materials, Alexander has a resoundingly positive character. Ferdowsi places the Macedonian conqueror straight in the line of Iranian monarchs, incorporating the world conqueror into the pantheon of wise and worthy kings. A brief mention of the Arsacid dynasty follows the story of Alexander and precedes that of Ardashir I, founder of the Sassanid Empire, after which Ferdowsi brings his epic to a close with the Arab invasion. The Shahnameh is, as a result, the epic of multiple empires, and even Alexander coming from Asia Minor is actively and comfortably incorporated into the imperial pedigree of the Persianate world.2 There is no trauma of defeat here, as there is never an ecstasy of triumph in any part of the Shahnameh. For Ferdowsi these are just stories gathered from tumultuous histories of multiple empires, collected only to teach the world enduring lessons of the way life works.

  WHENCE AND WHEREFORE “WORLD LITERATURE”?

  Why bother with Alexander or any other magnificent stories in the Shahnameh? Why be so cautious, careful, and judicious in separating and then seeing together the mythic, heroic, and historical components of the Persian epic? Here in the conclusion I must place my reading of the Persian epic in the larger context of my most recent work. Over the past few years, in four consecutive books I have mapped out in some detail and from multiple perspectives the formation of a postcolonial subject on an emerging transnational public sphere. I have done so, using the example of Iran but for far larger frames of comparative and theoretical references, in order to document the manner in which we can think of a global history of our presence outside the dominating Eurocentric historiography and its nativist and colonialist consequences. In these four books I have had a decidedly historical reading of the postcolonial subject predicated on a non-Eurocentric reading of the world pronouncedly outside the European perspective and in fact epistemically violated by it. In Shi’ism: A Religion of Protest (2011), I focused on the central significance of Islamic scholasticism in the historical formation of that public sphere initially in Isfahan under the Safavids in the sixteenth century and the eventual rise of the postcolonial subject on its premise in the aftermath of Iranian encounter with European colonial modernity. In The World of
Persian Literary Humanism (2012) I shifted gears from Islamic scholasticism and moved toward Persian literary humanism as the other crucial component of that selfsame public and parapublic spheres and the multifaceted aspects of the formation of the postcolonial subject. These two studies complemented each other and pointed ways toward a more transnational assessment of the issues I had raised systemically decentering “Europe” from our global history. In Persophilia: Persian Culture on the Global Scene (2015) I sought to demonstrate how this composition of the transnational public sphere worked through systemic acts of border crossings from the European bourgeois public sphere to its peripheralized colonial edges and back to it, where the postcolonial subject becomes in effect transnational through precisely such border crossings. Here I neither privileged Europe nor ignored it but placed it on a map of the globe that recognized both European imperialism and modes of postcolonial residences to it. By navigating the place of “Persia” in varied layers of European bourgeois imagination I showed how Iranians, too, began to conceive of their own national homeland on an entirely transnational public sphere. In Iran Without Borders: Towards a Critique of the Postcolonial Nation (2016), I brought all these works to a focal point and mapped out a view of Iran as a postcolonial nation formed on that transnational public sphere. The postcolonial subject of my sustained investigation was now historicized, liberated from any parasitical existence on the falsely manufactured binaries of “Islam and the West,” “Tradition and Modernity.” By historicizing this postcolonial subject, I had also decolonized it, liberated it from a Eurocentric false consciousness.

  Now in this book on the Shahnameh, I have sought to extend that project and opted for a detailed reading of the link between the Persian epic and the multiple empires it has served up to the postcolonial age in order to make the question of “modern epic” more complicated as a case study of the public sphere and postcolonial subject formation through the rise and unfolding of multiple worlds—not just the one colonially dominant, and imperially manufactured, the world that European and U.S. literary theorists of “World Literature” consistently theorize. Their liberal conscience now invariably bothers them and they wish to incorporate the world they do not know into the world they do know—and thus the more they do so the more they appear like the Christopher Columbus or the Indiana Jones of literary theory. A key reason for my critical perspective on what is today called “World Literature” is this overall project of rethinking the transnational public sphere and the postcolonial subject from a decidedly anticolonial and non-Eurocentric site—in order, in effect, to reveal at least one world these theorizations consistently cover and epistemically violate. This is perhaps the most important angle from which I have come to read the Persian epic against the grain of “World Literature” as it has been imperially narrated with a sustained epistemic violence against all its repressed alterities. Those concealed, denied, repressed, denigrated, and blindsided worlds are the most significant blind spot of “World Literature” theorists today, no matter how cleverly the old card of transnational tokenism is played out to sugarcoat the epistemic violence definitive to their project.

  My attention to both the locality and temporality of the Persian epic, interpolated in terms structural to its poetic worlding of the world it has inhabited and informed, is rooted in this project I have followed over this past decade. Let us remember how at the moment of entering the historical phase of his narrative, directly from the mythic and the heroic, Ferdowsi opts for a completely legendary account of Alexander, made allegorical through his poetic rendition of a fictional account of the Macedonian warlord and world conqueror. This choice pushes the mythic, heroic, and historical moments of the Persian epic toward the poetically fictional, which in effect inaugurates a whole genre of Persian Alexander Romance after Ferdowsi, though the source of Ferdowsi’s own account predates him by centuries. The temporal space thus created between fact and fantasy becomes poetically fictive and as such it categorically overcomes the political narrative of any empire that wishes to lay a temporary historic claim on the Persian epic. Those empires are at the service of this epic, to offer it stories to tell, and not the other way around. The story of the historical Alexander was actively fictionalized based on a Pseudo-Callisthenes account, on which Ferdowsi’s version, too, is based. This account is rooted in an apocryphal narrative attributed to Callisthenes of Olynthus (ca. 360–328 B.C.E.), a Greek historian (a great-nephew of Aristotle’s) who had accompanied Alexander during his Asiatic expeditions. This account had already turned Alexander (very much on the model that Xenophon had turned Cyrus the Great into a model of imperial leadership in his Cyropaedia) into an exemplary world leader. Though accounts of incorporating Alexander into Persian imperial pedigree predates him, Ferdowsi furthered that account by actively valorizing him into the pantheon of Persian epic poetry. That plus the strategic location of the Alexander story at a narrative moment when the mythic and heroic become historical generate and sustain a whole different conception of “world” and “worldliness” in the Shahnameh, which in turn demands and exacts a vastly different conception of “World Literature” if we were to seriously consider it in that frame of reference. “The world” in “World Literature” cannot be simply a decidedly Eurocentric world. It must not just come to terms with other worlds (in the plural) but above all recognize the world internal to the worldliness of a work of literary art like the Persian epic. This is where much of “World Literature” theorization by European and American theorists is entirely blindsided.

  The Shahnameh has been the epic of many and multiple empires. Many empires have arisen, fallen, and laid tenuous claims on the Persian epic, and yet they have all come and gone, and the Shahnameh has survived them all. With each and every fallen empire, nothing has happened to the living, worldly character of the Shahnameh except lending increasing legitimacy to its literary wisdom and poetic poignancy. Today the Shahnameh has finally reached one of its most ironic destinations—and it is here, and in its worldly character, that it poses a serious challenge to the very notion of “World Literature” as it has been imperially theorized. Through its widespread availability in its English translations it now lives through the farthest colonial reaches of an empire that cannot even read let alone lay a claim on its original. It has, also, providentially, as it were, remained outside the reach of those imperial literary theorists who write about “World Literature” entirely ignorant of it, or limited to an Orientalist nod to its existence. With that paradoxical ending, the Shahnameh is finally liberated from the false claim on it of any empire. Not just any single postcolonial nation-state but in fact the active theorization of “World Literature” as the ideological force of Euro-American imperialism cannot lay a claim on its world and worldliness. It now lives through its stories shedding light on histories, basking in its poetic defiance of all political and ideological claims on it. Liberating the Persian epic from the shackles of tiresome politics, of the pestiferous ethnic nationalism in particular, and marking its artistic powers will restore The Book of Kings to its neglected place as a piece of world literature in its own right, now made accessible, especially through its English translations, to a global readership made of postcolonial nations. It is in that manner that as a text that has overtly served but effectively subverted multiple empires, before it was plunged into its postcolonial history, we may ask how the Shahnameh has fared in the context and configuration of what today is called “World Literature” as the ideological force field of Euro-American imperialism the world over.

  My argument regarding the Persian epic as world literature is rooted in how I have read the Shahnameh. This seminal worldly text forces the theorists of “World Literature” to look at themselves in its mirror and see their unabashedly imperial theory humbled to its limited locality. I know of no other way than seriously engaging with the Persian epic that these theorists could face the provincial limitations of their own colonially accented theories. I believe the project of “World Liter
ature” as it is received and speculated on today is epistemically flawed and imperially rooted, and therefore no amount of liberal meandering can save it. The project is in dire need of not just some serious reconceptualization but also indeed coming to terms with its imperial provenance. The opportunity of engaging with the Shahnameh for a decidedly global audience has given me a unique opportunity to sketch out the general contours of this renewed understanding of what it means to think of world literature outside any compromising and sarcastic quotation marks.

  If you were to take a look at the excellent volume edited by David Damrosch, World Literature in Theory (2014), you would see both the momentum of its extraordinary attempts at articulating itself in ever expansive and liberal terms and yet its irreparable limitations in opening up to literary worlds beyond its incurable Eurocentricity.3 Marking the Eurocentricity of such volumes is not an accusation but a truism—a seeing through their imperial origins. We must understand and appreciate and benefit from such volumes for what they have to offer and move on with the task at hand, which is neither to accuse nor to excuse but to overcome the very idea of “World Literature” as we have received it from these senior custodians of the overexposed and outdated idea. Damrosch’s volume aptly begins with Goethe in 1827 and duly jumps to John Pizer’s 2006 piece “The Emergence of Weltliteratur: Goethe and the Romantic School.” There is a flashback to the Hungarian theorist Hugo Meltzl’s speculations about “Present Tasks of Comparative Literature” from 1877 and a citation of Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett’s “What Is World Literature” from 1886. We have then tokens of the Oriental in the form of a piece by Rabindranath Tagore, “World Literature” (1907), and Zheng Zhenduo’s 1922 piece, “A View on the Unification of Literature”—bringing them into a “conversation” that never actually took place. These are considered “the foundational texts” of the origin of “World Literature.” Then follows specific reflections on Yiddish or French or Francophone (three pieces here) as “World Literature,” with Edward Said’s “Traveling Theory” or Franco Moretti’s “Conjectures on World Literature” duly thrown into the ring. The volume is then brought to a conclusion with Zhang Longxi’s telling the readers of the volume that yes, the idea of “World Literature” began with Goethe and Marx, but it has been consistently changing until we get to Moretti’s telling us that we need to do “distant reading,” concluding with an honest but nevertheless embarrassing confession that the business of “World Literature” is today theoretically insolvent: “The history of world literature is unabashedly Eurocentric and modernist, closely mapping on the European expansion in the colonialist era and the subsequent decolonization in the mid-twentieth century, but completely oblivious of the Hellenistic and Roman world and ignorant of the formation of literary constellations outside Europe, such as the Persian and Ottoman Empires, or the East Asian region with the Chinese written language and culture playing a pivotal role in pre-modern times.”4