The Shahnameh

by Hamid Dabashi

  How are we to read the Shahnameh at the threshold of the twenty-first century? Since its very composition around the year 1000 in the Christian calendar, the Persian epic has been chief among the accoutrements of power. It has been far more beautifully illustrated and copied and written in exquisite calligraphy than critically read, discussed, and understood. Generation after generation what we have are illustrated manuscripts of the text and scarcely anything resembling critical, analytic, or theoretical encounters with the epic itself. Until very recently it has been far more a talismanic of imperial power than a poetic of resistance to it. It was only during the Pahlavi period that Iranian scholars began to take over from European Orientalists in preparing the critical edition of Ferdowsi’s epic and launch a sustained course of critical encounter with the text, and the poetics of its purpose.

  It was during this latter phase of critical encounter with the Persian epic that we began to realize how ennobling is the sense of the tragic hero in the Shahnameh. The hero here does not dwell on his or her moment of tragic incidence. The hero ennobles the story, and with it the epic, and eventually disappears. What remains is the quintessence and the aftertaste of the heroic incidents. They occur, gather momentum, leave their emotive traces, and disappear, story after story, incidence after incidence, leaving a lasting mark on your soul. The Shahnameh is no single postcolonial epic. It belongs to each and every such nation that has emerged from the historical Persianate empires from the Ghaznavids to the Qajars and has dwelled poetically in the inner sanctum of the epic. The Persian epic generates its own “nationhood,” or “peoplehood,” by virtue of the sustained course of sentiments it sustains and that it has helped its readers imagine for millennia from one end of the earth to the next. It carries its ancient relics forward and around but not into any historical posterior only. It carries them into its own textual interiority in that labyrinth of epic interiority, in that indwelling, of the sense of the tragic epic, the Shahnameh heals its own wounds. It is a living organism of truth and narrative.

  FROM ALEXANDER TO ANUSHIRVAN

  The Persian emperor Darab, according to the Shahnameh, was married to Nahid, the daughter of the Byzantine emperor. Soon after their marriage the king discovers his bride has a foul-smelling mouth, which results in sending her back to her father. Meanwhile Nahid is pregnant and soon gives birth to a son, whom she calls Alexander. Darab, however, marries another Persian princess, who soon gives birth to Dara. Dara and Alexander are therefore half brothers, from one royal Persian father and two mothers, one a Greek and the other a Persian princess. When Dara and Alexander ultimately face each other on the battlefield, and Alexander is victorious, this is a clear case of fratricide, a brother overpowering another in his quest for the Persian throne. The dramatic narrative here overcomes the historical Alexander of Macedonia facing Darius III. What remains here is the loving farewell of Dara to his half brother Alexander while dying in his arms. Alexander marries Dara’s daughter Roshanak and unites the kingdoms of Rome, Iran, and beyond.

  The wise and judicious character of Alexander at the end of the Kianian dynasty in the heroic age is then replicated in the figure of Anushirvan the Just at the height of the historical period. Anushirvan’s relationship to his wise vizier, Bozorgmehr, is on the model of Alexander’s to Aristotle as developed in the Alexander Romance genre, splitting the Platonic idea of the “philosopher-king” into two figurative and intimately interrelated characters. It is imperative to remember here that the historical Alexander is believed to have been fond of Xenophon’s Cyropaedia, a mirror for princes that would remain for generations exceptionally important in the course of the European imperial imaginary. This transfusion of power and knowledge in the fictional characterization of Cyrus the Great in Xenophon’s book is equally (though not identically) present to the text of the Shahnameh and its characterizations of Anushirvan and Bozorgmehr, and even to some degree in Alexander and Aristotle. But here, contrary to what Foucault would later argue, power is not the source of knowledge but exactly the other way around: knowledge is the source of power, and the oft-repeated axiomatic phrase of the Shahnameh, tavana bovad har keh dana bovad (Whoever is wise is powerful), explicitly posits knowledge against brute force.

  The cumulative knowledge of wise kings triumphs over their vanishing power when cast upon the transfusion of the three narrative moments of the Shahnameh. The three tropes of mythic, heroic, and historical narratives become unified in Ferdowsi’s epic and dismantle such European philosophers of history as Vico and Hegel and their respective teleological philosophies of history. History is not teleological in the Shahnameh. Its dialectic is integral to its unfolding course. The world of the Shahnameh is a decidedly anti-Hegelian world. Its Geist, as it were, does not unfold progressively. It flowers in and out and through itself. The dialectic of knowledge and power here is dialogical; that dialogical prose and poetry of history fracture the totality of any political or literary claim on the Shahnameh, including and in particular that of “World Literature,” as it charts its own path predicated on the world and worldliness of its inaugural moment.

  Toward the end of the Shahnameh Ferdowsi writes of his advancing age and that, upon the completion of his lifetime achievement, he was not properly rewarded or appreciated. But he assures himself that soon his wisdom will be spread around the world and cultured and learned people will always praise him for his Shahnameh. All these lines are marked with specific dates—I am sixty-five, he says, and then a few lines later seventy-one, and then he dates his concluding page with the year 400 in the Islamic calendar (1009–1010 in the Christian calendar). He as a poet is here fully conscious of his own mortality, of the time when he finishes his lifework, worries about its survival, wishes for its endurance, praises those who have supported him, criticizes those who did not. His ego has assumed full historical dimensions, his voice yet anxious, his mind restless, his boastful consciousness of the significance of what he has achieved marked by the frailty of the feeling of his own imminent mortality. He is alive when he is writing those lines, full of his fragile humanity, the very glory of a life purposefully lived and meaningfully left for posterity now signing off the very last pages of his masterpiece.

  AN EPIC FOR ALL SEASONS

  The Shahnameh, I have argued and demonstrated, was composed in an imperial age and successively used and abused by multiple other empires that appeared after its composition. It has had a symbolic and almost talismanic significance in consecutive imperial ages, all the way from the Ghaznavids to the Mughals, the Safavids and the Qajars, and even to the Ottomans. The Persian epic, speaking of foregone empires in archetypal tones, finally reached the age of colonial and postcolonial nation-states, when it was made to be useful for occasions of literary national pride and concomitant state-building ideologies and projects. But I have wondered beyond these historic origins and successive uses and abuses to which Ferdowsi’s magnum opus has been put how we are to read it today and in what sense we can consider it a piece of world literature. Will this designation increase or diminish the historic or contemporary significance of the Persian epic? To answer such questions, I have suggested we must begin with the proposition that the very idea of “World Literature” as we know it today is deeply and irredeemably Euro-universalist and therefore by nature cannibalistic. The instant it approaches any other equally if not even more worldly piece of literature it cannot digest it and perforce distorts it in the totality of its worldliness. We must, therefore, move toward the Persian (or Chinese, Japanese, etc.) text itself—in its original language—where we discover it is neither Hegelian in its historiography nor indeed compatible with the prevalent ideas of epic as either triumphalist or defeatist, linear or episodic, as David Quint has suggested. We need therefore first and foremost to come to terms with the organic totality, the irreplaceable worldliness, of the text itself.

  In this historical context, I have therefore proposed the Shahnameh to have marked and posited itself, as the established scholarship
has for long maintained, through three successive moments of mythic, heroic, and historical narrative textures, which thematic sequence I have then concluded constitutes a whole different mode of layered subjectivity in the Shahnameh that is decidedly un-Hegelian, or even counter-Hegelian. Those three periods of the Shahnameh are not merely sequential. They are paradigmatic forces of a vastly different conception of history when we take them together. We should also consider the fact that its dramatic unfolding is neither triumphalist nor defeatist, neither exclusively linear nor exclusively episodic—that it is decidedly a defiant epic whose stories trump its histories, its poetics undercuts its politics, its infinity of disclosing unanticipated horizons overcoming the totality of its narratives. The central traumas of the Persian epic, as many scholars have already noted,26 are those of fathers killing their sons (Rostam and Sohrab, Goshtasp and Esfandiar, Key Kavous and Seyavash are the most prominent cases) and not sons killing their fathers (with the exception of the singular case of Zahhak, who indirectly does kill his father through Iblis). That fact turns the Freudian conception of the civilizing guilt of “delayed obedience” into the defiant disposition of “delayed defiance,” as I have argued and demonstrated in the case of Shi’ism, which now appears as a case-specific manifestation of a much larger Shahnameh narrative trope. Yes, Shi’ism as a religion of protest is rooted in Islamic history, but its effective dramatization of the trauma of Imam Hossein in Karbala is predicated on a specifically Shahnameh narrative trope.

  From here I have then moved to point out the paradox of people around the world in which the Shahnameh is to be read as “World Literature” are reading it in most cases in English, a fact that must run through the equally paradoxical phenomenon that English is now a globally distributed postcolonial language. More non-British and in fact non-Europeans now communicate in English than the British or even the Europeans do together. Creative writers in Asia, Africa, Australia, and North America (where English is a colonial legacy) have been writing works of poetry and fiction in English at least matching in significance if not surpassing in volume and import those written by the British or in fact by Europeans in general. Here we must be clear: the only reason anybody cares to read what these Western European or North American scholars think of what they call “World literature” is that they write their speculations in English, or in French or German, or some other tongue they believe is a “European language.” If they did so in Arabic, Persian, Bengali, or Chinese nobody could care less what they fantasize or insist on calling “World Literature.” When they write in English they think themselves “Western” and take English to be a “Western language,” and thus they take this whole affair as an entirely “Western” business. But there’s the rub. English is not merely a British or exclusively “Western” language but a decidedly colonial and thereafter a postcolonial language. It categorically belongs to the people British imperialism and colonialism once conquered and ruled. We now own this language. It is ours. It is not our colonial rulers’ and tormentors’ anymore. The T. B. Macaulay treachery in his infamous “Minute on Education” (1835) to train a cadre of Indian intellectuals who looked Indian on the outside but thought like the British inside has indeed turned upside down and we the conquered colonials have now devoured our colonial masters’ language, digested it, and made it our own. Fanon wrote The Wretched of the Earth in French, Edward Said Orientalism in English. But English is not a “Western” language, it is a postcolonial global language. They used it to rule over us as they used the Manchester gun to conquer our lands. But the same way that occasionally Native Americans took those Winchester rifles (“the gun that won the West”) and started shooting back at their conquerors, we too, the colonized world too, has now taken English away from them and have long since started talking back at them. We have destroyed this house that they thought was their “House of Being.” With this language we have built much more democratically leveled houses, into which we welcome the whole world, to enter and rethink what is worldly literature. When an Asian, African, South, or even North American disabused of the myth of “the West” reads the Shahnameh in English he or she is reading it not in a “Western” language of conquest but in a postcolonial language of defiance, where the Persian epic now squarely belongs. The innate dynamics of the Persian original, where its poetics triumphs over its politics and its epic narrative trumps its imperial uses, allows for its traumas of delayed defiance be linked to the paradoxical fact that English as a postcolonial language is where the Shahnameh must be retrieved as a piece of worldly literature. This reading of the Persian epic will show it for what it is s: an exemplary text to be read against the stale, self-referential, self-defeating, chasing-after-its-own-tail, sad saga of “World Literature.”

  Zeh niku sokhan beh cheh andar jahan …, Ferdowsi writes early in his Shahnameh,

  What is better than beautiful words in this world

  To those noble souls who appreciate good words?

  If the origin of these words were not God Almighty Himself

  How would the Noble Prophet be our Guide?

  In his Shahnameh, Ferdowsi elevated the very existence, the very texture, the sound and certainty, of words to the status of sublime divinity. Words, good speech, eloquent diction—these were the very quintessence of civilization to Ferdowsi, the very secret of our existence in this world. We came to be through one simple and majestic word of God, who commanded with a single word, “Be,” and we “were.” The entirety of the Shahnameh is an ode to the miracle of words, the poetry of our existence, the key to who and what we are. Ferdowsi never minces words. He knows them inside out, hears their sounds, listens to their echoes, understands the shades of their meanings. For Ferdowsi sokhan is coterminous with kherad, sokhan is “word,” kherad is “wisdom.” He was an archaeologist of words, a gemologist of good diction. “My stories,” he once said, “may become old, but they become new every time they are recited in any gathering.” Every time I have taught the Shahnameh in my classes, and now in this book, the summation of my thoughts and feelings about this precious book, I have thought myself blessed with the accidental privilege of having been born into Ferdowsi’s language, whispered into my ears with my mother’s lullabies, to be able to occasion one of such countless gatherings around his immortal text.

  NOTES

  INTRODUCTION

    1.    In the best and most recent translation of the Shahnameh by Dick Davis, Abolqasem Ferdowsi, Shahnameh: The Persian Book of Kings (London: Penguin Books, 1997), the distinguished translator has alas opted not to translate these exceptionally important prolegomena of the Persian epic and to go straight to its first stories. Just a few select lines of the opening passage do, however, appear in the translator’s introduction (xiv). This is a most unfortunate decision. It is like going to see a Mozart opera and suddenly realizing that the conductor has opted to dispense with the overture!

    2.    The idea of the Shahnameh meaning “The Best Book” is not new. As early as the thirteenth century al-Rawandi, in Rahat al-Sudur, speaks of the Shahnameh as Shah-e Nameh-ha, “the best of books,” and Sar-dafter-e Ketab-ha, “top among books.” See al-Rawandi, Rahat al-Sudur (Leiden: Brill, Gibb Memorial Series, 1921), 59, 357.

    3.    Abolqasem Ferdowsi, Shahnameh, Julius Mohl ed. (Tehran: Jibi Publications, 1965), 1:30. My translation. Dick Davis does not translate this crucial passage in his text but alludes to it in his introduction.

    4.    In this reading I am deliberately limiting myself to the text of Ferdowsi’s poem itself, which contains a very gentle and even bashful reference to Zahhak’s mother. Otherwise, in a magnificent piece of scholarship, and based on pre-Shahnameh Pahlavi sources, Mahmoud Omidsalar has documented that the relationship between Zahhak and his mother, who in these sources is named as Vadak, was actually incestuous. Omidsalar’s psychoanalytic reading of this mother-son relationship helps cast the story of Zahhak and his mother to have a much more definitive presence
in our reading of the rest of the Shahnameh. See Mahmoud Omidsalar, “The Dragon Fight in the National Persian Epic,” International Review of Psycho-analysis 14 (1987): 343–56.

    5.    Gilles Deleuze, Masochism: “Coldness and Cruelty” and “Venus in Furs” (New York: Zone Books, 1991).

    6.    With different variations this story appears in many sources. I cite this version from a folkloric account collected by renowned Iranian folklorist Seyyed Abu al-Qasem Enjavi Shirazi in Mardom va Ferdowsi (People and Ferdowsi) (Tehran: Soroush Publications, 2535/1976), 37–40.

    7.    I have examined the impact of these translations and receptions of the Shahnameh on European social and cultural history and beyond in Persophilia: Persian Culture on the Global Scene (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2015), 67–79.