Often called the national epic of Iran, the Shah­nameh or Book of Kings, was writ­ten in the 10^th cen­tury CE by Abolqasem Fer­dowsi, who took as his sub­ject the pre-Islamic his­tory of the Iran­ian peo­ple, start­ing with the cre­ation of the world and end­ing with the 7^th cen­tury Arab con­quest of the Per­sian empire. A lit­er­ary expres­sion of what San­dra Mackey calls in The Ira­ni­ans “the sep­a­rate iden­tity within Islam that Ira­ni­ans [have always] felt” (64−5), the Shah­nameh rep­re­sents an act of cul­tural resis­tance, an asser­tion that, despite Mus­lim rule, the val­ues and tra­di­tions of ancient Iran were not only still rel­e­vant, but per­haps even supe­rior to those of Iran’s con­querors, whose reign, as A. Sha­pur Shah­bazi sug­gests in his Fer­dowsi: A Crit­i­cal Biog­ra­phy, was threat­en­ing to reduce the majes­tic sweep of Iran’s past into a sin­gle chap­ter in the his­tory of Islam (34). The suc­cess of this resis­tance can be seen most promi­nently in the fact that, even today, in the words of Dick Davis, the Shah­nameh is “one of the chief means by which both Per­sian rulers and the peo­ple of [Iran] have sought to define their iden­tity to them­selves and to the world at large” (3). The last Shah of Iran, Moham­mad Reza Pahlavi, for exam­ple, invoked the Shah­nameh in order to under­score Iran’s his­tor­i­cal, cul­tural, racial and lin­guis­tic dif­fer­ence from (and supe­ri­or­ity to) Iran’s Arab neigh­bors; and then, after the Islamic Rev­o­lu­tion in 1979, when Iran’s new and theo­cratic gov­ern­ment wanted to dis­cour­age its cit­i­zens’ iden­ti­fi­ca­tion with the nation’s pre-Islamic past, the Aya­tol­lah Khome­ini him­self attested to the cul­tural impor­tance of the Shah­nameh when, along with dis­cour­ag­ing the use of Per­sian first names and express­ing the hope that peo­ple would stop cel­e­brat­ing Norooz, the Per­sian New Year, a hol­i­day with deep Zoroas­trian roots, he sin­gled out Ferdowsi’s poem as rep­re­sent­ing every­thing the rev­o­lu­tion had fought against when it ended the Shah’s reign.

More recently, to take another exam­ple, it could not have been an acci­dent that the scenes of pro­tes­tors car­ry­ing green ban­ners through the streets in the weeks fol­low­ing Iran’s con­tested pres­i­den­tial elec­tions in 2009 bore such a strik­ing resem­blance to the scene near the begin­ning of the Shah­nameh in which the black­smith Kaveh marches through the streets car­ry­ing a ban­ner and call­ing the Per­sian peo­ple to rise up against the evil Arab king Zah­hak. Kaveh is an unapolo­getic rev­o­lu­tion­ary, intent on over­throw­ing the despot who has killed all but one of his eigh­teen sons, but he is also a Per­sian call­ing for the over­throw of his people’s Arab monarch, which makes it very tempt­ing to read Fer­dowsi as more sedi­tious than he really was, as if his pur­pose in writ­ing the Shah­nameh had been to foment a rev­o­lu­tion against Islam. Noth­ing, how­ever, could be fur­ther from the truth. Just as the pro­tes­tors in Iran sought to have their votes counted in the con­text of the gov­ern­ment they already had, not to over­throw that gov­ern­ment, Fer­dowsi, who was a prac­tic­ing Mus­lim, wanted to pre­serve and trans­mit Iran’s cul­tural her­itage within an Islamic con­text, not present that cul­tural her­itage as a replace­ment for Islam.

In this pur­pose, Fer­dowsi was not alone. He may have been a prac­tic­ing Mus­lim, but he was also a proud dehqan, a mem­ber of Iran’s landed gen­try, a group Shah­bazi calls “the back­bone” of Iran­ian soci­ety, pow­er­ful enough that Arab com­man­ders some­times felt it nec­es­sary to nego­ti­ate peace treaties with them, and a group that saw itself as duty bound to pre­serve the “mem­o­ries of the golden days of [the Per­sian] empire and the heroic tra­di­tions and cul­tural her­itage of [their nation]” (20−21). After three hun­dred years of Mus­lim Arab rule, the dehqan had rea­son to be con­cerned. Not only had Ara­bic replaced Per­sian as the lan­guage of law, lit­er­a­ture, phi­los­o­phy and sci­ence, but there was also a grow­ing accep­tance among Mus­lim Ira­ni­ans that it might be pos­si­ble to rebuild Iran’s impe­r­ial struc­ture within an Islamic con­text. Indeed, revi­sion­ist his­to­ries of Iran, such as Tabari’s Tarikh, which is con­tem­po­ra­ne­ous with the Shah­nameh, were writ­ten in sup­port of this idea. In Tarikh, Tabari incor­po­rates Iran’s ori­gins into the cre­ation story as told in the Koran. His goal is to demon­strate that the reigns of the Per­sian mon­archs fit into Koranic chronol­ogy, plac­ing Iran’s leg­endary kings and heros into the world inhab­ited by, and ulti­mately sub­or­di­nat­ing those kings and heros to, char­ac­ters like Adam and Nuh (Noah), who are far more impor­tant to Islam’s over­all nar­ra­tive than Iran could ever be.

In the eyes of the dehqan, this was an unac­cept­able diminu­tion of Iran’s cul­tural her­itage, and so when Fer­dowsi wrote of the begin­ning of the world in the Shah­nameh, he placed Iran squarely at the cen­ter of the nar­ra­tive, and when he told the sto­ries of Iran’s myth­i­cal mon­archs, he told the sto­ries in their own terms, with­out try­ing to jus­tify their exis­tence within the dom­i­nant cul­tural, polit­i­cal and spir­i­tual con­text of Islam (Davis 14). Yet it would be a mis­take to under­stand the Shah­nameh purely as a his­tor­i­cal or polit­i­cal text, of inter­est pri­mar­ily not for its lit­er­ary worth, but for its role as a repos­i­tory of ancient Iran­ian leg­ends. To do so would be to ignore not only Ferdowsi’s lit­er­ary intent – he was, very self-consciously, writ­ing a poem – but also the fact that, as any of the apoc­ryphal sto­ries told about him illus­trate, both in their con­tent and by the fact of their exis­tence, it was as a poet, not a his­to­rian, that Fer­dowsi made his rep­u­ta­tion. In one tale, that rep­u­ta­tion was pre­or­dained. Ferdowsi’s father, this story goes, had a vision of his recently-born son climb­ing a roof and call­ing out loudly towards each of the four cor­ners of the earth. Each time the child called out, a strong voice answered him. Najm-al-Din, who was a dream-interperter, explained to the boy’s father that the vision fore­told Ferdowsi’s achieve­ments. “Your son will be a genius, a poet whose name will be known to the four quar­ters of the world and whose songs will be learned and revered every­where” (Shah­bazi 39, n. 1).

In another story, Fer­dowsi trav­els from his home in Nishapour to Ghazna, the cap­i­tal city of Sul­tan Mah­moud, who was a great patron of the arts and about whom I will have more to say later. Upon enter­ing the city, Fer­dowsi encoun­ters three of Mahmoud’s court poets, Ansari, Asjadi and Far­rukhi, who did not want to be dis­turbed by some­one whose man­ner of dress so clearly marked him as provin­cial. Think­ing to have some fun at Ferdowsi’s expense, and to make sure he did not bother them again, they issued him a chal­lenge. “We are the king’s poets,” Ansari, who was the most senior, said, “and only a true poet can keep com­pany with us. So, to test your abil­ity, each of us will com­pose one line of a qua­train using a sin­gle rhyme. If you can pro­vide the fourth, we will allow you to join us.” Fer­dowsi, con­fi­dent in his skill as a poet, agreed.

The rhyming word Ansari chose was roshan (bright) and, at least accord­ing to Edward G. Browne, in whose Lit­er­ary His­tory of Per­sia I first read this tale (129−30), he chose that word because he was sure there were only two other words in Per­sian that would rhyme with it: gol­shan (rose gar­den), with which Asjadi ended his line, and joshan (cuirass), with which Far­rukhi ended his. The dif­fi­culty of repro­duc­ing Per­sian rhymes in Eng­lish forces Browne to offer two trans­la­tions. The first, in the main body of Browne’s text, pre­serves the rhyming chal­lenge – though the rhyme he chooses is hardly chal­leng­ing in Eng­lish – while los­ing both the mean­ing and, because he has to change the images and metaphors, the Per­sian char­ac­ter of the lines. The sec­ond trans­la­tion, which he gives in a foot­note, pre­serves the mean­ing of the qua­train but loses the rhyming chal­lenge entirely. In each trans­la­tion, though, his ren­der­ing pre­serves the sense of Ferdowsi’s com­plet­ing line. Here is Browne’s mono-rhymed quatrain:

Ansari:      Thine eyes are clear and blue as a sun­lit ocean
Asjadi:       Their glance bewitches like a magic potion
Far­rukhi:   The wounds they cause no balm can heal, nor lotion
Fer­dowsi:  Deadly as those Giv’s spear dealt out to Poshan.

And here is the qua­train that more accu­rately ren­ders the sense of the quatrain:

Ansari:       The moon is not so radi­ant as thy brow
Asjadi:       No garden-rose can match thy cheek, I trow
Far­rukhi:   Thy lashes through the hard­est breast­plate pierce
Fer­dowsi:   Like spear of Giv in Poshan’s duel fierce.

The court poets were deeply impressed. Not only had Fer­dowsi sur­vived their poetic chal­lenge; he had done so by refer­ring to an obscure story from Per­sian lore, demon­strat­ing not only that he was a fine poet, but also a man of some learn­ing. Real­iz­ing that they had under­es­ti­mated him, Ansari, Asjadi and Far­rukhi decide to present Fer­dowsi to Sul­tan Mah­moud as a poet wor­thy of com­plet­ing the ver­si­fi­ca­tion of the national epic begun two or three decades ear­lier by another poet, Daqiqi, whose mur­der had left the court with only a thou­sand or so com­pleted verses. This the poets did and the rest, as the say­ing goes, except that the story I have just told you is almost entirely apoc­ryphal, is history.

Works Cited

Davis, Dick. Epic & Sedi­tion: The Case of Ferdowsi’s Shah­nameh. Wash­ing­ton, DC: Mage Pub­lish­ers 2006.

Mackey, San­dra. The Ira­ni­ans: Per­sia, Islam and the Soul of a Nation. New York: Dut­ton 1996

Shah­bazi, A. Sha­pur. Fer­dowsi: A Crit­i­cal Biog­ra­phy. Costa Mesa: Mazda Pub­lish­ers, 1991.