Omidsalar’s Lecture October 17, 2007

Poetics and Projection: Nationalist and Neo-Orientalist Interpretations of

Iran’s National Epic, The Shahnameh
Cultural historians fashion fragments of the past into a coherent narrative
by means of inference and imagination. This narrative, however, is not formed in
a vacuum. Consciously or unconsciously, those of us who are engaged in this
enterprise impose something of ourselves upon what we study. This is
understandable and human but it becomes problematic when we impose too
much of “who” we are upon “what” we study, and drawing on our experience of
the familiar, slip into unjustifiable analogical reasoning by seeing similarities and
patterns where none exist. I intend to make two points in this talk. First, those
who work with non-western literary traditions should not lose sight of their texts’
social and cultural contexts lest they lose control of their data. Second, they
should avoid free associative and analogical speculation lest they mistake false
analogies for proof, or lose control of their unconscious impulses.
Since I will use Iran’s National epic the Shahnameh in order to
demonstrate my points, I will provide a brief history of the text for those of you
who might not be familiar with it. Also, since I criticize the application of the so-
called “Oral Formulaic Theory” to the study of Iran’s National Epic, I will briefly
digress and briefly discuss it before continuing with my arguments.
Shahnameh means the “Book of Kings.” It is Iran’s most important literary
monument. It is also the legendary history of Iran from her first primordial Kings
who invented culture to the end of the Persian Empire with the Muslim invasion
of the country in the 7th century AD. With its 50,000 distichs or 100,000 lines of
verse, the Shahnama is a long epic by European standards. It is nearly four
times the length of the Iliad (15,693 lines) and the Odyssey (12,110 lines)
combined.
Reports of a written epic tradition in Iran exist in Greek sources of the 4th
century BC (Achaemenid period 559 – 330 BC), which speak of Iran’s
“BASILIKAI DIFTERAI,” or “books of kings.” Although we don’t know the actual
Old Persian title of the book, we may safely assume that the Greek title was a
translation of the Old Persian name of the book, and whatever the book was

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called in Old Persian, its title meant something like: “The Book of Kings.” Iran’s
National Epic came to be called Xwadāy Nāmag in Middle Persian, which also
means “The Book of Kings.” This was during the reign of the Sassanid dynasty
(AD 224 – 651). After the advent of Islam the Middle Persian Xwadāy Nāmag
was translated into Arabic under the title of Siyar al-Mulûk, “Lives of Kings” in the
8th century AD. In the 9th and 10th centuries AD, when New Persian language
had fully matured, many versions of this legendary history existed, which in the
New Persian language were called the “Shahnameh, [The Book of Kings]”.
Therefore, a written tradition of the Book of Kings may be assumed for Iran from
at least the 4th century BC. In all likelihood, the Iranian aristocracy patronized the
compilation of these Books of Kings in order to connect itself to ancient lines of
rulers and heroes for reasons of political expediency.
The most famous of all the Shahnamehs in New Persian language, was a
prose Shahnameh that was prepared under the patronage of an Iranian noble
man in 957 AD. We know from Ferdowsi’s explicit statements that he put this
prose Shahnameh into verse and dedicated it to King Mahmud (d. 1031/421)
when he finished a second redaction of it in 1010 AD. Fortunately, the preface to
this text and a free Arabic translation of it have survived. The Arabic translation,
which often agrees with Ferdowsi’s verse word for word, exists in an excellent
manuscript (Dāmād Ibrāhim Pāshā manuscript 916. [see figures 1 & 2].

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(Fig. 1: The opening of the Book)

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(Fig. 2: A page from the table of contents)

I told you at the beginning of my talk that scholars sometimes impose too
much of who they are on what they study. An example of this is the recent trend
in American Shahnameh scholarship that imposes the history of western epic
literature upon the Shahnameh, and alleges that rather than being a literary work
of art, the Shāhnāma is the product of a poetic oral tradition. This view
contradicts not only Ferdowsi’s explicit statements of his dependence on a prose
archetype but also the independent testimony of ancillary sources. Because the
proponents of this view are inspired by what is called the “Oral Formulaic
Theory,” which grew out of Homeric scholarship, I have to take a few moments to
explain what folklorists mean by the term: “Oral Formulaic Theory” for those of
you who may not be familiar with the concept.
Certain features of Homer’s poetry justified doubts about whether he
depended on writing at all. Indeed his identity, gender, and even existence came
under scrutiny over the years. The totality of these doubts and concerns about

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Homer are called “The Homeric Question.” In order to find an answer to this
question, the American classicist Millman Parry (1902 – 35) engaged in fieldwork
among the illiterate poets of the Balkans. These poets who are called guslars,
sing their epic songs to the accompaniment of a stringed instrument or Gusle.
Parry found striking similarities between many features of Homer’s poetry and
oral verse making as found among these illiterate bards. He concluded that
Homer must have also been illiterate and must have composed the Iliad orally.
Following Parry’s death, his student, Albert Lord (1912 – 1991) formulated the
results of their Balkan researches in his influential book, The Singer of Tales
(1960).
According to Parry and Lord, illiterate singers of epic tales who must
perform their tales publicly, and extemporaneously during performance, rely on a
stock of memorized formulas that help them re-compose their stories during each
performance. These poets have to depend on memorized formulas and stock
phrases because unlike the literate poet who may take his time to develop an
idea on paper, the singer must be able to rapidly come up with verses in order to
be able to sing his song without interruption. This is why oral poetry, which
thrives primarily in pre-literate or illiterate cultures, is so full of repetitions,
formulaic expressions and contradictions. Parry explained the repetitions,
formulaic expressions, and the frequent contradictions of Homer’s poems as
proof that he was an illiterate bard who worked much like the Guslars of the
Balkans. In view of what we know about how oral poetry works, the recent
interpretation of Iran’s highest literary achievement as “Oral” or “Orally Derived”
seems difficult to understand. However, once we consider how the proponents
of this idea are allowing “who” they are to interfere with “what” they study things
begin to fall into place.
The assumption of the oral character of the Shahnameh is based on an
unfortunate description of Ferdowsi as the “Persian Homer.” Sir William Jones
wrote in 1772 that Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh is “an epick poem, as majestick and
entire as the Iliad.” In 1795, Sir William Ouseley agreed that Ferdowsi indeed
deserves the title of “The Persian Homer.” This improper description spread

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through studies of Persian literature like wildfire, and in time placed the history of
the Shahnameh under the tyranny of Homeric scholarship. Here’s an example of
its influence. The American classicist, Gregory Nagy, writes in his foreword to a
book called: Poet and Hero in the Persian Book of Kings (Cornell, 1994), which
was authored by his wife, Professor Olga Davidson:
“The story is told in the Shahnameh that [Ferdowsi’s] archetypal Book of
Kings became lost in time and disintegrated, only to be recovered all at
once and literally reintegrated through oral performance. The oral
performers are ... assembled by a wise vizier from every corner of the
empire, each holding a “fragment” of the long-lost Book of Kings. The
vizier lines [them] up, and each recites his fragment in order. The Book is
thus reassembled by this assembly” (p.ix).
No such reference to lining up “oral performers” exists in the Shāhnāma,
and Nagy’s statement is simply incorrect. However, errors, especially those
committed by fine scholars, exist for good reasons. Once their context is
penetrated, they tend to instruct rather than mislead. Being a student of Homer,
Nagy has imposed what he knows about the background of Homer’s poems
upon the Shahnameh and has created a hybrid history of Iran’s national epic that
is more Greek than Persian. Here’s how: all classicists know of the account
given in the pseudo-Platonic dialogue Hipparchus, according to which a
gathering of rahpsodes or oral performers of the Iliad led to the preparation of an
edition of the poem. According to this legend, each “performer” was made to
sing the part of the Iliad that he knew by heart in order, the different
performances were written down and compiled into the Iliad (Sandy’s A History of
Classical Scholarship, 1:19 – 20; cf. Kirk’s Homer and the Epic, 1965, p.212).
Nagy’s memory of this well-known story has influenced his idea of how the text of
the Shahnameh evolved. Being a scholar of Homeric epic and influenced by the
unfortunate description of Ferdowsi as the “Persian Homer”, Nagy imposes a
familiar intellectual model upon the Shāhnāma and recreates its history in Greek
terms. In other words, if Ferdowsi is the Persian Homer, then his poem must

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have been created the way Homer’s poems were collected regardless of his own
statement in the Shahnameh that he used a prose archetype.
In my opinion, drawing analogies between Ferdowsi and Homer are
inappropriate in spite of the fact that these poets occupy similar positions in the
literary pantheon of their respective cultures. Homer and Ferdowsi were
products of two different cultural circumstances. Ferdowsi was a highly educated
man who flourished in a literate culture that had a rich textual tradition, while
Homer was illiterate and lived during the Greek culture’s pre-literate phase.
Therefore, oral formulaic technique of composition, which may be applicable to
Homer, is not relevant to Ferdowsi’s art. Not mindful of this crucial difference,
American scholars ceaselessly strive to isolate traces of an underlying oral
performance in the textual tradition of the Shahnameh. For instance, drawing on
the ideas of the French medievalist, Paul Zumthor, Professor Olga Davidson
claims that just as manuscript variants in some medieval European poetry are
interpreted as evidence of oral performance behind that poetry, manuscript
variants of the Shahnameh must also represent varying oral performances rather
than being merely scribal errors. Although drawing conclusions about
manuscript variants of a highly literary poem on the basis of evidence from oral
poetry is like trying to extract orange juice from apples, but since the false
analogy is already made by the Oralists, let’s go along with it and examine the
truth of this claim by a simple quantitative comparison.
The story of Kaykhosrow’s rule in the Shahnameh has 11,749 distichs in
the Florence MS 1217AD; 11,622 distichs in the older London MS 1276 AD;
11,899 distichs in the Istanbul codex of 1330AD; 11,060 distichs in the Cairo MS
1341AD; 11,560 distichs in the second London text 1486AD; and 11,577 distichs
in the second Istanbul codex of 1498AD. The average quantitative difference for
all of our six codices is approximately 3.77% (from a minimum of 0.2% to a
maximus of 7.35%. See chart 1).

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**Istanbul 1498 Florence 1217

17% 16%

**London 1486 London 1276

17% 17%

*Cairo 1341 *Istanbul 1330

16% 17%

CHART 1
This is a far cry from the pattern of quantitative fluctuations that characterize oral
performance. A skilled singer’s version of the same song at 6313 lines fluctuates
by 238.9% compared to that of a less skilled singer at 2294 lines (SEE CHART
2).

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Skilled vs Unskilled Bards

Unskilled Bard Skilled Bard

1
2

CHART 2

A father’s version of the same song was found to be nearly twice the length of his
son’s performance (445 and 249 lines; fluctuation = 78.7%) (SEE CHART 3).

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Father's song vs Son's Song

Son's Perfornance Father's Performance

1
2

The same singer doubled the length of his own song in performances that were
only one year apart from 154 to 279 lines for a percentile change of 81.2% (SEE
CHART 4).

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Same Singer's versions of Same song

1
36%

1
2

2
64%

Compared to these numbers variations in Shahnameh manuscripts are positively

negligible and the claim that Shahnameh’s manuscript variants reflect different
oral performances is nothing but absolute absurdity.
A different version of the argument that ascribes an oral source to the
Shahnameh appeared a few years ago in the Journal of the American Oriental
Society. This paper pairs Ferdowsi with the medieval English author Geoffrey of
Monmouth (1100 – 1155), who gave us the literary form of King Arthur’s story
(History of the Kings of Britain; circa 1136). The argument runs as follows: (1)
Geoffrey was a medieval author and so was Ferdowsi. (2) Geoffrey claimed that
his history is based on an old book in the Welsh language that he obtained from
a friend and so does Ferdowsi. (3) Geoffrey fabricated his stories by conflating
contemporary oral tradition and his own imagination with Latin sources (4)
Therefore, Ferdowsi’s account of his prose archetype is also a fabrication and he
too disguised his dependence on oral tradition by claiming the authority of an
ancient book because that’s what medieval authors did.
The problem with assuming that Ferdowsi behaved as a medieval
European writer is that neither Ferdowsi nor any other Muslim author of Islam’s

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classical period may be justifiably called medieval. But why not? Ferdowsi
completed his poem in 1010, and died in 1020 AD during a time that is called
“medieval period” in European historiography.
Ferdowsi was not a medieval poet because outside the social-historical
context of Western Europe, the word “medieval” is meaningless. In his
introduction to Oral Tradition in the Middle Ages , W. F. H. Nicolaisen writes:
The notion of a chronological Middle Age, with its concomitant epithet
medieval, is, in its hint at a tripartite temporal division, essentially
European in origin and application. Any exercise … in matters concerning
oral tradition in a medieval setting,… is consequently almost by definition,
predestined to concentrate on and perhaps even to deal exclusively with,
the European scene (pp.1-6).
Therefore, using evidence from medieval European experience in support of
generalizations about life and literature in Iran of Ferdowsi’s time is
methodologically flawed. Classical Muslim society was fundamentally different
from medieval European society in several important respects, the most
important of which was the vastly greater extent of literacy in Muslim civilization.
If we may take book production and the size of public libraries as indices of
literacy in medieval Europe on the one hand, and classical Muslim civilizations on
the other, we see how drastically different these two cultures were.
According to Thomas Kelly’s Early Public Libraries in Great Britain, prior to
the 15th century there was no general public for books in Europe. Books were
expensive. The average price of a bound volume was about 20 shillings for
which in 1450, one could buy “two cows, a dozen sheep, or a tolerable horse;
and if one were convivially inclined, about 20 gallons of wine or 10 barrels of
beer.” Medieval European libraries were quite small, typically no more than a
few dozen devotional titles kept in a book-chest (called armarium) (See
illustration).

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The monastic library in St. Gall had only 400 volumes in 841 AD, Cluny had 570,
and Bobbic 650 in the 12th century. Cathedral libraries appeared around the 12th
century AD, and were no larger. The one at Durham had 600 volumes in 1200
AD, while Canterbury, had about 5000 volumes in the year 1300. University
libraries were even smaller. Cambridge library had only 122 volumes in 1424 AD,
while Oxford’s Oriel College library had fewer than 100 volumes in 1375.
By contrast, Muslim societies had large and well-organized libraries. The
Arab scholar, Yāqut (d. 1228 AD) who worked on his geographical dictionary in
the city of Merv in modern Turkmenistan, tells of that city’s twelve public libraries,
the largest of which was endowed by a man who was originally a grocer. Yaqut
praises the city’s librarians for allowing him to borrow 200 volumes for use at
home. Not many European libraries in the 13th century had 200 volumes let
alone the ability to lend so many tomes to a single patron. The library of the
Caliph, Hakam II in Andalusia (961-976) had 400,000 volumes of which the
author and title catalogues were prepared in forty-four volumes of fifty folios
each. A geographical work of the 10th century (Ahsan al-Taqāsim) describes the
large buildings, vast holdings, and extensive title catalogue of the Buyid library in
Shîrāz Iran. Al-Sam`ānî (d. 1167) reports that 120 draught animals transported
the personal library of the scholar al-Wāqidî (747-823 AD). The size of Sāhib b.
`Abbād’s (d. 995 AD) library in the 10th century has been estimated at 1,140,000
titles, while that of the scholar Nasîr al-Dîn-i Tûsî (d. 1273 AD) in Marāgha, Iran,

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had over 400,000 volumes. The Iranian vizier of the Mongol rulers, Rashid al-Din
Fazlollah (killed in 1318 AD /718) reveals in his correspondence that one of his
personal libraries housed 60,000 volumes. Documents that list the expenses of
Muslim librarie have survived and we know that these institutions employed
Librarians, translators, copyists, binders, and janitors, and also provided their
patrons with means of making copies of books and documents for their private
use. Naturally public libraries imply a reading public. In contrast to their
European counterparts, classical Muslim literati read a vast variety of non-
devotional texts. In the year 963, the Persian vizier Bal`amî (d. 973) writes of the
wide availability of classical Greek and Latin texts in translation in North Eastern
Iran (present day Afghanistan).
Reports of extensive graffiti imply widespread literacy. The great Arab
author, Abū al-Faraj al-Isbahānī (897-967 AD) composed a book that is entirely
devoted to graffiti and its literary merits. Even fortune-tellers, who are largely
illiterate in modern Middle East, relied on books for the conduct of their business
in the 10th century AD. In one of his elegies, the poet Manûchihrî (d. 1040) writes:
‫ﻧﻬﺎدﻩ ﭘﻴﺶ ﺧﻮﻳﺶ اﻧﺪر ﭘﺮ از ﺗﺼﻮﻳﺮ دﻓﺘﺮهﺎ‬ ‫ﺑﺴﺎن ﻓﺎﻟﮕﻮﻳﺎﻧﻨﺪ ﻣﺮﻏﺎن ﺑﺮ درﺧﺘﺎن ﺑﺮ‬
The birds upon the trees resemble fortunetellers
With their picture-filled books in front of them.
That literacy was not limited to the upper classes is also implied in Abu Hayyān
al-Tawhidi’s (d. 1023) report that when the scholar Ibn Kaysān (d. 912) lectured
on one of the treatises of the grammarian al-Tha`lab (816 – 904), over 100 of the
literati and a great mass of common folks attended his lectures. This is hardly
the picture of a “medieval” culture of the European sort in which oral tradition
may have a place.
The Muslim literati despised “oral tradition”. Literary works that betrayed
an oral style were objects of scorn and intellectual snobbery. For instance, the
historian Bayhaqî (d. 1077) who was Ferdowsi’s contemporary refers to
storytellers as: “idiots, gathering other idiots around them, only to tell them
unbelievable fables.” Muslims were concerned with the authority of their
sources. Writing in the year 1082, Prince Kaykāvûs ibn Iskandar advised his son

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to depend only on texts that are in the handwriting of their authors [i.e., are
autograph copies]. Another historian Ibn Esfandiyar (c. 1216) derides popular
histories as:” collections of peasant lies (‫)از ﺗﮑﺎذﻳﺐ اهﻞ ﻗﺮﯼ‬, oral reports of the
common people (‫)و اﻓﻮاﻩ ﻋﻮام اﻟﻨﺎس‬, nonsense (xurāfāt), and old wives tales (afsāna-
yi `ajāyiz).” (History of Tabarestān, p.4).
This is not to say that Muslim scholars did not use oral tradition at all.
They clearly did, but theirs was a learned oral tradition passed from scholar to
scholar. At the end of many literary, historical, and religious texts, there is a brief
note which stats that the text was read to a scholar who orally corrected it and
supervised its learning by others. These notes are called Samācāt, or:
“auditions”. Typically, the Samācāt list the name of the scholar to whom the text
was read, the names of those who attended the session, and the date, place,
and duration of the sessions. Here is a note from the year 1302/701 which states
that the text was read to a woman scholar and lists the names of those who
attended the reading, including one slave and two other women.

Here’s another one that also involved a woman scholar.

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This important cultural context of oral tradition in Muslim civilization is routinely

neglected by the “Oralists”.
Let me suggest a compromise and say that if classical Muslim society
must be compared with European civilizations in order to be validated an
legitimized in the western mind, then the pre-conquest Roman civilization is more
appropriate for this comparison; and if Ferdowsi must be paired with a European
epic poet in order to be recognized as a poet, then Virgil is a suitable companion
for him than is Homer.
Although most scholars, who are presented with indisputable evidence
against their views willingly change those views, the devotees of Harvard’s tribal
religion of Oral Formulaic Theory tend to grow more obstinate; and like Balaam's
travel companion, tend to dig in their heels. Therefore, something beyond
normal scholastic considerations must be at work here. I believe the myth of
Ferdowsi’s dependence on oral tradition is rooted in the emotional response that
dominates the relationship between Iran and the US since Iran’s Islamic
revolution. Indeed, the first statement of the Shahnameh’s “orality” dates from
shortly after that time. Since the Islamic revolution Iran has been transformed
from being America’s Middle Eastern island of stability and the land of wine and
roses, to a dank and dismal den of “mad mullahs” in the American mind. TV

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news’s relentless portrayal of Iranians as a host of shouting savages incessantly

chanting for America’s death and downfall, has successfully redefined Iran as
America’s nemesis. As Iran moved from the “with us” column of America’s
ledger to its “against us” column, her greatest literary monument also shifted from
the realm of high-literature to the sphere of “folklore.” It was recast as either
“oral” or “orally derived” in agreement with America’s cultural re-imagining of
Iranians. Those who are familiar with the nuances and evolution of academic
jargon know that before the anthropologists began to use the “politically correct”
terms “literate” and “pre-literate” in order to distinguish advanced societies of the
West from the “backward” cultures of the third world, they used the terms
“civilized” and “savage.” The subtext of the “orality argument” in western studies
of the Shahnameh, its implicit associative chain is:
ORAL Æ PRE-LITERATE Æ ILLITERATE Æ SAVAGE
There is but a short jump from the "savage" to the “mad”.
Iran’s grand Ayatollahs, accomplished scholars of theology and Islamic
jurisprudence who command a legal textual tradition that is fifteen centuries old,
are routinely described as the “mad mullahs of Iran.” A similar description of the
members of the college of the Cardinals in Rome or the Rabbinate in Israel
would be hard to imagine. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that in an
instance of “scholarship mimics the media” American academics should actively
promote the absurd notion of Ferdowsi’s dependence upon the so-called oral
tradition in spite of incontestable evidence to the contrary. From the vantage
point of this slightly sublimated bigotry, Iran’s highest literary achievement is
“oral” or at best “orally derived” not because a shred of evidence exists in favor of
such a position, but because savages can’t have high literature. Because their
equally savage national poet can only reach into an ancient bag of formulas and
produce stock phrases to pass off as art. I submit that the argument which
ascribes “orality” to the Shahnameh is nourished by the type of unconscious
aggression that in its deceptively benign academic form, wounds without
apparent malice or spite.

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The “otherization” of Iran and Iranians, their dehumanization is

iconographically confirmed in America’s popular culture. The recent movie, the
300, transforms Iranian soldiers of the Achaemenid period from this:

to this:

Meanwhile the Emperor Xerxes is transformed from this:

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to this:

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The dehumanization of Iranians reached new intensity in a recent cartoon

in the Columbus Dispatch of September 4th, 2007, where Iran is depicted as a
sewer out of which an infestation of cockroaches is spreading to the rest of the
Middle East:

Naturally, if Iranians are mere cockroaches, then using nuclear weapons against
them would not be an act of genocide but merely a matter of pest-control. That is
why exhortations to bomb Iran have become routine in American political
discourse, mass media, and even marketing, where they are found on infant
clothing:

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Toys:

Personal effects,

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As well as garments and music.

American neo-Orientalists’ prejudiced assessment of the Shahnameh
does not mean that Iranians’ evaluation of their national poem is free of
prejudice, and I don’t want you to think that I thrash western academics only to
leave my own countrymen unmolested. Whereas westerners may plead
ignorance of detail, the Iranian scholars have no such defense. We imagine
Ferdowsi’s life and career in the context of our own cultural prejudices and
behave no better than those whose attitude might be offensive to us. King
Mahmud of Ghaznah (r. 998/1031/ 389 – 421), arguably the greatest patron of
Persian literature after Islam is cast as Ferdowsi’s enemy in a cultural farce of
our own creation and is treated with such venomous contempt by the Persian
academy and public opinion that is positively mind-boggling. He is said to be an
anti-Iranian Turk in spite of the fact that he was born in Iran from an aristocractic

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Iranian lady. There is a healthy dose of male chauvinism in the scenario that
depicts Mahmud as Turkish for no better reason than his father was Turkish.
One might ask, what about his Iranian mother? Did she have anything to do with
his birth, upbringing, and formative years? Do women count at all?
Another Iranian myth alleges that Ferdowsi composed his poem in “pure
Persian,” and intentionally avoided Arabic vocabulary. Though chiefly used for
“Arab bashing,” this bit of folklore is related to the perception of Ferdowsi as the
father of Persian language and culture. A belief that is drilled into every Iranian
child from the first grade and is reinforced by iconography:

Notice the child in front of the poet

This is also untrue. Statistical studies of the Shāhnāma’s vocabulary
conclusively prove that the frequency of Arabic words in the poem is typical of
other literary works of Ferdowsi’s time. Ferdowsi used relatively few Arabic
words in his poem because that was how Persian was written in those days NOT
because he was trying to purge his verse from Arabic vocabulary. Aside from its
depravity as a linguistic form of “ethnic cleansing,” the myth that by avoiding

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Arabic vocabulary Ferdowsi rescued Persian language and culture from

disappearing under the weight of Arabic is flagrantly false. We have thousands
of pages of Persian poetry and prose that predate Ferdowsi’s time. Therefore,
the idea that he rescued Persian language from annihilation is absurd. But
myths, especially those that are believed in the face of evidence to the contrary,
exist because they fulfill some pressing psychological need.
The legend of Ferdowsi as the father of Persian language dates from the
first half of the 20th century, when the absurd idea of Iranians as “Aryans” took
off. The founder of Pahlavi dynasty, Reza Shah (r. 1925 – 1941), unabashedly
admired Adolf Hitler and Nazism. Reza Shah’s anti-Semitic ideas carried over to
his son’s reign, during which propaganda about the racial superiority of the so-
called Aryan Iranians to other populations of the Middle East was promoted as a
matter of course. Driven by the Zeitgeist of the early 20th century, Persian
academics contributed to the fraud that has mislead the Iranian community for
over fifty years, and re-invented Iranians as “Aryans” in a Middle Eastern sea of
Semites. Like every effective piece of propaganda and self-deception, this
scenario has a tiny speck of fact in its center. It is true that Persian is an Indo-
European language, but it is also true that Iranians are one of the most
genetically diverse populations in the world. Let me make this clear by an
example from a Middle Persian text In the Shahrestani-ha I Eranshahr (Iran’s
Provincial Capitals), the lineage of the Sassanid Emperor, Bahrām V, (420 – 438
AD), also called Bahrām-e Goor in Persian, is described as follows:
• Šahrestān [ī] šūš ud šūštar Šīšīnduxt zan ī Yazdgird ī Šābuhrān kard
čiyōn duxt ī rēš-galūdag jahūdagān-šāh mād-iz ī Wahrām ī Gōr būd
• The cities of Shush and Shustar were built by Shishin-Dokht, the wife of
Yazdgird son of Shapoor, who was the daughter of Rash Galut, king of the
Jews and the mother of Bahrām-e Goor (Sharestani-ha-ye Eranshar, line
47)
Those of you who know anything about Jewish law would immediately deduce
that one of our most famous pre-Islamic, and by implication “Aryan” kings turns
out to be Jewish because his mother was a Jew. Moreover, if the text of

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Bal`ami’s history is to be believed, the mother of the last Persian Emperor,

Yazdgird III (632 – 651 AD) was an Ethiopian Christian woman (last three lines
on this manuscript page):

So much for the pre-Islamic Aryans of the imagination of the closet Nazis among
Iranians—but I should not digress.
Let me return to the narrative of Ferdowsi vs. Mahmud, and Ferdowsi vs.
Arabs/Muslims to which I alluded before. These narratives received support from
different groups of Iranian intellectuals for different reasons. The nationalists
projected their opposition to the influence of the colonial powers on Iran back a

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thousand years, and constructed a storyline according to which Iran’s national

poet single-handedly defeated the alien influence of Arabs and Turks. The
Iranian left had a slightly different take, and saw in Ferdowsi’s relationship with
Mahmoud an expression of the “class struggle” that their Soviet overlords had
taught them was the force behind history’s tortuous movements. In their scheme
Ferdowsi represented the masses of workers and peasants while Mahmud stood
for those who oppressed these masses. Since the left had been assured that all
creativity comes from the working class, the Shahnameh had to be detached
from its aristocratic roots in order to be connected to the proletariat. This was
achieved by promoting the baseless idea that Ferdowsi adopted most of the
narrative of the Shāhnāma from the tales of the wondering storytellers of his
time. Thus, the aristocratic narrative of the Shahnameh was transmuted into
something “folksy”. According to the left’s re-imagining of Iran’s epic, the tales
told by Ferdowsi, this "poet of the people" did not come from an actual “Book of
Kings” which was commissioned by the country’s nobility, but from the treasury of
the Iranian people's folklore. Ironically, this leftist reinterpretation is frequently
cited by the “Formulaicists”, who have intellectually cross bred with the
communists to produce a bastardized version of Shahnameh’s history, that is no
less amazing for its insipidity than it is for its total disregard of textual and
historical evidence.
To prove that the Shahnameh is either orally derived, or orally composed,
one needs more than mere faith in theory or dogma. It is the burden of those
who claim that Ferdowsi relied on oral tradition to demonstrate how the
Shāhnāma’s grand language or its cultural context support their contention.
Piling opinions atop fatuous analogies to pass off as proof will not do. Originality
is a good thing, however, scholars should not attempt to be original even at the
cost of making sense. In the Book of Proverbs 25:2, King Solomon said that it is
the glory of God to conceal a thing. Alfred E. Housman responded that it is the
honor of scholars not of Kings to reveal the things that God has concealed.
Allow me to add that if scholars are to be worthy of butting heads with God, then

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they should begin by paying greater attention to detail and to context. Thank you
for your patience.

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