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Parallel Universes: Exploring the Shāhnāmeh’s spin-offs

Ferdowsī’s Shāhnāmeh has had an immense impact on Persianate literary production since shortly after its completion. Its literary figures and their stories have been taken up in numerous secondary epics, romances, and lyric poems - sometimes as mere references, and sometimes with a substantial development of character or plot. With this in mind, this panel investigates the relationship between the narrative of the Shāhnāmeh and literary texts written as a continuation, response, or rebuttal of the Shāhnāmeh.

The panel brings together five literary texts into a conversation on intertextuality with the Shāhnāmeh. Rabīʿ’s ʿAlī-nāmeh (1089 CE) imitates yet vehemently rejects the Shāhnāmeh, positing ʿAlī, the nephew of the Prophet Muhammad, as its hero. Irānshāh b. Abī Khayr’s secondary epics, the Kūsh-nāmeh and the Bahman-nāmeh (written around the turn to the 12th century CE), feature both monstrous characters and good deeds, thus providing grounds for further discussion of what is good and what is bad. Neẓāmī’s Eskandar-nāmeh (beginning of 13th century) responds to Ferdowsī’s depiction of Eskandar through a shift in focus from determining lineage to examining pious character. Lastly, the Dāstān-e Babr-e Bayān blends humor and violence to depict Rostam’s heroic, monstrous coming-of-age.

The papers will address the following questions: How exactly are the characters or plots in these “spin offs” represented differently from the version preserved in the Shāhnāmeh? Is there a different ethos or morality that motivates each story? What elements are different or new in each case (for example, superhuman phenomena, or religious doctrines)? Do characters act more rationally or more emotionally, are they more fleshed out or do they become flattened into archetypes, stereotypes, or caricatures? Furthermore, are these changes due to genre expectations, changing literary tastes, or influences from other literary cultures? Finally, in examining these “parallel universes”, this panel explores what we can learn about the development of Persianate literature by mapping out intertextualities with Ferdowsī’s Shāhnāmeh.

Presentations

The Shifting Ontologies of Evil in Persian Epic, from Ferdowsi to Iranshah
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Whether in its demonic outward manifestations, or internalized as greed, hatred, and hubris, the problem of evil has proven to be one of the richest and most productive sites of research in Shahnameh studies. As the stories of Sohrab, Siyavash, and Esfandyar famously illustrate, evil is hard to identify, and even harder to root out; the ongoing popularity of these stories is a testament to the powerful moral questions raised in Ferdowsi's work. Less studied, however, are the ways later writers in the Persian epic tradition responded to these questions and posed new ones to complement or complicate them. In this paper, I examine two masnavis written by the Caucasian poet Iranshah b. Abi al-Khayr of Arran (fl. ca. 1100), who, like Ferdowsi before him, is very interested in the origins and ontology of evil: where does it come from, and to what extent is it fixed in the bodies of its avatars (demons, dragons, etc.)? But although his poems, the Bahmannameh and the Kushnameh, are explicitly set in the literary universe of the Shahnameh, they explore these questions along lines radically different from their 'parent' work by developing characters who challenge pat categories of good and evil in unexpected ways. The (anti-)hero of the Kushnameh is a hideous demon and Zahhak's right-hand man; we are forced to watch his cruel deprivations for thousands of lines, only to be surprised at his ultimate redemption at the end of the poem. The Bahmannameh treats Bahman's desire to avenge the death of his father Esfandyar, a seemingly noble goal that devolves into an obsessive quest to eradicate every trace of Rostam's (semi-demonic) family from the earth; the saintly hero is eventually consumed (literally and figuratively) by a dragon. If the Shahnameh, like the Avesta before it, asserts a necessary correlation between monstrous body and demonic soul, Iranshah's work troubles this correlation, questioning the authority of outer appearances. As a result, the phenomenon of 'admixture,' a Zoroastrian concept deeply ingrained in the logic of the Shahnameh, loses its negative force: rather, it can enable the inner transformation and indeed transcendence of both men and monsters. These new possibilities of the soul, articulated here as a response to (and through) the Shahnameh, anticipate similar themes found in the works of the next major masnavi poet in the Caucasus, Nezami of Ganja.

Burning Bright: Monsters, Back-stories, and Rostam's Babr-e Bayan
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Rostam’s iconic garment, the babr-e bayān, is referenced throughout the hero’s story in the Shāhnāmeh, and acquired a distinctive visual representation in later illuminations. But the story of how Rostam acquired the coat through a youthful act of monster-slaying exists only in later versions, incorporated into classical works including the Shāhnāmeh and Farāmarznāmeh but bearing the marks of other eras and narrative-poetic styles. This paper seeks to compare different versions of the Dāstān-e Babr-e Bayān, exploring both why poets were drawn to narrate this episode and how their versions reflect thematic concerns including masculinity, the natural world, and India. While a handful of Persian-language articles have explored this subject, their focuses have tended towards the etymological and an attempt to establish the suit’s linguistic and mythological origins. In addition to offering a contribution in English, this study aims to re-orient discussion towards literary representations of Rostam’s acquisition of the garment. Though ostensibly a suit of armor, the babr-e bayān is (as its name suggests) linked to animal skins, particularly those of big cats. In the sources, however, these predators become interchangeable with both dragon-like and demon-like beasts, complicating the symbolic fields typically ascribed to each of these categories. Rostam’s destruction of this monster is woven into coming-of-age narratives that emphasize Oedipal conflict and sexual awakening, consciously drawing on tropes from the core Shāhnāmeh narrative while altering them into a novel (if occasionally less refined) form. Metatextually, the seemingly late production of these texts reflect both an ongoing interest in creative intervention in classical works and, more specifically, the desire to account for Rostam’s iconographic idiosyncrasies. Drawing on the research of scholars including Djalal Khaleghi-Motlagh and Marjolijn van Zutphen, contemporary theories of monstrosity and fan-fiction, as well as originally manuscript work, this paper takes a multi-faceted approach to a set of rarely-discussed texts that nonetheless represent an integral part of the Shāhnāmeh’s legacy.

Conceiving Eskandar the Great
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The eskandar-nāma, or Alexandrian romance, was a popular choice amongst the narratives about the pre-Islamic past adapted by numerous Persian poets and storytellers from the eleventh through fifteenth centuries. Like its medieval French and English counterparts, Persian Alexanderian romances take readers through an array of legends that include battles with natural and supernatural enemies, conversations with philosophers and sages, and quests to real and imagined places. Yet unlike its Hellenistic predecessors as well as its medieval European counterparts, many Persian Alexandrian romances claim that Eskandar is of Persian lineage himself, as the son of Dārāb (Darius II) and Nahīd, the daughter of Philip II of Macedon. In this paper, I demonstrate how the Shāhnāmeh and Neẓāmī’s (d. 1209) Eskandar-nāma wrestle with this attributed lineage, and what this can show us about each text’s complex relationship to the past.
The Shāhnāmeh narrates the scene of Eskandar’s birth through an anecdote that narrates how Dārāb, having obtained Nahīd from Philip II as tribute, subsequently sends her back to Macedonia on account of her bad breath. Out of shame, she hides her pregnancy such that Eskandar becomes known by all as the son of Philip II. Through this genealogical alignment that reflects the account of earlier historians writing in Arabic such as Dīnavarī (d. 903), Eskandar’s conquest of Persia is consequently portrayed as the legitimate move of a king and subsequent narratives about his conquests can be internalized from within the Shāhnāmeh’s world-building perspective. Moreover, this hidden genealogy allows for the Shāhnāmeh to maintain different levels of “truth” in accordance with what is externally and internally known by various characters as Eskandar’s conquests are subsequently depicted. Neẓāmī’s Eskandar-nāma, however, directly engages with this genealogy only to dismiss it as fabricated, asserting from the beginning of the narrative that Eskandar was the son of Philip II. Shifting the focus from genealogy to conduct, the Eskandar-nāma emphasizes Eskandar’s pious character, which gives way to his eventual prophethood, and thus internalizes his character within an Islamic vision of prophetic history. By comparing these two depictions of Eskandar’s birth, I maintain that we can see competing visions of the past at play through observing how Eskandar is variantly “Persianized” or “Islamized.” Moreover, by placing these depictions in conversation with genre theorists such as Jauss and Bakhtin, this paper aims to show how each text relates to historical “truth” while revisiting their rich intertextuality and contemporary generic classifications.

A Rostam in New Garb? On “Shāhnāmian” Masculinities in the ʿAlīnāmeh
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The ʿAlīnāmeh, written by a certain Rabīʿ in 1089 CE, is an unusually early example of an ʿAlid religious epic. This 11’000 line poem features ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭāleb as its main character and relates the events of the Battle of the Camel (656 CE) and the Battle of Ṣiffīn (657 CE). Composed only decades after Ferdowsī’s Shāhnāmeh, the ʿAlīnāmeh exhibits rich intertextual references to Ferdowsī’s epic. At the same time, the poet clearly sets himself apart from the Shāhnāmeh: In his view, the Shāhnāmeh is entertaining, yet nothing but falsehood (dorūgh) compared with his report of ʿAlī’s true deeds.
Although the Shāhnāmeh as a text is regarded by Rabīʿ as mere legend, its heroes are readily referenced as examples of strength and valor when it comes to his portrayal of ʿAlī. At the same time, ʿAlī as a religious figure transcends the Shahnamian heroic characterization, as he is both a hero in epic terms, but also a virtuous holy figure. This paper explores how the ʿAlīnāmeh sets him apart from the warriors of the Shāhnāmeh to create an ideal of an Iranian religious masculinity.
Based on the scholarship of Shafiʿī Kadkanī and others, this paper analyzes the ʿAlīnāmeh’s intertextualities with Ferdowsī’s Shāhnāmeh through the lens of the study of men and masculinities. It discusses the ʿAlīnāmeh as a product of a literary culture that was informed by the Shāhnāmeh even though its subject matter – two of the most important battles in early Islam – completely differs from the Iranian royal chronicle.