The Shifting Ontologies of Evil in Persian Epic, from Ferdowsi to Iranshah

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.