Poetics and Projection: Nationalist and Neo-orientalist interpretations of Iran's national epic the Shahnameh

8/14/2019 Poetics and Projection: Nationalist and Neo-orientalist interpretations of Iran's national epic the Shahnameh

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Omidsalars Lecture October 17, 2007

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Poetics and Projection: Nationalist and Neo-Orientalist Interpretations of

Irans 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 Irans 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 Irans National Epic, I will briefly

digress and briefly discuss it before continuing with my arguments.Shahnameh means the Book of Kings. It is Irans 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 Irans

BASILIKAI DIFTERAI, or books of kings. Although we dont 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. Irans

National Epic came to be called Xwady Nmag 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 Xwady Nmag

was translated into Arabic under the title of Siyar al-Mulk, 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 Ferdowsis 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 Ferdowsis verse word for word, exists in an excellent

manuscript (Dmd Ibrhim Psh 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 Shhnma is the product of a poetic oral tradition. This view

contradicts not only Ferdowsis 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 Homers 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 orGusle.

Parry found striking similarities between many features of Homers 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 Parrys 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 Homers 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 Irans 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 Ferdowsis 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. Heres 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 [Ferdowsis] 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 Shhnma,

and Nagys 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 Homers poems

upon the Shahnameh and has created a hybrid history of Irans national epic that

is more Greek than Persian. Heres 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 (SandysA History of

Classical Scholarship, 1:19 20; cf. Kirks Homer and the Epic, 1965, p.212).

Nagys 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 Shhnma 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 Homers 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 cultures pre-literate phase.

Therefore, oral formulaic technique of composition, which may be applicable to

Homer, is not relevant to Ferdowsis 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, lets go along with it and examine the

truth of this claim by a simple quantitative comparison.

The story of Kaykhosrows 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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London 1276

17%

*Istanbul 1330

17%

*Cairo 1341

16%

**London 1486

17%

Florence 1217

16%**Istanbul 1498

17%

CHART 1

This is a far cry from the pattern of quantitative fluctuations that characterize oral

performance. A skilled singers 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

1

2

Skilled BardUnskilled Bard

CHART 2

A fathers version of the same song was found to be nearly twice the length of his

sons performance (445 and 249 lines; fluctuation = 78.7%) (SEE CHART 3).


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Father's song vs Son's Song

1

2

Father's PerformanceSon's Perfornance

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%

2

64%

1

2

Compared to these numbers variations in Shahnameh manuscripts are positively

negligible and the claim that Shahnamehs 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 Arthurs 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, Ferdowsis 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 thats 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 Islams


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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 Ferdowsis 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 Kellys 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 Oxfords Oriel College library had fewer than 100 volumes in 1375.

By contrast, Muslim societies had large and well-organized libraries. The

Arab scholar, Yqut (d. 1228 AD) who worked on his geographical dictionary in

the city of Merv in modern Turkmenistan, tells of that citys twelve public libraries,

the largest of which was endowed by a man who was originally a grocer. Yaqut

praises the citys 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-Taqsim) describes the

large buildings, vast holdings, and extensive title catalogue of the Buyid library in

Shrz Iran. Al-Sam`n (d. 1167) reports that 120 draught animals transported

the personal library of the scholar al-Wqid (747-823 AD). The size of Shib b.

`Abbds (d. 995 AD) library in the 10th century has been estimated at 1,140,000

titles, while that of the scholar Nasr al-Dn-i Ts (d. 1273 AD) in Margha, 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`am (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, Ab al-Faraj al-Isbahn(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 Manchihr (d. 1040) writes:

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 Hayyn

al-Tawhidis (d. 1023) report that when the scholar Ibn Kaysn (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 Bayhaq (d. 1077) who was Ferdowsis 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 Kaykvs 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 ( ), oral reports of the

common people (), nonsense (xurft), and old wives tales (afsna-

yi `ajyiz). (History of Tabarestn, 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 Samct, or:

auditions. Typically, the Samct 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.

Heres 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 Harvards 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

Ferdowsis dependence on oral tradition is rooted in the emotional response that

dominates the relationship between Iran and the US since Irans Islamic

revolution. Indeed, the first statement of the Shahnamehs orality dates from

shortly after that time. Since the Islamic revolution Iran has been transformed

from being Americas 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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newss relentless portrayal of Iranians as a host of shouting savages incessantly

chanting for Americas death and downfall, has successfully redefined Iran as

Americas nemesis. As Iran moved from the with us column of Americas

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 Americas 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 PRE-LITERATE ILLITERATE SAVAGE

There is but a short jump from the "savage" to the mad.

Irans 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 Ferdowsis dependence upon the so-called oral

tradition in spite of incontestable evidence to the contrary. From the vantage

point of this slightly sublimated bigotry, Irans 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 cant 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 Americas 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 iswhy 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 dont 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

Ferdowsis 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 Ferdowsis 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 Shhnmas vocabulary

conclusively prove that the frequency of Arabic words in the poem is typical of

other literary works of Ferdowsis 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 Ferdowsis 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 Shahs anti-Semitic ideas carried over to

his sons 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(Irans

Provincial Capitals), the lineage of the Sassanid Emperor, Bahrm V, (420 438

AD), also called Bahrm-e Goor in Persian, is described as follows:

ahrestn [] ud tar nduxt zan Yazdgird buhrn kard

iyn duxt r-galdag jahdagn-h md-iz Wahrm Gr bd

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 Bahrm-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`amis 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

Iraniansbut 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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they should begin by paying greater attention to detail and to context. Thank you

for your patience.