The Shahnameh of Ferdowsi: Historical Idealism in the Persian Mind (½)
History does nothing, it possesses no immense wealth, and it wages no battles. It is man, real, living man who does all that, who possesses and fights; history is not, as it were, a person apart, using man as a means to achieve its own aims; history is nothing but the activity of man pursuing his aims. - Karl Marx
To remind subsequent generations of the present, humans write. But, why should we write for the folks who have not yet come into existence? What should future humans be reminded of? One may argue that the obligation to seek the knowledge of the past should be a matter of concern for subsequent generations. After all, is not it better to write history for the folks at the present? “Each one has his reasons,” Sartre says, “for one art [of writing] is a flight; for another, a means of conquering” (qtd. in Richter 662). Indeed, the form of writing determines the purpose of the writer. History can be written in two forms; that is, it can be either informative or discursive.
One writes to articulate a precise description of the events, which have already occurred, or are likely to occur, or are on-going occurrences. The writer reduces an event to a series of statements that together aim at forming an objective representation of that event in the mind of readers in the future. In this sense, the writer (or the articulator) is not the origin of the historical text, nor should he be considered the actual producer of the piece. He is a mere mediator who exposes the perceived causal relationships that have led to an occurrence. This form of writing is informative. In the movement of time towards the future, its language looses artistic quality, its content goes out of intellectual fashion, and its influence remains limited to textbooks.
The other writes to decode the pattern based on which time progresses so that he or she can sketch a roadmap to the future for the folks at the present. This form of writing is isolated from discrete events in the sense that it is not dependent on what occurs. The writer’s articulation of factual statements leaves no room for future humans to infer the objectivity of the past. Instead, this writing originates from the mind and, therefore, it leads people towards a path into the future that is patterned based on the continuation of all discrete events in the past. This form is what we shall call “discursive writing.” It speaks about how history should be made.
The epic poems of Ferdowsi in the Shahnameh are prime examples of discursive writing because Ferdowsi does not hesitate to emphasize his writing’s influence on the thoughts of future humans:
I have reached the end of this great history
And all the land will fill with talk of me:
I shall not die, these seeds I have sown will save
My name and reputation from the grave
And men of sense and wisdom will proclaim
When I have gone, my praises and my fame
The epic of the Shahnameh is the mythical history of the Persians. It is mythical because the historical accounts narrated in this epic are not only the fruits of the writer’s mind but also ideal-type interpretations of the progression of time. The purpose of Ferdowsi was to chalk out a literary paradigm according to which history moves from one stage to another. When the purpose is to create a normative history based on the ideals of the writer, poetry, the central element of epics, becomes the indispensable element of discursive writing.
In his lecture, “The Historical Text as Literary Artifact”, Hayden White states, “History belongs to the category of discursive writing.” He continues, “…when the fictional element – or mythic plot structure – is obviously present in it [history], it cease to be history [in the narrative meaning of the term] altogether and becomes a bastard genre, product of unholy, though not unnatural, union between history and poetry” (qtd. in Richter 1386). This suggests that, to Ferdowsi, the poetic form of history had a special meaning other than a mere narration of events. Reminding the Persians of their stolen glory, Ferdowsi penned the epic of the Shahnameh – a reply to the then-existing miseries of the Persian nation, to, if only in the realm of mind, repel alien cultural hegemony by sketching a dialectical analysis of past events that might be an action plan for the reformation of the former glory in the future
Fundamentals of Writing History
To write history, one essential question suggests itself: where do we stand in the progression of time? Of course, this question cannot be answered without understanding the character of the time within which one exists or is. By character, I mean the collection of characteristics through which one can distinguish one era from another. Understanding our position in time defines the parameters of the authentic self. What Dick Davis states in the introduction to the Shahnameh affirms the validity of this argument:
Most striking perhaps is … [that] virtually all of the significant women in the poem’s mythological and legendary sections are non-Persian in origin (Sindokht, Rudabeh, Sudabeh, Farigis, Manizheh, Katayun). In poem’s earlier sections, most of the narrative’s major heroes have foreign mother, but this does not prevent them from being seen as great exemplars of Persian
virtues
Thus, writing history not only leads us to formulate our authentic self but also let us systematize the evolutionary progress of the dynamics of authenticity. Such dynamics are, of course, unfixed and can differ from time to time based on the character of the time itself. One can argue that the significance of our initial question, “where do we stand in the movement of time?” comes straight back to a purpose of the writer. By balancing his historical position against the present time, Ferdowsi intended to institutionalize a literary means for analyzing history. The response to the aforementioned inquiry helped him compose the Shahnameh in a discursive form. To ground heroic struggles in an actual direction for future humans, Ferdowsi needed to modify history and go beyond the traditional narration of chronicles. This modification stemmed from the ideas that took shape in his mind. The effort to let realities turn into ideals requires a masterful skill over discursive writing. It should not be forgotten that, in the Shahnameh, the behavior of heroes and empires as well as the consequence of loves and struggles are the criteria against which we can distinguish ideals from realities.
Form of Writing History
Discursive writing transcends the limits of time. The cornerstone of this form is neither external incidents nor raw ideas. Raw ideas are thoughts, which have been articulated by humans other than the writer himself, or contemplations, which originated from sources other than the writer’s mind. Thinking is the foundation of discursive writing. What is thinking? Here also appears another interrelated question: how is thinking the foundation of historical writing? To begin with, one must note that the progression of time does not possess a particular prototype to be discovered. When we talk about “decoding the pattern of time’s progression,” implication should not be as if we consider time a superior phenomenon and the most tyrant of all. It should not contradict the point I made earlier about the formlessness of time and its progression. In essence, time is formless, but its progression from where it began to where it will end has been and will be subject to infinite modifications that both human will and Providence impose on it. Time, by virtue of its progression, gains a systematic pattern. In the Shahnameh, Ferdowsi tries to initially discover this human- and God-willed pattern and then offers an action plan to change it in favor of the Persians by means of poetry.
Defined in a functional term, thinking is the process of constituting and fabricating ideas. It should be contrasted with the general concept of thinking, which means to think prior to undertaking actions, whether it be writing, reading, or speaking. It is also different from the research process in which one decides to know history by collecting sources, evidence, or primary literature. Thinking navigates the present towards the ideal future. Expressing his historical abstraction in poems, Ferdowsi attempts to offer the Persians a historical consciousness so that the Persians would strive to live the authentic self as prescribed in the Shahnameh. Two questions coincide with one another: Why does Ferdowsi employ poetry as the language of discursive writing? Why does Ferdowsi choose to write an epic rather than a history book like that of Tabari? To comprehend the union of the two constitutive elements of discursive writing; namely, epic and poetry, in writing a future-oriented history, we should examine each separately.
In the classical sense, epics refer to “narrative poems of legendary and heroic content” (De Blois 474). This narrow definition categorizes epics into a literary genre. To Ferdowsi, however, an epic is not a literary genre; it is a weapon to surpass time, to enslave history, and to make the future. The epic of the Shahnameh consists of one prime vision along with a section on determination and a section on realization. Ferdowsi’s vision is to revive the glory of the Persians, as it was, and directly transfer it to the future. An epic is meant to raise the emblem of the Persian civilization after the two centuries of painful silence under the yoke of the Bedouins of Arabian deserts. Ferdowsi’s vision is to establish the intellectual base of an all-comprehensive revolt against the pseudo-owners of Islam, yet in favor of the localized Islam; his vision is to demand God to end Persians’ suffering and let them rise to glory once more. Ferdowsi poeticized heroic struggles and sacrifices in the scope of the section we shall call determination in the Shahnameh. That is, similar to God who wills the world to come into being, the writer of an epic intends to develop, on the basis of that very same will, an epic to design the future with the assumption that future generations belong to the same socio-cultural structure. Even if these ideals seem far less plausible to be realized, it is well worth recalling the memory of former glories, lest gradually all that is gone be obliterated or, according to Dick Davis, “… [that] Persian civilization would disappear as an entity distinguishable from the culture of other countries subsumed into the Caliphate” (Ferdowsi xvii).
The language of the Shahnameh is poetry. Why? All pieces of art possess a unique personality from which originates the purest form of language, that is, the poetic one, which speaks to humans regardless of the time they live in. Ferdowsi himself did not choose to write the epic of Shahnameh in poetry. On the contrary, poetry asserted itself as soon as Ferdowsi decided to put his thoughts on paper. History resembles poetry. It follows a form, and its form is not accidental, for it is willed. History has no tolerance for disproportionate deeds just as poetry has no place for un-rhythmic words. Both are precise, symbolic, and demanding. History is the bearer of truth and is pregnant with its meaning. As the voice of thought, in the words of Heidegger, poetry is the “saying of truth, the saying of the unconcealed-ness of beings” (Heidegger “Poetry” 72). Therefore, poetry is the most accurate language of history.
By no means could Ferdowsi write history in a traditional form similar to that of Tabari or Masoudi because his thoughts, in contrast to orthodox principles of historicism, imply that time does not have a linear movement, progressing from lower and evil to higher and good. The Shahnameh does not begin with misery and end with victory. It is vice-versa. According to Ferdowsi’s thoughts, good always precedes evil. But when evil prevails, as shown in the Shahnameh, an inevitable reformation based on human agency shall emerge to bring about changes.