The Book of Kings

Power politics may demonise Iran today but the country's culture remains the darling of philosophers and poets from around the world. While western powers bit their nails over Iran's nuclear intentions at the 51st general conference of the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, 300 experts, including 90 Iranians, at the 6th European Conference of Iranian Studies held in the same city at the same time, could not get enough of the Achaemenids or Zarathustra.

Hosted by the Austrian Academy of Sciences, the Iranian Studies meet was not just about grandising the past. It was about getting to know the past in order to deal with the present. According to Professor Evangelos Venetis of Holland's Leiden University, a pre-modern text like the Shahnama is key to understanding Iran today.

Written a millennium ago, the Shahnama is the largest poem to be penned by one author. “It is the encyclopaedia of Iranian culture. An enormous amount of scholarly literature already exists about it and yet it remains one of the most enigmatic works surrounded, like its author, by beautiful and tragic legends,” says Professor Firuza Abdullaeva, Oxford University. She read a paper on Firdausi and his Shahnama Again.

The Shahnama or The Book of Kings is known as the 'Persian Quran'. Written by Firdausi whose ancestors were Zoroastrians, the Shahnama is both history and literature. Its 62 stories, 990 chapters and 60,000 couplets cover four eras of pre-Islamic Persia. The text begins with the creation of the world myth and ends with the conquest of Persia and defeat of the last Zoroastrian ruler by the Arabs in the seventh century. The heroes of the Shahnama are larger than life but the most popular protagonist of the narration remains Iran.

The importance of the Shahnama is manifold. It is pure poetry but by writing it at time in history when Persia found itself desperately battling threats from Arabs, Greeks, Romans, Turkish tribes, and Mongols alike, Firdausi was able to instil in people a profound sense of nationhood. Firdausi took legends about famous figures of the past, already familiar within the oral tradition of the region, and immortalised them in glorious language that boosted the morale of the masses.

The poet was unable to save the lands swallowed up by Arab conquerors but he did prevent the Persian language from being wiped out by Arabic. Modern Persian is said to be very similar to the language used in the Shahnama.

To study the Shahnama is to understand values most dear to the Iranians and to know what its brand of nationalism is all about. It is to understand how valuable knowledge is even to ordinary Iranians and that people are proud of Firdausi for having written that perfection comes not from knowledge alone, but from practice.

Above all the Shahnama gives a glimpse into how Iranians have always found a way to defy dictatorial clergymen who dare to dominate their life. The strict monotheism of Islam never did succeed in stifling the colourful tradition of storytelling. Throughout time, Islamic theologians disregarded storytellers and mystics even though both have made the Quranic revelations more understandable to the masses by filling in meanings in between the line that are not found in the scripture.

Professor Venetis is fascinated with the topic of Islam and Nationalism as Reflected in the Shahnama Storytelling Tradition in Modern Iran. In his presentation, he explored the very interesting development of Islam and nationalism, the two most important rival political and cultural concepts widespread amongst storytellers in contemporary Iran.

Scholars from Armenia, China, Europe, Georgia, Japan, Tajikistan, and even the USA swarmed the five-day conference that ended on September 22. The hothouse atmosphere is created every four years in an attempt to understand tradition and modernity in Iranian society.