ABOLQASEM FERDOWSI: SHAHNAME
The story of
Sohrab is just one small part of the Shahname. It occurs about a third
of the way through the poem and">
ABOLQASEM FERDOWSI: SHAHNAME The story of
Sohrab is just one small part of the Shahname. It occurs about a third
of the way through the poem and">
ABOLQASEM FERDOWSI: SHAHNAME The story of
Sohrab is just one small part of the Shahname. It occurs about a third
of the way through the poem and">
ABOLQASEM FERDOWSI: SHAHNAME The story of
Sohrab is just one small part of the Shahname. It occurs about a third
of the way through the poem and, at just a little over a thousand couplets in
length, makes up only about 2 percent of its fifty thousand couplets. Although
a relatively brief tale, it is generally regarded as a dramatic and poetic high
point. Briefly told, it is the story of the accidental and tragic murder by
Rostam of his son, Sohrab. This murder is precipitated by the weakness of
Iran’s shah and mediated by a hostile and implacable fate. It challenges our
expectations that in such conflicts, as with Oedipus, it is the son who will
destroy his father. Perhaps for this reason, Sohrab has captured the
imagination of European readers more than any other tale. It was the first tale
from the Shahname translated into English, or any other European
language, and was translated many times after that. In the late nineteenth
century, Matthew Arnold, working from a brief paraphrase of the episode, wrote a
Homeric imitation of it, the story of Sohrab and Rustum. The tale begins
one morning when Rostam, the paramount hero of this portion of the Shahname,
wakes up sad and decides to lift his spirits by going on a hunt. He sets out
alone for the plains bordering Iran’s traditional enemy, Turan. He loses his
horse, Rakhsh, while hunting and in following him comes to the border city of
Semengan where the shah invites Rostam to spend the night in feasting and
merriment. That night,
Tahmine, the daughter of the shah, comes to Rostam’s room in secret and declares
her love for him. She is both noble and chaste, but like Shakespeare’s
Desdemona, she has been enraptured by tales of her hero’s prowess. She vows she
will have no other mate if he refuses her and begs him to give her a son.
Rostam yields to her request, but the next day he returns to Iran. Sohrab is born
nine months later and grows to manhood with the astonishing speed characteristic
of heroes. “When he was ten in all of Semengan/ No one would dare to meet him
in the field.” When he is fully grown, Tahmine tells him who his father is,
swears him to secrecy, and ties a seal on his arm that Rostam left with her to
give their child as a proof of his paternity. Sohrab, thrilled to learn his
father’s identity, is immediately filled with ambition to make Rostam the ruler
of Iran and himself the shah of Turan, and he sets about raising an army to
invade Iran. “For when Rostam’s the father, I the son/ Who else in all the
world should wear a crown?” Afrasiyab, the
shah of Turan, has learned the secret of Sohrab’s identity and schemes to use
him to destroy his father. He offers his support for the campaign and sends two
of his generals, Human and Barman, ostensibly to assist Sohrab, but with secret
instructions to prevent father and son from recognizing each other. Sohrab’s
first battle in Iran is with the woman warrior Gordafarid. He easily defeats
her in battle, but she as easily outwits him and eludes capture, exposing the
youthful innocence that lies behind his massive frame. Gazhdaham, the shah’s
deputy in the fort, writes Kay Kavus a letter telling him how invincible this
new Turkish champion is and warning him that Iran is now in grave danger. When the shah
learns of this new threat, he sends immediately for Rostam for assistance.
Rostam, who has often had to rescue the shah from the consequences of his folly,
has grown weary of Kavus’s repeated demands. He delays for several days before
setting out for the court. On his arrival, Kavus is enraged by his delay and
rashly demands that he be executed. Rostam easily pushes aside the shah’s
champion, Tus, and departs in fury. The other courtiers upbraid Kavus for
driving away so great a champion as Rostam when Iran faces such danger. Kavus
repents and sends their leader, Gudarz, to bring the hero back. Rostam is at
first reluctant but agrees to return when Gudarz suggests that others will think
fear of Sohrab was his motive for fleeing the court. When the two
armies face each other at last, Sohrab tries repeatedly to learn which of the
heroes camped before his fort is his father, but he is thwarted by the
courageous silence of his one prisoner, Hojir, who fears this Turkish warrior
will defeat Rostam, and by the lies of Afrasiyab’s generals. On his side,
Rostam is baffled by the sudden appearance of this new Turkish champion whom he
has gone in secret to observe in the Turanian camp. He suspects he may be his
son, but rejects the thought because Tahmine, wishing to keep her son near her,
has told Rostam that their son is still a stripling. Rostam, following a
strategy he has used before, determines to hide his identity to put this new
champion off guard. When father and
son meet at last, they fight three times. The first battle takes an entire day
and ends in a draw when night falls. The next morning they begin again and
Sohrab throws Rostam down. Before he can beheaded him, however, the wily Rostam
says that in Iran two falls are required for a victory, and Sohrab, naively,
believes him. They pause to catch their breath, then fight once more. This
time luck is with Rostam. He throws Sohrab down and quickly stabs him with his
sword. Though mortally wounded, Sohrab lives long enough for father and son to
recognize each other at last. Rostam sends to
Kavus for some of the royal panacea to save his son’s life, but the shah refuses
out of fear. Sohrab dies. Rostam first threatens to take his own life in
remorse, but is dissuaded by the other heroes and the shah. The armies separate
and withdraw. Rostam takes his son’s body with him for burial in his home
province of Sistan, and the episode ends with scenes of mourning: “It is a tale
that’s filled with tears and grief. / The gentle heart will rage against Rostam”.
The tragic encounter between Sohrab and Rostam is a single episode in the long
and terrible war between Iran and Turan that has its origin in an ancient feud.
Many years before, Faridun defeated the foreign tyrant Zahhak and reclaimed the
throne for Iran. In his old age, he divided his empire – now grown to include
the known world – between his three sons. He gave the central and choicest
portion, Iran, to his youngest son Iraj. Iraj’s two older brothers, Salm and
Tur, were enraged by their father’s decision and killed Iraj, hoping to gain
control of Iran. They were unsuccessful. Faridun protected the throne and
passed it on to Iraj’s grandson, Manuchehr. It remained in Iraj’s line more or
less continuously after that. For a time Afrasiyab, a descendant of Tur, ruled
in Iran, but he was driven off with the help of Rostam and his father Zal. And
when the throne fell vacant, Rostam found a remote cousin of Manuchehr to
reestablish the royal line. This shah, Kay Oobad, was the father of Kay Kavus.
Despite repeated failures, Afrasiyab continued to covet Iran and to plot the
overthrow of Kay Kavus. Although in the
poem Iranians and Turanians are both descended from the same ancestors, by the
time of Ferdowsi, Turan had come to be equated with the Turkish regions of
central Asia, and the Turanians are referred to as Turks. Kay Kavus has not
proved to be a wise ruler and has often put himself and Iran at risk by his
foolishness. In each case, Rostam has single-handedly saved the shah from the
consequences of his actions. These adventures have both confirmed Rostam in his
sense of his own invincibility and his impatience with Kay Kavus. TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION
& ANALYSIS
1. Only a few of the stories in the
Shahname have a prologue, and that which begins the tale of Sohrab is among
the longest. It invites us to think about the meaning of Sohrab’s death, and
says, in short, that it is just. Although readers may inevitably weep for the
death of Sohrab, they may console themselves with the thought that his death
serves the ends of justice. Justice may seem cruel to us, but we are ignorant
of God’s purpose. Attempting to understand the justice of Sohrab’s death leads
us to two compelling questions: why must Sohrab die, and why must Rostam be
responsible for his death?
Why must Sohrab die?
Sohrab is a young man who is devoted to his father and who undertakes a campaign
against Iran to find him and elevate him to the throne. Why should he be
punished so cruelly for what seems a laudable ambition? And if anyone should
gain by his death, why in the world should it be Kay Kavus and Afrasiyab? The
former is a dreadful ruler, and the latter, the shah of Turan, is Iran’s
greatest enemy.
The death of Sohrab at his father’s hands also seems wrong to us because we in
the West have grown up thinking that the normal order of things is for sons to
kill fathers, either symbolically or in fact. However frightening or appalling
patricide is, it has the sanction of natural process. The story of Sohrab
fascinates us in part at least because it violates our sense of the natural
order of things and adds a nightmarish element to a confrontation that is
already ripe with meaning.
Virtually the first choice that Sohrab makes is the fateful one that ensures his
destruction. When he comes to manhood, he asks his mother about his parentage.
She tells him he is son of Rostam. He is thrilled to learn this and immediately
decides to go to Iran to overthrow shah Kay Kavis and place Rostam on his
throne. Then the two of them will return to Turan to take that throne for
Sohrab:
When Rostam is the father, I the son,
None else in all the world should wear a crown.
When the son and moon illuminate the sky,
What need is there for stars to flaunt their crowns?
However appealing a young man Sohrab is, this decision makes him an enemy of the
shah. And being an enemy of the shah makes him an enemy both of Iran and of
God. As modern readers, we are inclined to see Sohrab’s desire to overthrow
Afrasiyab and Kay Kavus and replace them with the far worthier figure of Rostam
as commendable, as a protomodern anticipation of rule by merit rather than by
inheritance. But the Shahname is the Book of Kings. It has its
fundamental conception that Iran will endure as long as it is ruled by a line of
divinely appointed shahs. Loyalty to the monarch is part of piety, and to turn
against the shah is both a crime against the state and against God. That God
would choose so a bad ruler for Iran as Kay Kavus is indeed puzzling. But both
the prologue and the conclusion to the story make it quite clear that humans
have no right to question or dispute his decision.
Why must Rostam kill Sohrab?
The theme of filicide is a powerful and deeply disturbing one, especially when
both father and son are both “good men” as they are here. Rostam is one of the
great heroes of the Shahname, the exemplar of heroism and loyalty and the
embodiment of what is noblest and best in the Iranian nation. Why should he, of
all people, be obliged to kill Sohrab? Sohrab is clearly the son who was meant
to succeed him, to continue the line of great warriors from Sistan that
stretches back from Rostam to Zal and Sam and Nariman. But even if we accept
the necessity of Sohrab’s death, the question still remains of why it must be
Rostam who slays him. The simple answer is that since Rostam is that, because
he is the chief warrior of the Iranian court, he is obviously the one to face
any new challenger. But to justify so profoundly meaningful a confrontation by
such simple mechanical means does not do justice to Ferdowsi’s narrative art.
Looking more deeply, we can find it in the one moment in the Shahname
when Rostam lapses from his exemplary loyalty to the crown and throne of Iran.
When Sohrab appears on the border of Iran with regicide on his mind and a vast
army to support him, and when he defeats the Iranian heroes at the border with
casual ease, Kay Kavus immediately sends for Rostam. This has become his
invariable response to a crisis. Rostam has come to be not simply his best
weapon, but his only one. But when Kay Kavus’s messenger reaches Rostam’s
court in Zabol, Rostam does not respond with his usual swiftness. He has grown
weary of Kay Kavus’s demands, and for good reason. He has so often had to
rescue him from the consequences of his foolish policies. Moreover, Rostam has
only recently defeated all the best warriors of Turan single-handedly. Why
should he take this new threat seriously? Were this new Turkish champion his
son, there might be cause for concern, but the boy’s mother recently sent him a
message to say that he is, however great a promise, still a youth. And so he
ignores Kavus’s order for three days. When he does at last reach the court, Kay
Kavus explodes with rage and orders him killed. The threat is ludicrous because
Rostam can and does easily shrug off any attempt to carry it out, but it
infuriates Rostam and provokes him to make a decision as fateful as Sohrab’s.
He rejects Kay Kavus as his monarch and says he will deal directly with God
henceforth. After speaking slightingly of the shah, he says: “How dare he
order me! I’m not his slave./ I serve the World Creator, only him.” He
wishes to separate his obedience to God from his obedience to the shah so that
he can abandon the latter, but he cannot. In the world of the Shahname,
loyalty and piety are one. He must, unfortunatel, be the shah’s slave if he
would be God’s. Rostam has badly overstepped himself. Wiser heads prevail at
court, and he returns to make peace with Kavus. The shah also apologizes, and
Rostam renews his oath of obedience. The breach is repaired, but the memory
lingers, and Kay Kavus will later allude to it in explaining his refusal to send
Rostam the royal remedy that would save Sohrab:
[Sohrab will] make his father yet more powerful
Rostam will slay me then, I have no doubt.
When I may suffer evil at his hands,
What gift but evil should I make him now? It
does seem unfair. One feels that Rostam has been tricked into this decision by
fate and that he is largely blameless of this lapse. And yet a lapse it is, and
he must be punished for it. Here, the belief in the absolute supremacy of
the monarch is being tested in the most extreme fashion – with the best of the
heroes and the worst of the shahs. The result demonstrates what we should
have expected: God is the strictest of strict constructionists. 2. Was Ferdowsi a
monarchist and what do we mean by that?
There is no question that the shah is the only one who gains by this tragedy,
and the same may be said of many of the Shahname’s other tragic
narratives. This is perhaps a good moment to consider the question of how and
in what way Ferdowsi himself was a monarchist. Because so much of the
Shahname details the terrible dilemmas posed for decent, moral, and pious
men, such as Rostam and Gudarz here, by the bad policies of foolish and inept
rulers, it is hard to see Ferdowsi as in any sense a convinced and enthusiastic
royalist. He was a royalist in much the same sense that Shakespeare was. That
is, he took for granted that monarchy was part of the essential fabric of life,
the form of rule that God chose to give human society. Humans simply had to
make the best of it. But Ferdowsi was too keen and honest an observer of human
life not to see that the divine choice did not always fall on those who were, in
human terms, the best men. Indeed, the list of bad kings in the Shahname
is a very long one, and that of good kings is depressingly short.
The alternative to absolute rule by a divinely chosen shahanshah (king of kings,
emperor) was not, of course, democracy, but the endless conflict of lesser
rulers. If Kay Kavus were removed, all of the various heroes who made up the
court and identified by Hojir would become competitors for the throne.
3. Compare/contrast the epic elements of
the Persian epic Shahname to those epic elements we have read by Homer
and Virgil.
4. The story of Sohrab and Rostam is as
much about family obligations as it is about a heroic encounter. For all his
extraordinary physical strength, Sohrab is a child, and his trouble begins when
he defies his mother and goes in search of a father who denies him. Compare
Ferdowsi’s treatment of these relationships with those of other epic figures:
why do our heroes always seem to be identified as somebody’s son?