Ferdowsi
Ferdowsi was a Persian poet and the author of Shahnameh, which is one of the world's longest epic poems created by a single poet, and the greatest epic of Persian-speaking countries. Ferdowsi is celebrated as one of the most influential figures of Persian literature and one of the greatest in the history of literature.
Life
Family
Ferdowsi was born into a family of Persian landowners in 940 in the village of Paj, near the city of Tus, in the Khorasan region of the Samanid Empire, which is located in the present-day Razavi Khorasan province of northeastern Iran. Little is known about Ferdowsi's early life. The poet had a wife, who was probably literate and came from the same dehqan class. The dehqans were landowning Iranian gentry who had flourished under the Sasanian dynasty and whose power, though diminished, had survived into the Islamic era which followed the Islamic conquests of the 7thcentury. The dehqans were attached to the pre-Islamic literary heritage, as their status was associated with it. Thus they saw it as their task to preserve the pre-Islamic cultural traditions, including tales of legendary kings.He had a son, who died at the age of 37, and was mourned by the poet in an elegy which he inserted into the Shahnameh.
Background
The Islamic conquests of the 7th century brought gradual linguistic and cultural changes to the Iranian Plateau. By the late 9th century, as the power of the caliphate had weakened, several local dynasties emerged in Greater Iran. Ferdowsi grew up in Tus, a city under the control of one of these dynasties, the Samanids, who claimed descent from the Sasanian general Bahram Chobin. The Samanid bureaucracy used the New Persian language, which had been used to bring Islam to the Eastern regions of the Iranian world and supplanted local languages, and commissioned translations of Pahlavi texts into New Persian. Abu Mansur Muhammad, a dehqan and governor of Tus, had ordered his minister Abu Mansur Mamari to invite several local scholars to compile a prose Shahnameh, which was completed in 1010. Although it no longer survives, Ferdowsi used it as one of the sources of his epic. Samanid rulers were patrons of such important Persian poets as Rudaki and Daqiqi, and Ferdowsi followed in the footsteps of these writers.Details about Ferdowsi's education are lacking. While it is likely that he learned Arabic in school, there is no evidence in the Shahnameh that he knew either Arabic or Pahlavi.
Ferdowsi was a Shiite Muslim, although varying views exist on what Shiite sect he belonged to. Khaleghi-Motlagh, following Theodor Nöldeke, notes that Ferdowsi displays a contradictory attitude towards religion in the Shahnameh: on the one hand, he shows a "lenient" attitude towards religion, but on the other hand, he believed that his sect was the "only true Islamic one." Khaleghi-Motlagh concurs with Nöldeke that Ferdowsi was "above all a deist and monotheist who at the same time kept faith with his forbears." Ferdowsi criticized philosophers and those who tried to prove the existence of God. He saw God's creation as the only evidence of His existence and believed everything in life to be the product of God's will. Khaleghi-Motlagh and others have suggested that a certain fatalism in Ferdowsi's work contradicts his "absolute faith in the unicity and might of God," and that this may have been the legacy of the Zurvanism of the Sasanian period.
Life as a poet
It is possible that Ferdowsi wrote some early poems which have not survived. He began work on the Shahnameh around 977, intending it as a continuation of the work of his fellow poet Daqiqi, who had been assassinated by his slave. Like Daqiqi, Ferdowsi employed the prose Shahnameh of Abd-al-Razzaq as a source. He received generous patronage from the Samanid prince Mansur and completed the first version of the Shahnameh in 994. When the Turkic Ghaznavids overthrew the Samanids in the late 990s, Ferdowsi continued to work on the poem, rewriting sections to praise the Ghaznavid Sultan Mahmud. Mahmud's attitude to Ferdowsi and how well he rewarded the poet are matters which have long been subject to dispute and have formed the basis of legends about the poet and his patron. The Turkic Mahmud may have been less interested in tales from Iranian history than the Samanids. The later sections of the Shahnameh have passages which reveal Ferdowsi's fluctuating moods: in some he complains about old age, poverty, illness and the death of his son; in others, he appears happier. Ferdowsi finally completed his epic on 8 March 1010. Virtually nothing is known with any certainty about the last decade of his life.Tomb
Ferdowsi was buried in his own garden, burial in the cemetery of Tus having been forbidden by a local cleric who considered him a heretic. A Ghaznavid governor of Khorasan Afghanistan constructed a mausoleum over the grave and it became a revered site. The tomb, which had fallen into decay, was rebuilt between 1928 and 1934 by the Society for the National Heritage of Iran on the orders of Reza Shah, and has now become the equivalent of a national shrine.Name
Except for his kunya and his pen name, nothing is known with any certainty about his full name. According to Djalal Khaleghi-Motlagh, the information given by the 13th-century author Bundari about Ferdowsi's name should be taken as the most reliable. Bundari calls the poet al-Amir al-Hakim Abu'l-Qasem Mansur ibn al-Hasan al-Ferdowsi al-Tusi. From an early period on, he has been referred to by different additional names and titles, the most common one being حکیم / Hakīm. Based on this, his full name is given in Persian sources as حکیم ابوالقاسم فردوسی توسی / Hakīm Abol-Qâsem Ferdowsī Tusī. Due to the non-standardised transliteration from Persian into English, different spellings of his name are used in English works, including Firdawsi, Firdusi, Firdosi, Firdausi, etc. The Encyclopaedia of Islam uses the spelling Firdawsī, based on the standardised transliteration method of the German Oriental Society. The Encyclopædia Iranica, which uses a modified version of the same method, gives the spelling Ferdowsī. The modern Tajik transliteration of his name in Tajik Cyrillic is Ҳаким Абулқосим Фирдавсӣ Тӯсӣ.Legends and anecdotes
Many legends have been composed about Ferdowsi and the Shahnameh. Most appear to have arisen from the enthusiasm of Ferdowsi’s admirers and the imaginative elaborations of Shahnameh reciters, and are often unsupported by historical sources or by the text of the Shahnameh itself.Among these are: the story that a Middle Persian version of the Shahnameh traveled from Ctesiphon to the Hejaz, Abyssinia, and India before returning to Iran in the hands of Ya'qub ibn al-Layth al-Saffar; Ferdowsi’s confrontation with three Ghaznavid court poets ; his alleged flight to Baghdad, India, Tabaristan, or Quhistan after composing a hajw-nama ; the claim that he presented the Shahnameh to Mahmud of Ghazni out of poverty in order to provide a dowry for his daughter; the tale that—on the advice of Ahmad ibn Hasan Maymandi—Mahmud sent silver instead of gold; Ferdowsi’s supposed gift of that reward to a seller of fuqāʿ and to a bathhouse attendant; and finally Mahmud’s remorse, with the gold reward arriving only as Ferdowsi died.
By contrast, Jalal Khaleghi-Motlagh—observing that information about Ferdowsi’s life after about 1009–1010 does not extend beyond the report of the Chahār Maqāla—argues that although some details are doubtful, there is not always decisive evidence to reject them, and some are corroborated when compared with other sources. For example, the account of Ferdowsi’s journey to Ghazna and his encounter with Mahmud appears in the Tarikh-e Sistan. Khaleghi-Motlagh also notes that poets such as Nizami Ganjavi and ʿAttar allude to Ferdowsi’s conflict with Mahmud, Mahmud’s ingratitude, and to the episode of fuqāʿ-drinking and the giving away of the royal reward. On the basis of the Chahār Maqāla, he reports the fuqāʿ episode, Ferdowsi’s flight from Ghazna, his move to Herat, and a journey to Tabaristan to the Bavandid ruler Ispahbad Shahriyar. However, he regards stories of travel to Baghdad and Isfahan—found in some manuscript prefaces and later accretions to the Shahnameh—as legendary.
In addition, the Baysunghuri Preface preserves an anecdote attributed to the Safarnama of Nasir Khusraw: in 1045–1046, on the road to Sarakhs, Nasir Khusraw supposedly saw a large caravanserai in the village of Chāha, said to have been built with the reward Mahmud had sent Ferdowsi. Because Ferdowsi had already died, the story continues, his heir refused the reward. This passage is not found in the extant manuscripts of the Safarnama, though Hasan Taqizadeh considered it likely to be accurate; Theodor Nöldeke initially regarded it as an invention but later revised his view.
In the modern era
In the twentieth century, legends about Ferdowsi were also taken up for political purposes. Reza Shah—who promoted nationalism—is reported to have admired Ferdowsi. During Reza Shah’s reign, Abdolhossein Sepanta produced the film Ferdowsi, presenting a dramatized account of Ferdowsi’s life; earlier, Ali Nasr had prepared a stage play titled Ferdowsi. Left-wing polemics likewise made use of Ferdowsi’s image; for example, Ali Hessouri and Ahmad Shamlou harshly criticized him, portraying him as an ideologue of repression and social conservatism in the service of preserving class hierarchy.Legend-making nevertheless continued and was sometimes praised as an art in itself. Many writers and artists in later periods recast Ferdowsi’s life in narrative form. For instance, Bahram Beyzai in his screenplay Dibache-ye Novin-e Shahnameh depicts Ferdowsi as an angry outsider, sacrificing his wealth to revive Iran’s ancient heritage and receiving only accusations and insults in return. Satem Ulughzade likewise portrayed Ferdowsi according to his own interpretation in the historical novel Ferdowsi.
At the same time, scholars searching for Ferdowsi’s historical life amid legendary material have achieved partial success. What follows summarizes some of the better-attested points.