people assume Iranians are Arabs?
Good question! Iranians are often confused with Arabs because of geography and because of certain historical connections between the peoples. Before the seventh century, the dominant religion in Iran was Zoroastrianism. Arabs conquered Iran in the seventh century, and Iranians were ruled by the Arab caliphate at Baghdad for hundreds of years. Over time, most became Muslims. (That said, in Iran there are still minority populations of Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, and Bahais.) Starting in the sixteenth century, Iran became a Shi’a majority nation, which differentiates it from most Arab countries, which are Sunni-dominated. Also, Iranians speak Farsi, not Arabic. Farsi is an Indo-European language, whereas Arabic is a Semitic one.
What is the importance of the italicized tale that begins every chapter of your book?
For a long time, I’ve been deeply inspired by the poet Ferdowsi’s tale of Kaveh the blacksmith, who takes a stand against political despotism. Presumably, Ferdowsi had to be very careful not to offend the ruling Shahs of his day; writing about a humble blacksmith challenging a Shah was probably a radical act during such a hierarchical period. I thought that the story of Kaveh the blacksmith could be used to inspire the characters in my book to take action against the injustice around them, just as it has inspired Iranians for centuries. Pari’s father, Tahmasb Shah, commissioned a famous illustrated Shahnameh, and members of his court worked on it for years before she was born. I think it is likely that Pari would have grown up memorizing Ferdowsi’s poetry—and that every literate person at court would have done so. To this day, the Shahnameh is still considered Iran’s national epic.
Who was Ferdowsi?
Ferdowsi was one of the greatest Iranian poets; his Shahnameh is, for Iranians, like the Odyssey for the Greeks. The book consists of sixty thousand lines in rhyming couplets. Ferdowsi completed the poem in the year 1010 after working on it for about thirty years. Not much is known about his life, but the legend goes that when he asked the Ghaznavid Shah, Mahmood, for patronage after he completed his great epic, the Shah refused, and Ferdowsi died in poverty.
The Shahnameh recounts the stories of hundreds of legendary Iranian kings, as well as historical kings, all the way up to the arrival of Islam in the seventh century. That was when Arabs conquered Iran, and Islam gradually replaced Zoroastrianism. Although a Muslim himself, Ferdowsi’s lament over the conquest of Iran by the Arabs and the changes brought to the culture is one of the most powerful pieces of writing in the book.
Once when I was visiting Iran, my dad and stepmom took me to a traditional Iranian restaurant, where we were entertained by a performer playing the tar and reciting poetry from the Shahnameh. It was good to know that Ferdowsi’s work still has such an important role in everyday Iranian life. There is a beautiful monument to Ferdowsi in the city of Tus in eastern Iran, which is inscribed with verses from the Shahnameh, and it is visited with reverence by many Iranians.
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Ferdowsi, Abolqasem. Shahnameh: The Persian Book of Kings. Translated by Dick Davis. New York: Viking