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Ferdowsi
Abul-Qasem Ferdowsi Tusi Tusi (also Firdausi, Firdawsi or Ferdowsi), was a Persian poet and the author of Shahnameh ("Book of Kings"), 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.
Ferdowsi, also spelled Firdawsi, Firdusi, or Firdousi, is the pseudonym of Abu al-Qasem Manṣur, (b. c. 935, near Ṭus, Samanid Empire [now Iran] — d. c. 1020–26, Ṭus, Ghaznavid Empire [now Iran]). Ferdowsi was a Persian poet and the author of the Shah-nameh (the “Book of Kings”), the Persian national epic, to which he gave a final and enduring form, although he based his poem mainly on an earlier prose version.
Ferdowsi was born in a village on the outskirts of the ancient city of Ṭus. In the course of the centuries, many legends have been woven around the poet’s name, but very little is known about the real facts of his life. The only reliable source is given by Nezami-ye 'Aruzi, a 12th-century poet who visited Ferdowsi’s tomb in 1116 or 1117 and collected the traditions that were current in his birthplace less than a century after his death.
According to ʿAruẓi, Ferdowsi was a dehqan (“landowner”), deriving a comfortable income from his estates. He had only one child, a daughter, and it was to provide her with a dowry that he set his hand to the task that was to occupy him for 35 years. The Shah-nameh of Ferdowsi, a poem of nearly 60,000 couplets, is based mainly on a prose work of the same name compiled in the poet’s early manhood in his native Ṭus. This prose Shah-nameh was in turn and for the most part the translation of a Pahlavi (Middle Persian) work, the Khavaty-namak, a history of the kings of Persia from mythical times down to the reign of Khosrow II (590 CC – 628 CC), but it also contained additional material continuing the story to the overthrow of the Sasanians by the Arabs in the middle of the 7th century of the Christian calendar. The first to undertake the versification of this chronicle of pre-Islamic and legendary Persia was Daqiqi, a poet at the court of the Samanids, who came to a violent end after completing only 1,000 verses. These verses, which deal with the rise of the prophet Zoroaster, were afterward incorporated by Ferdowsi, with due acknowledgements, in his own poem.
The Shah-nameh, finally completed in 1010, was presented to the celebrated sultan Mahmud of Ghazna, who by that time had made himself master of Ferdowsi’s homeland, Khorasan. Information on the relations between the poet and the patron is largely legendary. According to ʿAruẓi, Ferdowsi went to Ghazna in person and through the good offices of the minister Aḥmad ibn Ḥasan Meymandi who was able to secure the sultan’s acceptance of the poem. Unfortunately, Maḥmud then consulted certain enemies of the minister as to the poet’s reward. They suggested that Ferdowsī should be given 50,000 dirhams, and even this, they said, was too much, in view of his heretical Shiʿite tenets. Maḥmud, an intolerant Sunni, was influenced by their words, and in the end Ferdowsi received only 20,000 dirhams. Bitterly disappointed, he went to the bath and, on coming out, bought a draft of foqaʿ (a kind of beer) and divided the whole of the money between the bath attendant and the seller of the foqaʿ.
Fearing the sultan’s wrath, he fled — first to Herat, where he was in hiding for six months, and then, by way of his native Ṭus, to Mazandaran, where he found refuge at the court of the Sepahbad Shahreyar, whose family claimed descent from the last of the Sasanians. There Ferdowsi composed a satire of 100 verses on Sultan Maḥmud that he inserted in the preface of the Shah-nameh and read it to Shahreyar, at the same time offering to dedicate the poem to him, as a descendant of the ancient kings of Persia, instead of to Maḥmud. Shahreyar, however, persuaded him to leave the dedication to Maḥmud, bought the satire from him for 1,000 dirhams a verse, and had it expunged from the poem. The whole text of this satire, bearing every mark of authenticity, has survived to the present.
It was long supposed that in his old age the poet had spent some time in western Persia or even in Baghdad under the protection of the Buyids, but this assumption was based upon his presumed authorship of Yusof o-Zalikha, an epic poem on the subject of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife, which, it later became known, was composed more than 100 years after Ferdowsi’s death. According to the narrative of ʿAruẓi, Ferdowsi died inopportunely just as Sultan Maḥmud had determined to make amends for his shabby treatment of the poet by sending him 60,000 dinars’ worth of indigo. ʿAruẓi does not mention the date of Ferdowsi’s death. The earliest date given by later authorities is 1020 and the latest 1026; it is certain that he lived to be more than 80.
The Persians regard Ferdowsī as the greatest of their poets. Down through the centuries they have continued to read and to listen to recitations from his masterwork, the Shah-nameh. Though written some 1,000 years ago, this work is as intelligible to the average modern Iranian as the King James Version of the Bible is to a modern English speaker. The language, based as the poem is on a Pahlavi original, is pure Persian with only the slightest admixture of Arabic. European scholars have criticized this enormous poem for what they regarded as its monotonous meter, its constant repetitions, and its stereotyped similes, but to the Iranians it is the history of their country’s glorious past, preserved for all time in sonorous and majestic verse.
Except for his kunya (Abo'l-Qasem) and his laqab ( Ferdowsī, meaning "paradisic"), nothing is known with any certainty about Ferdowsi's full name. From an early period on, he has been referred to by different additional names and titles, the most common one being Ḥakim ("philosopher"). Based on this, his full name is given in Persian sources as Ḥakim Abo'l-Qasem Ferdowsi Țusi. Due to the non-standardized transliteration from Persian into English, different spellings of his name are used in English works, including Firdawsi, Firdusi, Firdosi, Firdausi, etc.
Ferdowsi was born into a family of Iranian landowners (dehqans) around 935 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. 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.
Ferdowsi belonged to the class of dehqans. These were landowning Iranian aristocrats who had flourished under the Sassanid dynasty (the last pre-Islamic dynasty to rule Iran) and whose power, though diminished, had survived into the Islamic era which followed the Islamic conquests of the 7th century of the Christian calendar. The dehqans were attached to the pre-Islamic literary heritage, as their status was associated with it (so much so that dehqan is sometimes used as a synonym for "Iranian" in the Shahnameh). Thus the dehqans saw it as their task to preserve the pre-Islamic cultural traditions, including tales of legendary kings.
The Islamic conquests of the 7th century of the Christian calendar brought gradual linguistic and cultural changes to the Iranian Plateau. By the late 9th century of the Christian calendar, 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 Sassanid general Bahram Chobin (whose story Ferdowsi recounts in one of the later sections of the Shahnameh). 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 ("Book of Kings"), 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. Judging by the Shahnameh, there is no evidence he knew either Arabic or Pahlavi.
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 ʿAbd-al-Razzāq 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 (see below). 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 March 8, 1010. Virtually nothing is known with any certainty about the last decade of his life.
Ferdowsi was buried in his own garden, burial in the cemetery of Tus having been forbidden by a local cleric. A Ghaznavid governor of Khorasan 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.
According to legend, Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni offered Ferdowsi a gold piece for every couplet of the Shahnameh he wrote. The poet agreed to receive the money as a lump sum when he had completed the epic. He planned to use it to rebuild the dykes in his native Tus. After thirty years of work, Ferdowsi finished his masterpiece. The sultan prepared to give him 60,000 gold pieces, one for every couplet, as agreed. However, the courtier whom Mahmud had entrusted with the money despised Ferdowsi, regarding him as a heretic, and he replaced the gold coins with silver. Ferdowsi was in the bath house when he received the reward. Finding it was silver and not gold, he gave the money away to the bathkeeper, a refreshment seller, and the slave who had carried the coins. When the courtier told the sultan about Ferdowsi's behaviour, he was furious and threatened to execute him. Ferdowsi fled to Khorasan, having first written a satire on Mahmud, and spent most of the remainder of his life in exile. Mahmud eventually learned the truth about the courtier's deception and had him either banished or executed. By this time, the aged Ferdowsi had returned to Tus. The sultan sent him a new gift of 60,000 gold pieces, but just as the caravan bearing the money entered the gates of Tus, a funeral procession exited the gates on the opposite side: the poet had died from a heart attack.
Ferdowsi's Shahnameh is the most popular and influential national epic in Iran and other Persian-speaking nations. The Shahnameh is the only surviving work by Ferdowsi regarded as indisputably genuine.
Ferdowsi may have written poems earlier in his life but they no longer exist.
Ferdowsi is one of the undisputed giants of Persian literature. After Ferdowsi's Shahnameh, a number of other works similar in nature surfaced over the centuries within the cultural sphere of the Persian language. Without exception, all such works were based in style and method on Ferdowsi's Shahnameh, but none of them could quite achieve the same degree of fame and popularity as Ferdowsi's masterpiece.
Ferdowsi has a unique place in Persian history because of the strides he made in reviving and regenerating the Persian language and cultural traditions. His works are cited as a crucial component in the persistence of the Persian language, as those works allowed much of the tongue to remain codified and intact. In this respect, Ferdowsi surpasses Nizami, Khayyam, Asadi Tusi and other seminal Persian literary figures in his impact on Persian culture and language. Many modern Iranians see him as the father of the modern Persian language.
Ferdowsi in fact was a motivation behind many future Persian figures. One such notable figure was Reza Shah Pahlavi, who established an Academy of Persian Language and Literature, in order to attempt to remove Arabic and French words from the Persian language, replacing them with suitable Persian alternatives. In 1934, Reza Shah set up a ceremony in Mashhad, Khorasan, celebrating a thousand years of Persian literature since the time of Ferdowsi, titled "Ferdowsi Millennial Celebration", inviting notable European as well as Iranian scholars. Ferdowsi University of Mashhad is a university established in 1949 that also takes its name from Ferdowsi.
Ferdowsi's influence in the Persian culture is explained by the Encyclopedia Britannica:
- The Persians regard Ferdowsi as the greatest of their poets. For nearly a thousand years they have continued to read and to listen to recitations from his masterwork, the Shah-nameh, in which the Persian national epic found its final and enduring form. Though written about 1,000 years ago, this work is as intelligible to the average, modern Iranian as the King James Version of the Bible is to a modern English-speaker. The language, based as the poem is on a Dari original, is pure Persian with only the slightest admixture of Arabic.
The library at Wadham College, Oxford University was named the Ferdowsi Library, and contains a specialized Persian section for scholars.
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The Shahnameh or Shahnama ("The Book of Kings") is a long epic poem written by the Persian poet Ferdowsi between c. 977 and 1010 CE and is the national epic of Iran, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan. Consisting of some 50,000 distichs or couplets (two-line verses), the Shahnameh is one of the world's longest epic poems. It tells mainly the mythical and to some extent the historical past of the Persian Empire from the creation of the world until the Muslim conquest in the seventh century. Iran, Azerbaijan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan were influenced by Persian culture. Additionally, other countries such as Armenia, Dagestan, Georgia, Turkey, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan celebrate this national epic.
The work is of central importance in Persian culture and to Persian language. It is regarded as a literary masterpiece. It is also important to the contemporary adherents of Zoroastrianism, in that it traces the historical links between the beginnings of the religion and the death of the last Sasanian emperor, which brought an end to the Zoroastrian influence in Iran.
Ferdowsi started writing the Shahnameh in 977 and completed it on March 8, 1010. The Shahnameh is a monument of poetry and historiography, being mainly the poetical recast of what Ferdowsi, his contemporaries, and his predecessors regarded as the account of Iran's ancient history. Many such accounts already existed in prose, an example being the Abu-Mansuri Shahnameh. A small portion of Ferdowsi's work, in passages scattered throughout the Shahnameh, is entirely of his own conception.
The Shahnameh is an epic poem of over 50,000 couplets written in Early New Persian. It is based mainly on a prose work of the same name compiled in Ferdowsi's earlier life in his native Tus. This prose Shahnameh was in turn and for the most part the translation of a Pahlavi (Middle Persian) work, known as the "Book of Kings", a late Sasanian compilation of the history of the kings and heroes of Persia from mythical times down to the reign of Khosrau II (590–628). The Xwadāynāmag contained historical information on the later Sasanian period, but it does not appear to have drawn on any historical sources for the earlier Sasanian period (3rd to 4th centuries). Ferdowsi added material continuing the story to the overthrow of the Sasanians by the Muslim armies in the middle of the seventh century of the Christian calendar.
The first to undertake the versification of the Pahlavi chronicle was Daqiqi, a contemporary of Ferdowsi and the poet at the court of the Samanid Empire, who came to a violent end after completing only 1,000 verses. These verses, which deal with the rise of the prophet Zoroaster, were afterward incorporated by Ferdowsi, with acknowledgment, in his own poem. The style of the Shahnameh shows characteristics of both written and oral literature. Some claim that Ferdowsi also used Zoroastrian nasks, such as the now-lost Chihrdad, as sources as well.
Many other Pahlavi sources were used in composing the epic, prominent being the Karnamag-i Ardaxsir-i Pabagan, which was originally written during the late Sassanid era and gave accounts of how Ardashir I came to power which, because of its historical proximity, is thought to be highly accurate. The text is written in the late Middle Persian, which was the immediate ancestor of Modern Persian. A great portion of the historical chronicles given in Shahnameh is based on this epic and there are, in fact, various phrases and words which can be matched between Ferdowsi's poem and this source, according to Zabihollah Safa.
Traditional historiography in Iran has claimed that Ferdowsi was grieved by the fall of the Sassanid Empire and its subsequent rule by "Arabs" and "Turks". The Shahnameh, the argument goes, is largely his effort to preserve the memory of Persia's golden days and transmit it to a new generation so that they could learn and try to build a better world. Although most scholars have contended that Ferdowsi's main concern was the preservation of the pre-Islamic legacy of myth and history, a number of authors have formally challenged this view.
Ferdowsi concludes the Shahnameh by writing:
This prediction of Ferdowsi has come true and many Persian literary figures, historians and biographers have praised him and the Shahnameh. The Shahnameh is considered by many to be the most important piece of work in Persian literature.
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Browne, E. G. (1998). A Literary History of Persia. Psychology Press.
Chopra, R. M. (2014). Great Poets of Classical Persian. Kolkata: Sparrow.
Dabashi, Hamid (2012). The World of Persian Literary Humanism. Harvard University Press.
Ferdowski, Abolqasem [Translated by Dick Davis] (2006). Shahnameh: The Persian Book of Kings. Penguin.
Ghani, Cyrus (2000). Iran and the Rise of Reza Shah: From Qajar Collapse to Pahlavi Power. Bloomsbury Academic.
Kia, Mehrdad (2016). The Persian Empire: A Historical Encyclopedia. ABC-CLIO.
Lapidus, Ira M. (2014). A History of Islamic Societies; New York City, New York, Cambridge University Press.
Mackey, Sandra and Harrop, W. Scott (2008). The Iranians: Persia, Islam and the soul of a nation. University of Michigan.
Rosenberg, Donna (1997). Folklore, Myths, and Legends: A World Perspective. McGraw Hill Professional.
Rypka, Jan (1968). History of Iranian Literature. Reidel.
Shahbazi, ʻA Shapur (1991). Ferdowsi: A Critical Biography. Harvard University, Center for Middle Eastern Studies.
Sharma, Sunil and Waghmar, Burzine K., eds. (2016). Firdawsii Millennium Indicum: Proceedings of the Shahnama Millenary Seminar, the KR Cama Oriental Institute, Mumbai, 8-9 January, 2011. KR Cama Oriental Institute.
Wiesehöfer, Josef (2001). Ancient Persia: From 550 BC to 650 AD. I.B.Tauris.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferdowsi
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shahnameh
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ferdowsi
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