Abul-Qāsem Mansur bin Hasan Tosi (940–1025), better known by his pen name Ferdowsi, was a Persian poet who is notable for being the author of the Shahnameh ("Book of Kings"), which is one of the world's longest epic poems created by a single poet, and the greatest epic of the 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.
Born in 940, Ferdowsi came from a family of landed gentry. He spent the beginning of his life in the Samanid era and at the same time as the movement for independence and identity among Iranians. The Samanid kings, with the support of the Persian language, prepared a brilliant time for the cultivation of the Persian language and thought, and Ferdowsi is clearly indebted to his predecessors and all those who reached the pinnacle of the Persian language in the ninth and tenth centuries, and he was able to use that capital to express his speech so brilliantly. In a comprehensive look at Ferdowsi's knowledge and learnings, it can be said that he knew the Arabic language, but he did not dominate Arabic literature. In the "Baysunghur Shahnameh", Ferdowsi's name is associated with the title of "Hakim", which according to some refers to the wisdom of Khusrawani.
Researchers believe that Ferdowsi began composing the Shahnameh based on the Abu-Mansuri Shahnameh at the age of 30. The only poem that has been clarified about him is the Shahnameh itself. The Shahnameh is Ferdowsi's most famous poem and one of the greatest writings of ancient Persian literature. Ferdowsi completed the Shahnameh in 995, three years before Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni's accession to the throne. In 1010, Ferdowsi completed the second edition. Other poems have also been attributed to Ferdowsi, though most of these claims are considered baseless. The most famous of them is the masnaviof Yusuf and Zulaikha. Another poem that is known to be by Ferdowsi is a satire in condemnation of Mahmud.
In the Shahnameh, Ferdowsi links the culture of pre-Islamic Iran with the culture of post-Islamic Iran. It can be concluded from the Shahnameh that Ferdowsi was influenced by ancient Iranian religions such as Zoroastrianism, Zurvanism, Manichaeism, Mazdakism and Mithraism, although some researchers consider the source of these influences to be the themes of Ferdowsi's work, to which he was very loyal. Also, due to his peasant origins, he was familiar with the ancient culture and rituals of Iran, and later increased the scope of this knowledge, so that this knowledge established his poetic worldview. What Ferdowsi was dealing with was not only poetic, but also intellectual; he did not write fiction. Ferdowsi considers wisdom as the source and capital of all goodness. He believes that a person with wisdom recognizes good and evil from each other, and in this way, he reaches the happiness of this world and the salvation of that world. Ferdowsi carefully examined his motifs, most of which were from the Abu-Mansuri Shahnameh. He was able to gather an excerpt from the vast wealth of knowledge he had at his disposal to have a legacy carried by the Persians, Turks, and Indians.
Etymology Except for his kunya ( – , meaning 'father of Qasim') and his pen name ( – , meaning 'paradisic'), 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 al-Qasim Mansur ibn al-Hasan al-Firdawsi al-Tosi. From an early period on, he has been referred to by different additional names and titles, the most common one being / ("philosopher"). Based on this, his full name is given in Persian sources as / . Due to the non-standardised romanizations of Persian, 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.Huart/Massé/Ménage: Firdawsī. In: Encyclopaedia of Islam. New Edition. Brill, Leiden. CD-Version (2011) The Encyclopædia Iranica, which uses a modified version of the same method (with a stronger emphasis on modern Iranian Persian intonations), gives the spelling Ferdowsī. The modern Tajik transliteration of his name in Tajik Cyrillic is (). Life
Family
Ferdowsi () was born into a family of Persian landowners (dehqans) 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 (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 7thcentury. 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 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 (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. While it is likely that he learned Arabic in school, there is no evidence in the Shahnameh that he knew either Arabic or Pahlavi.
Religion Most historians consider Ferdowsi to have been a Shia Muslim, although there has been controversy over which branch of Shia Islam he followed. He has variously been identified as Zaydi, Isma'ili, or Twelver Shi'ite, while passages in some manuscripts praising Abu Bakr, Umar, and Uthman have led some scholars to argue that he was Sunni. Nöldeke, whose interpretation is followed by Djalal Khaleghi-Motlagh, described Ferdowsi as a monotheist who respected the religion of his ancestors while considering his own faith the only true one. Ferdowsi attributed creation and human actions to God and rejected astrological claims that the stars could influence human affairs. He began his epic poem Shahnameh by invoking God as the Creator of the world and reason. His knowledge of pre-Islamic Iranian traditions was influenced in part by his background as a dehqan. Kolsoum Ghazanfari and Dick Davis note that the poem's treatment of these traditions does not directly correspond to Zoroastrian theology, while Khaleghi-Motlagh links some fatalistic elements to older Iranian ideas, possibly including Zurvanism in 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 (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 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.
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 (Pahlavi) 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 (Unsuri, Farrukhi, and Asjadi); his alleged flight to Baghdad, India, Tabaristan, or Quhistan after composing a hajw-nama (satire); 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 (a kind of malt beverage) 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 (c. 400 AH) does not extend beyond the report of the Chahār Maqāla—argues that although some details (including those transmitted by Nizami ʿArūżī) 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.