VIEWPOINTS AROUND 1000 | 203from permanent loss and to justify the religion’s fundamental dualist as-
sumptions. What we see in the Denkard is an exegetical culture polemical in
tone, but more defensive than others we have looked at. Psychologically it is
closer to the earlier (Mishnaic/Talmudic) rabbinical experience than to that
of the Arabic Christian or Muslim “fathers,” or the Muʿtazilite Jews. It was
clear to many learned Iranians under the Abbasids that the future lay with
Islam. Even so, they yearned to preserve something of their own identity
within the new monotheist culture—as when Tabarī included not only the
prophets of Israel but also the rulers of ancient Iran in his History.
Eventually, an Iranian efflorescence of Platonizing and Gnostic philoso-
phy facilitated this compromise on the theological level too. A great deal of
ancient Iranian mytholog y was given a Muslim orientation within the frame-
work of Gnostic currents of thought. The influential “illuminationist” phi-
losopher Suhrawardī (d. 1191) drew on episodes in Ferdowsi’s epic poem the
Shahnameh (Book of kings), especially the birth of Zāl and the combat be-
tween his son Rostam and Esfandyār, in order to tell the history of the soul,
just as late Greek Platonists had read the Odyssey in a similar perspective.^24
The Shahnameh deserves a few words here, because just as the Denkard codi-
fies Avestan culture at the close of the First Millennium, so the Shahnameh
opens a new phase in Iranian historical and ethnic as well as spiritual con-
sciousness—Islamic now, no longer Avestan—at the very beginning of the
Second Millennium.
Of all the symptoms of Iranian cultural and especially literary revival we
observe in the tenth century,^25 Ferdowsi’s poem was the most spectacular and
durable, its panorama of Iran’s mythological and historical past in 50,000
lines making it seven times longer than the Iliad, and its use of New Persian
causing it to stand out in a Middle East gradually letting go both its native
languages and its pre- Islamic past. Ferdowsi was undoubtedly keen to revive
Persian, but his restrained use of Arabic words may not be due to prejudice,
given that some of those he does use are synonyms of common Persian words
that occur elsewhere in his poem.^26 He himself, like Tabarī, Ibn Sīnā, and
Bīrūnī, was a native of the Iranian East, which in his day experienced an up-
surge of Iranian sentiment.^27 He was born and appears to have spent his
whole life in the region of Tūs, near modern Mashhad, in Khurāsān.^28
(Ghazālī too was born there.)
24 H. Corbin, En Islam iranien (Paris 1971–72) 2.212–14; id., L’archange empourpré (Paris 1976)
197–200.
25 Daniel [4:81], in New Cambridge history of Islam [2:106] 1.502–3.
26 J. Perry, “Šah- nāma v. Arabic words,” EIr, http://www.iranicaonline.org.
27 P. Pourshariati, “The Parthians and the production of the canonical Shāhnāmas,” in Börm and
Wiesehöfer (eds), Commutatio et contentio [3:84] 347–92, esp. 348–49.
28 D. Khaleghi-Motlagh, “Ferdowsi, Abu’l-Qāsem,” EIr 5.514–23, http://www.iranicaonline.org (revised
version).