by JAWED NAQVI
It was a placard that as students we would draw cartoons on or write slogans with marker pens or thick brushes for college protests. To deter Donald Trump’s vile description of Iranians as an evil lot, the chador-clad Iranian woman chose a verse from the great Persian poet Firdausi for her placard. The 10th-century master poet is credited with reviving Persian literature. His fabled Shahnameh chronicled the legends of Persian kings with motifs and characters that were essentially pre-Islamic. The stories of Rustam and Sohrab, for example, popularised by Firdausi, relate to the early Zoroastrian period of Iran. Colonial upstarts would later drool at the awe-inspiring heritage he spawned. It was reflected in the British pretence at majesty as they attempted to mask an instinct for savage plunder.
After uprooting the Persian-Prakrit-Sanskrit culture nurtured by Muslim rulers in India, chiefly the Mughals, the British viceroy installed a Persian painting on the ceiling of the ballroom of the vice-regal palace, today’s Presidential Palace. The painting still hangs there, mocking Hindutva’s boorish hatred of Iran’s legacy of refinement in India. The painting of a Qajar-era ruler on a tiger hunt was created by an Italian artist as faux inspiration from the legends depicted in Firdausi’s magnum opus, compiled between 977 AD and 1010 AD.
The verse the woman wrote with a blue brush on a placard for the huge Nowruz march through Tehran to mark the Persian new year intrigued an American journalist watching the war. Ergo: there are foreign journalists invited by the reviled Iranian ‘regime’ to chronicle an unprovoked assault on their nation; the opposite seems true of the falsely adulated ‘democracies’ of the US and Israel where opacity and news blackouts have become a legitimate requirement in a self-harming and costly military expedition.
Donald Trump the tycoon doesn’t want the markets to shudder at his foolhardy plans to destroy Iran and thereby the Persian Gulf. Benjamin Netanyahu desperately needs to cover up the untold damage inflicted on precisely chosen targets straddling Israeli cities. One missile cautioned him that Iran could destroy the Dimona nuclear plant at will, with horrific consequences to the world, if its Bushehr nuclear power station was damaged. This is the terrifying prospect Trump and Netanyahu have jointly given birth to in an ultra-volatile region.
In modern Persian culture, Gordafarid is a feminist icon and a symbol of Iranian resistance and ingenuity.
The image of the Iranian woman’s placard was snapped from a news clip, and as such it was angled, blurred and incomplete. It was her explanation of the verse to the American interlocutor that helped me track it down to the Shahnameh. I checked out the verse with an encyclopaedic Persian scholar. The illustrious Sharif Husain Qasemi is Delhi’s only expert on Bedil, the 18th-century Persian poet notorious for being so difficult that he was considered a challenge even by the great Ghalib, himself notorious for his difficult Persian poetry. He found the verse and explained its context: “Agar sar be sar tan be koshtan daham/ Azaan beh ke kishvar be dushman Daham” (“If I give my body — from head to toe — to be killed/ That is better than giving the country to the enemy.”)
The verse is one of the most famous examples of heroic ethos (javanmardi) in Persian literature. It is spoken by a woman warrior, the legendary hero Gordafarid. The sentiment is echoed throughout the Shahnameh also by figures like Rustam or other heroes facing insurmountable odds.
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