Pre-Islamic Iran

Before the Islamic Revolution dimmed the Iranian literary imagination in 1979, and before an expanding Islam swept Iran into its Arab empire in the seventh century, there existed the rich and colorful Iran recounted in Ferdowsi’s “Shahnameh,” or the Book of Kings. Nearly four centuries after the Arab conquest, the “Shahnameh” tells the story of pre-Islamic Iran—when Persian civilization was at its zenith.

The epic proceeds through the reign of many monarchs, chronicling the at times legendary, at times mythological, and at times quasihistorical stories of each reign. Then, with the Arab conquest, the chronicle comes to an end. This might seem to mark the end of Persian civilization, too. But Ferdowsi’s masterpiece, composed about A.D. 1000, both went on to inspire the greatest Persian miniature paintings and retrieved Iran’s lost identity—along with its language, which still survives.

The epic is not only a remembrance of a wondrous past but a mourning of the passing of that history and all that falls prey to “the absolute of all tyrants, time,” says Azar Nafisi. She relates her love of the work in her 2009 memoir, “Things I’ve Been Silent About.”

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