Endowment Revives Study of Book of Kings

It is hard to imagine another modern culture more in thrall to its distant literary past than Iranians with their Shahnama, the national epic composed by the poet Ferdowsi in the eleventh century. With its luminous array of villains, heroes, and demons, and stories probing the struggle of love against betrayal and good against evil, the Book of Kings is at once a retelling of Persian history before the Arabic conquest and a repository of literary myths that places Ferdowsi alongside Shakespeare and Homer as one of the great giants of storytelling. The Shahnama exerts a profound emotional and psychological hold over Iranians to this day, and the epic remains central to contemporary Iranian identity, a perennial cultural refuge in turbulent political times.

Its grip on the Iranian aesthetic imagination is borne out by even very recent works. The poem’s visualizations of power and justice have shaped the latest installation of the artist Shirin Neshat, who places modern Iranian and Arab revolts in the epic’s ancient context; its iconic heroes are a recurring visual theme in the work of modern Iranian painters, and the figure of Zal, the spurned albino child recused by the mythical bird Simorgh, has inspired the recent literary novel by Porochista Khakhpour.

A new Centre of Shahnama and Persian studies at the University of Cambridge’s Pembroke College, which was inaugurated at an opening this past week, will seek to nurture and extend study of the epic’s numerous manuscripts and propel a revitalized program of Persian Studies. The center is the second institution dedicated to Shahnameh studies in the world, as the first was established in Tehran in the 1970s under the direction of Mojtaba Minovi. The Cambridge center emerged out of a £1.2 million endowment from Iranian-American philanthropist Bita Daryabari, which builds on a Shahnama Project founded by Professor Charles Melville with the support of the British Academy. The new center will devote itself to fresh research and initiatives that explore the Shahnama's far reaching influence across the Persian-speaking world, and its role in the forging of national identity in nations such as Tajikstan and Georgia.

“The benefaction not only allows the work on the Shahnama Project to continue – for a great deal still remains to be done in the collection, analysis and presentation of the illustrated manuscripts of the epic,” said Melville. “It also provides a focal point for the encouragement of Persian Studies in Cambridge and guarantees its long-term future. It enables us to pursue new directions of research – for instance into the significance of the poem for contemporary artists in various media – as well as to support programmes of public lectures, publication series and cultural activities.”

The inauguration included an exhibition of mediaeval Shahnama manuscripts and several detached folios of extreme importance as well as a number of contemporary works influenced by its themes, including Siamack Filizadeh’s iconic “Rostam II and Zal join forces” from his series ‘Rostam II. Return,’ a pastiche of references from Qajar-kitsch, to zurkhaneh to Tehran’s Dolat Street Benetton; Sama Soltani’s “Kiss of Rustam,” which evokes Gustav Klimt in examining Tahmineh’s fall from grace; and Fereydoun Ave’s “Radioactive Rustam,” a classic from his macho-mystic series that probes Persian culture’s fetishisation of hero figures who trade in both misogyny and folk mysticism. “The aim of the exhibition is to show why and how the ideas of the medieval Persian poem, based on ancient Iranian mythology, are still relevant to understanding contemporary Persian culture, and why the idea of Iran is associated with the idea of the Shahnama,” said Firuza Abdullaeva, an Iranian studies scholar who will serve as the centre’s director, in her introductory comments.

Speakers included Olga Davidson of Boston University, Touraj Daryaee of University of California, Irvine, and the Islamic-Iranian art specialist Sussan Babaei of the Courtauld Institute. The talks explored the historicity of the Shahnama, its influence across the Persianate world and Central Asia, the aesthetic manifestations of Persian kingship, and the relevance of Shahnama mythology to modern Iranian political culture.  “The Shahnama provides the inner logic of how the Persians operated vis-a-vis their foes, and also inside the Persian world,” said Daryaee in his remarks. “But it’s also a living tradition, very much alive in the psyche of Iranians in the 21^st century.”

The endowment comes at a pivotal time for both the University of Cambridge and the wider academic field. Persian Studies, which flourished in many European universities throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, have struggled in the West in recent decades, with governments cutting spending on higher education andmany of the subjects that the field traditionally encompassed shifting into other broader disciplines. Though a promising young generation of scholars has certainly emerged, overall student enrolment for Persian courses has also waned, partly reflecting the insecurity of the job market for scholars specialising in Persian literature and history. As such, the field has become increasingly specialist and reliant on the backing of private donors to sustain academic positions and research. That no major academic institution in the West would accept an endowment from the Islamic Republic of Iran, a wealthy and natural contributor, is another impediment..

Arabic Studies have managed to better the survive the structural changes in the funding of higher education. Student enrolment is healthier due to the wider geographic scope of the subject’s application, and wealthy countries like Saudi Arabia and Qatar, along with private Arab donors, have endowed numerous major chairs and departments. This support has essentially merged Arabic and Islamic Studies at the university level, and left the study of Persian civilisation and language – especially fields that predate the Islamic conquest and do not fall into the realm of Shia or Islamic Studies – highly vulnerable.

It is only relatively recently that Iranian philanthropists have stepped into this sphere. Professor Ali Ansari, president of the British Institute for Persian Studies, believes the field is still in robust health despite the shortfall in funding and its position as a minority field in a minority subject. He says however that private donations “can often provide the extra leverage that we need to persuade universities to support the subject and recognise that not only is it viable but has a future.” He notes that there is only a single endowed chair in Persian Studies in the United Kingdom -- at the University of Oxford, funded by the Soudavar Memorial Foundation -- “a lamentably low figure,” and that the field needs endowments to support scholarships and posts. “We do a lot with quite a little, but just think what we could do if we had access to the sort of streams of private finance that other subjects get,” he says.

In such a climate, and at a time when most endowments from Iranian donors have gone to American universities, Ms. Daryabari’s support from California for the study of the Shahnama and Persian Studies at Cambridge is particularly notable. For Cambridge, it is a resonant endowment because it links the present to the University’s past in the field. Cambridge was theacademic home of the British orientalist Edward Granville Browne, whose classic Year Amongst the Persians remains one of the West’s most important literary encounters with nineteenth century Persia. Browne himself, a fellow of Pembroke College, went on to found Persian Studies in Britain at the university level. The study of his archives, parts of which are kept at the college, will be a priority for the new institution. “The new Persian Centre is not starting from scratch, it aims to continue, slightly reviving the long and flourishing traditions of Pembroke Persian studies,” said Abdullaeva. “I hope our centre will not diminish but help increase its international fame among academics and the wider public.”