Iranology Cief: Iran’s Cultural Resilience Lies in Shahnameh Tradition

TERHRAN -- As the first anniversary of the 12-day war passes, the head of Iranology Foundation argues that poetry has always been Iran’s quiet weapon against foreign domination

In a Tehran studio, against a backdrop of grey bookshelves and the low hum of air conditioning, Mahmoud Jafari Dehaghi is explaining why a thousand-year-old poem might matter more than any missile.
The professor of ancient languages and head of Iranology Foundation sat for a lengthy interview with state news agency IRNA this week, and his argument cuts through the usual noise of geopolitical punditry: Iran endures not because of its military might, but because of its verses.
“The writing of Shahnamehs was common before Ferdowsi and continued after him,” he says, referring to the epic poem that most Iranians know as the work of a single 11th-century genius. 
But Dehaghi complicates that narrative. The Ferdowsi we revere, he suggests, was never a lone voice in the wilderness. He was part of a tradition — the most brilliant link in a chain that stretched back to the Parthian era and forward into our own confused century.
This matters, Dehaghi says, because the Shahnameh tradition is a form of cultural resistance. When empires fall, when armies invade, when the world gets the story of Iran wrong (and he believes it currently does), poetry becomes a way of saying: we are still here. 
“Shahnameh writing is a dimension of Iranian cultural resilience against foreign invasion,” he says. “Even today, when we see that outside this land we are being judged incorrectly, we have turned back to the Shahnameh.”
He points to a quiet revival. Across Iran, in cities and villages, groups have begun gathering to recite Ferdowsi’s verses. This is not nostalgia, Dehaghi insists. It is a reflex. A way of rejecting a foreign culture that would portray Iranians as something other than what they have always been.
The professor’s diagnosis of Iran’s present condition is sharp. He believes the country has drifted from its identity. The cure, he says, begins at home — literally. Families need to teach children how to argue, how to express dissent, how to think critically. 
Schools need to stop draining literary values from textbooks. “In today’s world, we may not be number one in technology or economics,” he says. “But in literature, poetry and literary culture, we are number one in the world.”
He has written a play about Rabe’a, a female poet whose life he compares to Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
 He dreams of films about Biruni, Farabi, Ibn Sina — the Persian scholars who built the so-called golden age of Islam.
And then there is Cyrus the Great. Dehaghi speaks of the Achaemenid emperor with something close to wonder. In an ancient world of ceaseless war, of Assyrian inscriptions boasting about plundered gods and obliterated kingdoms, Cyrus proposed something radical: coexistence. 
Different religions, different ideologies, different ways of thinking — all could live alongside one another. The Cyrus Cylinder, which some have called an early human rights charter, became the foundation of a vast empire.
“Why shouldn’t a valuable film be made of this idea?” Dehaghi asks. It is not a rhetorical question. He seems genuinely to hope that someone might answer it.