Shāhnāmeh and the Presumptive Authority of the West

The association of the Iranian national poet, Ferdowsi, with Homer, and the Shahnameh with the Iliad is, in my view, the most unfortunate analogy in the history of classical Persian scholarship. In what passes for comparative epic scholarship in the West, Ferdowsi is discussed as though he were merely an Iranian manifestation of Homer. As a result, the Shāhnāmeh is often analyzed by criteria that grew out of scholarship on Homer’s poems rather than in terms of its own cultural milieu, artistic merit, or even literary language.