FERDOWSI, THE SHAHNAMEH, AND THE IRAN OF MY HEART

Reflections on a journey through the Everglades

The road to the Indigenous community where I care for my patients passes through Everglades National Park in South Florida. It is an hour’s drive through one of the world’s most unusual landscapes. There are no mountains, no dramatic valleys, no majestic waterfalls. Instead, there is an immense, almost mystical river of grass, a geological and ecological wonder where water moves imperceptibly beneath an endless horizon of green.

During these journeys, I usually listen to audiobooks. They allow my mind to travel far beyond the landscape through which I am driving.

Yesterday was my first day back with the tribe following my recent travels to Mexico and France. Each country had offered its own enchantment. Mexico, with its exuberant celebration of the Day of the Dead, reminded me how joyfully human beings can embrace the mystery of mortality. France offered another experience: the quiet elegance of everyday life, but also the occasional melancholy of those who seem to withdraw from participation in their secular society.

Moving constantly between cultures has taught me something important. I rarely ask how another society differs from Australia, Israel, or anywhere else I have lived. Instead, I try to discover what is beautiful, meaningful, and uniquely human within it.

For this particular journey, I chose an audiobook from my downloaded library: the Shahnameh, the Book of Kings, by Abolqasem Ferdowsi.

From the very first moments, I was captivated.

The English narration was accompanied by evocative music, distinctly Persian yet enriched by contemporary interpretations. Different voices brought kings, demons, warriors, princes, and princesses to life. The music created a soft emotional bed upon which Ferdowsi’s immortal words could rest.

I imagined how magnificent these stories would be on a theatrical stage, performed by actors. Yet here I was, driving through the ancient wilderness of Florida, transported into the equally ancient imagination of Persia.

A thousand years separated Ferdowsi from me. Yet, emotionally, there seemed to be no distance at all.

What astonished me most was the extraordinary relevance of his observations about human nature.

Ambition, vanity, betrayal, loyalty, courage, injustice, the corruption of power, and the fragility of human greatness—these are not merely the concerns of ancient Persian kings. They are the dramas of our own times.

I could recognize in Ferdowsi’s characters people I encounter in contemporary America. Political leaders who mistake power for wisdom. Men who refuse to accept defeat. Societies struggling between dignity and domination.

On the eve of another intriguing American election, with memories of political turmoil in Brazil and elsewhere still fresh, I found myself wondering whether Ferdowsi had somehow become a wise counsellor to our modern world.

Perhaps that is the greatness of truly universal literature.

Ferdowsi belongs not only to Iran. He belongs to humanity.

I have also been reading Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones’s excellent book, Persians, which has deepened my appreciation of the remarkable continuity of Persian civilization.

And yet, I believe Ferdowsi occupies a place beyond that of a poet or historian.

He was, in his own extraordinary way, a rescuer of Iran.

Like the noble princes and heroic warriors of his epic who struggled to preserve their homeland, Ferdowsi fought another battle: the preservation of Persian language, memory, and cultural identity.

Following the Arab conquest and the profound transformations that accompanied it, Persian civilization might have lost much of its linguistic inheritance. Yet Ferdowsi created an immense literary monument in which the Persian language stood proudly, drawing deeply upon its own vocabulary and traditions.

It is often said that the Shahnameh contains remarkably few Arabic words. Whatever the precise number, the achievement remains extraordinary.

Ferdowsi preserved not merely a language, but the memory of a civilization.

And perhaps this is why listening to him awakened such powerful emotions within me.

As I write these reflections, I have opened Spotify. Iranian music fills my room. Videos of Iran and of Iranian artists living abroad appear on the screen.

Dariush, Faramarz, Siavash, Ebi, and younger voices from contemporary Iran accompany my thoughts.

Their songs carry nostalgia, tenderness, sorrow, longing, and sometimes defiance. Images of Iranian cities, mountains, gardens, streets, and ordinary people pass before my eyes.

The music soothes the sadness that the Shahnameh has awakened in my heart.

There is something deeply moving about a civilization that has endured conquest, upheaval, exile, and repeated attempts to reshape its identity, yet continues to produce such astonishing poetry, music, beauty, and intellectual life.

I think of the Iranian friends I have made over the years, many through our shared love of literature. Their affection for poetry is not merely an intellectual exercise. It is woven into the fabric of their emotional existence.

Perhaps another awakening of the spirit of the Shahnameh will help Iran rediscover the fullness of its cultural inheritance—not by rejecting the many influences that have enriched it over the centuries, but by freeing its people to choose their own future.

A future in which Persian civilization can flourish without fear, coercion, or the imposition of identities that its people have not freely embraced.

I do not know when that moment will arrive.

But I believe that civilizations possessing such extraordinary reservoirs of beauty, wisdom, and creativity can renew themselves.

Ferdowsi himself offers us that hope.

For a thousand years, his words have survived kings, conquerors, dynasties, revolutions, and empires.

Perhaps they will outlive our present anxieties as well.

And so I wait, with affection and hope, for the day when I can travel freely through Iran.

I would like to stand quietly before the tomb of Ferdowsi in Tus, thanking him for preserving the soul of a civilization.

Then visit Omar Khayyam in Nishapur, whose verses first introduced me to Persian poetry when I was a schoolboy.

And finally, sit beside the tomb of Hafez in Shiraz, where poetry, love, longing, and the mysteries of existence seem to become one.

Perhaps I shall bring a small book of his verses and sit beneath the trees.

There will be no need for grand speeches.

Only gratitude.

And perhaps, somewhere in the distance, the gentle sound of Persian music.

Until that day, Iran remains a country I have yet to visit, but whose poetry has already found a permanent home in my heart.