Qadisiyyah

The last great battle of the Shahnameh is fought by a man who shares the name of its greatest hero. Rostam, son of Farrokhzad, is the commander of Yazdegerd III's army. Before the battle, the poem has him read the stars and write a long letter to his brother, foreseeing that the empire is lost, and describing in bitter detail the world he expects to follow: kings without legitimacy, the old order turned upside down, and the values of the past forgotten. It is one of the most quoted passages of the poem, and readers have argued about its meaning ever since.

Rostam also exchanges messages with Sa'd ibn Abi Waqqas, the Muslim commander. The armies fight for days. In the poem, Rostam is killed in single combat with Sa'd, the Iranian army breaks, and the way to Ctesiphon lies open. The poem's account is a lament, told from the side of the defeated Sasanian nobility to which Ferdowsi's own class traced its roots.

History and memory

Historically, the battle of al-Qadisiyyah took place around 636 or 637, near al-Hira on the edge of the desert in southern Iraq, and the Sasanian commander Rostam Farrokhzad was killed there. It opened Mesopotamia to the Arab armies and was followed by the fall of Ctesiphon. Its exact site is uncertain, and the point here is approximate. The battle has been remembered very differently by different readers over the centuries, as a disaster, as a turning point that brought Islam to Iran, or both, and Rostam's letter is still read through all of those lenses.