Rostam Farrokhzad's letter

In the reign of Yazdegerd III the caliph Omar sends Sa'd ibn Abi Waqqas with an army against Iran. Yazdegerd gathers troops from every side and gives the command to Rostam: wakeful, wise, a fighter and a reader of the stars, a man even the priests listen to. History knows him as Rostam Farrokhzad; the poem calls him the son of Hormozd. For thirty months, the poem says, the armies fight at Qadisiyyah (in the poem, Qadesi), with heavy losses and no one giving ground.

Rostam takes his astrolabe, reads the heavens and strikes his head. Then he writes to his brother. He is the guiltiest man of his age, he says, caught by Ahriman, for kingship is leaving this house. Mars and Venus are against them, and Mercury has entered Gemini. He has wept for the Iranians and burned for the Sasanians, for after this, for four hundred years, no one of that line will count in the world.

He tells his brother of the enemy's offer: the land from Qadisiyyah to the river for the king, a market town where they may buy and sell, tribute, hostages and obedience. His own commanders will not hear of it; they mean to fight. So he tells his brother to gather the treasure and the household, go to Azerbaijan, to the fire of Azar Goshnasp, and guard Yazdegerd, the last of the line, with his own life.

Then the letter becomes a prophecy of a world turned upside down. When the pulpit stands level with the throne, it says, and the names of Abu Bakr and Omar are on every tongue, the long labours of the past will be lost. A worthless man will be king; father and son will plot against each other; birth and merit will count for nothing; men will seek profit in others' loss and make religion their pretext; blood will be shed for gain. His arrows, Rostam writes, once pierced iron and his sword cut through elephants and lions, but now they cannot break the skin of the enemy, and he wishes he had never had the knowledge that shows him all this. "This Qadisiyyah is my grave," he ends, "my breastplate is my shroud, my helmet blood."

Rostam also writes to Sa'd, praising the wealth and lineage of his king and urging him not to fight. Sa'd answers with a summons to Islam. His envoy, Mughira ibn Shu'ba (in the poem, Sho'beh Moghayreh), comes to Rostam's tent of brocade on foot, will not step on the carpets, and sits on the bare ground. Rostam sends him back: an honourable death, he says, is better than this talk.

The battle lasts three days. Water runs out, and men and horses eat wet clay. At last Rostam and Sa'd ride out from their centres and meet alone. Rostam's sword brings down Sa'd's horse, and he dismounts to finish him, but the dust blinds him, and Sa'd strikes him on the helmet and then on the neck. The Iranian army breaks and flees to Yazdegerd.

Rostam's letter is one of the most quoted passages of the Shahnameh, and over the centuries it has been read in very different ways.