The Uses of Guile in the Shāhnāmah

The ShĀhnĀmah Provides an Obvious Starting Point for an Examination of the role of guile in Persian literature. It is the earliest major work in which male and female characters both play significant roles, and in many of its stories guile, by which I mean the whole range of dishonest or deceitful behavior, plays a central role. Rethinking the stories in the Shāhnāmah from this perspective leads to several general conclusions. First, guile is a pervasive presence in the Shāhnāmah. Despite the consistent and ubiquitous condemnation of all forms of dishonesty, and the parallel exhortations to honesty and truth, lies and deceit are familiar weapons in the armory of heroes as well as villains. Second, warriors employ guile, as they do more conventional weapons, when it will yield some advantage over an opponent, and, in particular, when their own strength by itself will not be enough to assure victory. Third, although the ways in which men and women deploy guile varies according to their very different roles in society, men use it as readily as women do. Finally, when a woman does lie or dissimulate, men do not generalize from her behavior to that of all women

Dishonesty · Honesty · Political science · Theology · Victory · Archaeology and Historical Studies · Islamic Studies and History · Language, Linguistics, Cultural Analysis · Law · Philosophy · Psychology · Social Psychology

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