Fashioning Persian Identity:: Asadī’s Staged Dispute between a Zoroastrian and a Muslim

Abstract

This paper focuses on the earliest surviving specimens of Persian debate poetry (monāzara), a genre which deals with controversial topics such as the Persians’ supremacy over the Arabs or the superiority of Islam over Zoroastrianism. Focusing on one panegyric by the poet Asadi Tusi (1010–70), this paper contextualizes such debates in a cultural milieu of eleventh-century Persia. It shows how poets, as an indispensable part of the court hierarchy, participated in constructing a new identity for Persians by formulating a Persian standpoint on controversies of the day.