Golden Age of Storytelling in Iran

Date: 30 April 2025 - 21:37

News ID: ۱۳۹۰۵۸

TEHRAN -- Whatever the
Qajar period is considered to have been in terms of political events, from the perspective of the discipline of folk narrative research it was a golden age of storytelling.
Stories of all kinds were told in Iran since times of old and certainly are still told today, but for no other period of Iranian history do we command such a wealth of information on professional storytelling, the storytellers and their stories as for the Qajar period.
The art of professional storytelling in Iran relies on a long tradition, probably arching back as far as Parthian times.
Several of the great narrative collections of world literature owe their genesis or at least their mediation into world literature to pre-Islamic and early Islamic Iran – such as Kalīla va Dimna, the Sindbād-nāma, and the Thousand and One Nights.
Besides contributing to the inter-national dissemination of numerous narratives of ‘Oriental’ origin, these collections prove that the art of narrating was held in high esteem in Iran as in various other Oriental cultures.
In the Islamic period, fables and other didactic tales were employed to illustrate points of a moral, didactic or mystical intent in numerous works of Persian literature, such as – to name but the most famous – those by ʿAṭṭar, Nizam, Rumi, and Saʿdi.
The Iranian national epic, Firdaus’s Shah-nāma, is a pivotal narrative of Iranian identity drawing on a wide array of stories that focus on mythical rulers and heroes.
And finally, in addition to the stories told in works of elite or popular literature, folktales and fairy tales are still told orally today.
While storytelling thus can rightfully be considered a traditional constituent of Iranian culture, it goes without saying that all kinds of storytelling have developed and changed under the influence of contemporary conditions.
The Persian art of naqqālī is posited somewhere in between the various strands of oral and (written) literary tradition, thus constituting the ideal subject for considerations on orality and textuality in the Iranian world.
Naqqālī, a general denomination for professional storytelling, is the verbal art of telling stories of a historical nature, whether relating to events that actually did happen or those that learned or popular tradition would imagine to have happened.
As in the field of Oriental historiography in general, naqqālī rather than representing a faithful and ‘authentic’ depiction, relies on plausibility and likeliness to construct and present an appealing image of how things might have been.
Naqqālī is an oral performance that is presented by a professional storyteller, the naqqāl, and that takes place in a public or semi-public context.
The texts performed in naqqālī usually relate to heroic adventures of secular as well as religious heroes. While being performed orally, naqqālī to a certain extent relies on sources laid down in writing that include both manuscript and printed versions of the performed text.
The specific genre of manuscript texts related to their work is the ṭūmār, a text that is best described as a booklet constituting a mnemonic aid for the storyteller’s performance.
Storytellers might retell a more or less fixed narrative, whether in prose or verse or, at times, in prose interspersed with verbatim quotations in poetry as taken from the original source.
The more the storytellers would deviate from their source text, the more they would employ techniques of oral composition. In particular, they would apply a large set of narrative formulas structuring the text as well as describing certain repetitive events, such as sun-sets or scenes of combat.