Paper abstract:

The most famous scene in Haft Paykar, a twelfth century Persian romance epic by Neẓāmī Ganjavī (1141–1209), is that of Fitna, a Chinese musician slave girl lifting up a full-grown bull as she walks up sixty flights of stairs towards Sasanian King, Bahrām Gūr. Fitna, whose ambiguous name means ‘rebellion’ in Persian, refuses to let Bahrām Gūr bully her for her honesty. Instead, she uses her bull-lifting performance to assert her ability to embody javānmardī (young-manliness) to challenge patriarchal kingship. Javānmardī is an ethical concept of human perfection that genders Persianate subjectivity and may be translated into ‘chivalry’. The scholarly consensus has been that the chivalric ideal of Persianate masculinity pertains to the sexed male body only. However, javānmardī’s influence on the female body, and specifically the important role it plays in the shaping of a feminine identity during the medieval period with Fitna being a prime example, points to a lesser understood history of medieval Persianate gender, race, and class relations in which bodies sexually shapeshift in the act of storytelling. By uncovering how Haft Paykar functions as a “mirror for princesses” that remembers women as models of javānmardī with their ability to embody and redefine virtues associated with this chivalric ideal ranging from virtuous trickstery, gift-giving, ‘glamor politics’, and gender-bending, this article shows how the medieval Persianate world understood ādāb and kingship as female-led enterprises. Most importantly, with Haft Paykar celebrating Fitna as the standard of javānmardī regardless of her ethnicity as Chinese and her social status, we are able to understand how China, specifically the ‘enslaved’ Chinese female body, played an important role in the driving of a medieval Persianate imagination and new ways of use romance and chivalry to understand the intersections of gender, class, and race from a medieval Persianate perspective. Javānmardī becomes what Joan Scott calls an analytical category pushing us to re-think, from a feminine perspective, the cosmopolitan extent of the medieval Persianate world, specifically how its ‘frontiers’ went beyond an Indo-Iranian border and extended all the way to China and even the Arab world. Indeed, Bahrām Gūr himself is depicted as a Persian-born and Arab-raised king. I locate in Haft Paykar’s depiction of ‘love between strangers’ the different tensions that governed the ‘frontiers’ of the Persianate world as the patriarchal concept of Persian kingship was being called into question by the elite literati.