Iskandar's Bibulous Business: Wine, Drunkenness and the Calls to the Sāqī in Nizāmī Ganjavī's Sharaf-nāma

Abstract

The twelfth-century poet Nizāmī Ganjavī has produced his version of the adventures of Alexander as a unique composition mingling known Persian historiography and Qur'anic legends with unusual non-Islamic, especially Greek, elements in order to create his Iskandar-nāma (containing two parts, the Sharaf-nāma and the Iqbāl-nāma) as a synthesis of eastern and western cultures. A first point is the examination of the reasons behind the importance given to wine and drunkenness within the narrative. The poet has stressed this further by heading each chapter with a call to the sāqī. The essay examines the appositeness of the invocations with the episodes in the narrative, it analyses examples of wine imagery (containing references to medicine, to the mirror and to religion) and questions the relation between authorial persona, narrator and characters, examining in particular the famous teetotaler claim in one of the introductory chapters of the first part of the Iskandar-nāma.