The Word for Guile (Kayd) Itself Seems to be Shifty. Sometimes it is positive, sometimes negative, at times divine. It seems to assume its significance from its context. It becomes positive or negative according to the point of view of the one who uses it. It has a variety of meanings: Steingass's listing “deceiving, laying snares, entrapping, plotting mischief; applying a remedy, vomiting; being menstruous; the croak of a raven; war, warfare; deceit, fraud, stratagem; treachery, malignity, malice” illustrates its large semantic field. Kayd can also be a divine attribute. In the Qur˒anic chapter in which the Egyptian ruler admonishes his wife and utters the often repeated verse 29, “Indeed your guile is great,” verse 76 links kayd with God who “did devise a plan for Joseph.” “There are at least thirty-four uses of the Arabic root K.Y.D in the Qur˒an, and a number of them refer to God's action.”

Some of the most admired heroes and heroines of Persian literature are guileful. Most writers, however, have formulated their paradigms of guile with women in mind. Kayd and its numerous synonyms, although not gendered words, are frequently “feminized.”

In a Beautiful Essay, Titled “Justify My Love,” Daniel Boyarin writes, “From almost the first sentence in my first preparatory course in reading the Talmud, I was charmed—in the full antique sense of the word.” So much so that he did not notice that “they [the characters central to the Talmudic narratives] were all men, or that the texts were primarily addressed to me just because I was a Jewish man. I failed to see the exclusions and oppressions that those facts encode and mystify.” Gradually, feminist awareness of these oppressions and exclusions, Boyarin explains, made his life disturbing and untenable, eventually producing a new endeavor, which he calls “to justify my love, that is, both to explain it and to make it just.”

The dilemmas eloquently written about in this essay are in many ways those I have navigated since, as a teenager, I fell in love with the seduction-temptation episode in the Joseph/Yusuf story.

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.

Rustam's Origins are Certainly Complex, Multilayered, and it Would seem only partly Iranian. His legend itself indicates this; his mother is a foreigner living in Kabul and descended from Zahhak, so that both Sudabah and Isfandiyar are able to refer to him as demon-born, (dīv-zād). Mehrdad Bahar has concluded that much of his legend is Saka, or Scythian, and that it also has strong parallels and probable connections with that of Indra, the Vedic god of war. His integration into Iranian national history as its defender and savior betrays some strains: he is Iran's greatest champion but he enjoys very uneasy relations with some of Iran's kings (notably Kavus and Gushtasp), his sons Suhrab and Faramarz each launch independent attacks against the Iranian court, and his own last battle is against the crown prince of Iran whom he kills. Half foreigner, with a partially demonic ancestry, a man who kills the nation's heir apparent and whose sons declare war on two different Iranian royal families—these are troubling attributes for an ethnic hero, and point to some ambiguity in the evolution of his legend.

To the memory of my ustad, K. Allin Luther, in appreciation of his teaching and example.

Abu'l-Fazl Muhammad B. Al-Husayn Bayhaqi (385-470/995-1077), A Khurasanian scribe of the Ghaznavids, wrote a history of this Perso-Islamic dynasty (388-582/994-1186) in his work referred to as the Tārīkh-i Bayhaqī (composed in 450/1058). The Ghaznavids ruled in an area now comprising eastern Iran, Afghanistan, and northern India. With the loss of greater Khurasan to the nomadic Saljuqs at the battle of Dandanqan on 9 Ramadan 431/24 May 1040, the empire was reduced to parts of Afghanistan and northern India, chiefly the Punjab. The downfall of the Ghaznavids in Khurasan also divides the period of the first three kings from those of the later ones. Bayhaqi himself organized the history of the Ghaznavids in terms of “principal” (aṣl), versus “minor” (far˓) territories. For Bayhaqi the principal territories are Khurasan and Jibal, but especially Khurasan, as opposed to the minor territories in India. He wrote his history when he was an old man and after 29 years had passed from the loss of Khurasan. The only surviving volumes of Bayhaqi's history of the Ghaznavids cover the reign of the third Ghaznavid ruler Mas˓ud (421—31/1030-1040), who lost Khurasan to the Saljuqs.

After the Recent Work of Merguerian and Najmabadi, Najmabadi, and Milani (in this volume), it can be little surprise that the topic of women's tricks (makr-i zan) is explicit and pervasive in traditional oral narrative in Persian-speaking communities. In afsānah or fictional folktales, makr-i zan serves as a generic title for a large, but shifting, corpus of individual tales which are perceived by their tellers as primarily concerned with the topos (though the tales may be otherwise identified or characterized by other sources, including literary ones). Indeed, from the general perspective of a strongly patriarchal popular ideology which promotes male authority over female action, any and all female-initiated action (“female agency”) may be construed, explicitly or implicitly, as subversive of the ideal order of patriarchy. While the female actor and female agency are marked as “other” (than ideal) by the topos (or stereotype), women as well as men perform tales about makr-i zan. This paper begins the task of sorting out perspectives on this “otherness” and agency as reflected in the repertoires of various male and female traditional storytellers, in individual oral performances in which makr-i zan are central.