Iranshah b. Abi Khayr’s Kushnameh, written 1108-11 CE and surviving in a single manuscript, is set in the same timeframe as the Pishdadian Shahnameh. This epic deals with the family of the evil snake-king Zahhak and their conflict with the house of Jamshid. It recounts the story of the quite unusual character of Kush-e pilgush (Kush, the elephant-eared), son of Zahhak’s brother and a woman from the pilgush tribe. Born with elephant ears and tusks, Kush grows up believing that he is bound by his monstrous appearance to do evil, until he finds God at the hands of a pir who surgically removes his elephant ears and tusks. This paper examines Kush-e pilgush through the lens of monster studies. As Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Dana Oswald, and others have shown, monsters are depositories of various human fears, especially with respect to sexuality. Through a close-reading of this text I explore the ways in which Kush-e pilgush navigates a middle ground between humanity and monstrosity. Passages on his elephantine body and deviant sexual behavior emphasize his monstrosity, while the fact that he capable of being ‘saved’ through bodily transformation into a ‘normal’ form speaks to his underlying humanity. The Kushnameh is therefore a valuable text through which to test assumptions already explored in European Medievalist scholarship regarding the essentialism of monstrous bodies; at the same time, it provides an opportunity for a reading of literary monstrosity through the lens of Islamicate ethical thought.