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.

In Islamic paradisiacal depictions, imagery of lush gardens or plentiful banquets are often accompanied by description of the houris (huriyah) as feminine ethereal virgins promised to the believer in the afterlife. Variously translated as "splendid companions of equal age", "lovely eyed", or "pure beings" of “modest gaze,” houris occupy an ambiguous space between the human and nonhuman insofar as they retain semblance to a chaste, beautiful woman and yet are typically described as translucent and/or incapable of producing menses. While Qur’anic discourse on the houris mentions them in passing, many medieval Islamicate romances adopt the figure of the houri as a way of defining the beloved’s beauty and noble lineage. In this paper, I analyze an early example of this adaptation of Qur’anic presentations of paradisiacal houris to a female, earthly beloved in ‘Ayyuqi’s tenth century Persian romantic epic Varqa & Golshah. I argue that descriptions of the beloved Golshah’s houri lineage (huran-nezhad) define the ideal feminine through her respective whiteness, chastity, and ethereality, and as such illustrate anxieties surrounding purity in medieval Islamicate literary discourse. I begin my analysis by examining the Qur’anic passages and pre-Islamic poetry that mention houris. Following Jacob and Neuwirth, I maintain that imagery of the houris as figures with dark, lustrous eyes can be seen in both pre-Islamic banquet poetry and paradisiacal Qur’anic depictions from the early Meccan period. Such figures, I argue, tend to not be overtly gendered although they are typically depicted as a reward for the solitary male poet or believer. The houris of Qur’anic discourse, moreover, are distinctly nonhuman actors whose mention fades with the later Meccan and Medinan descriptions of a communal and familial paradise. Yet against Neuwirth and Lange, I do not suggest that this shift in Qur’anic paradisiacal imagery led to the diminished presence of houris in popular imagination and instead point to houris’ literary afterlife in medieval Islamicate literature, notably in the romance. Through a close reading of descriptions of Golshah as a houri or of houri lineage in ‘Ayyuqi’s Varqa & Golshah, show how the romance fleshes out the image of the houri and makes houris human through physical depictions of idealized femininity and whiteness. These depictions recycle the image of the houri in order to classify an ideal feminine type, which further displays anxieties around gender, ethnicity, and purity present throughout the work.

The dragon (Persian azhdah?) is among the most defiantly non-anthropomorphic of monsters. Unlike giants, ghouls, or shape-shifting wizards, it does not readily evoke the human in its form or behavior. An ultimate alterity, it exists primarily to be encountered and defeated by the chivalric male hero (such as Fereydun, Rostam, or Bahram Gur), whose victory reaffirms the values of truth and civilization. Most scholarly work on Persian dragons, indebted to broad comparative models of Indo-European mythology, continues to assert this fundamental dichotomy of the chaos serpent and the culture hero. Yet close readings of medieval Persian texts challenge the stark division between reptilian beasts and their conquerors. Similes and metaphors constantly align the murderous work of war with the depredations of snake-like monsters. The word azhdah? itself is closely related to the hybrid figure of Zahh?k, whose body and exploits exist along an uneasy border between the human and the draconic. Fereydun assumes the shape of a dragon to test his sons’ fitness to rule; Rostam, clad in a sea-monster’s skin, fights a dragon fully capable of thought and speech. In the Bahmann?ma, a sexually rapacious dragon menaces a feudal princess, while the monstrous central figure of the epic is himself eventually devoured by a justice-serving dragon. In each of these cases, the supposedly clear delineations of human and monster are shattered by texts less interested in repeating ancient myths than in interrogating vital questions of power and nature. At the same time, the azhdah? is an almost purely historical monster. Unlike other beasts, it can no longer be encountered in Ir?n-zamin. By relegating the dragon to the past – or, occasionally, a distant east suffused with anteriority – epic narratives reframe the relationship between ancient and contemporary experience. Denied access to the present, the dragon is left to operate on the margins of history. At the same time, through its deep imbrication with origin stories, heroic genealogies, and language itself, the azhdah? asserts a haunting presence that far outlasts its local extinctions. Drawing on the posthuman monster theory of critics such as Patricia MacCormack as well as Mark Fisher’s explorations of weirdness, eeriness, and horror, this paper seeks to reconsider the azhdah? as a crucial site of tension between human, nonhuman, past, and present.

The Sirat Sayf bin Dhi Yazan, an Arabic popular epic put to paper in 14th century Mamluk Cairo, presents an ontological spectrum of human and non-human characters, many of which occupy not simply the poles of this spectrum, but the spaces in between. Notably, human characters who engage in occult practices and possess magical/scientific (here termed occult) capabilities interact with their world in patterns more akin to their non-human counterparts. This is especially true of women in the sira: human women, women who practice the occult sciences, and non-human women demonstrate differing relationships to power and gender over the course of the epic. As such, this paper explores two sets of human/non-human differentiations made in the Sirat Sayf. The first is between human women engaged in occult sciences and practices, such as the sorceress ‘Aqila, and non-human women, including the jinn ‘Aqisa and ghoul Ghula. The second differentiation is between human women who do not participate in occult practices, including a number of the titular King Sayf’s wives, and the human women who do. It is argued that the engagement of human women with the occult sciences creates a change in their ontological status, granting them an access to power more akin to that of their non-human counterparts and remarkably different from other human women. The result of the presence of this ontological spectrum is an implied spectrum of gendered relationships in the text and a fluidity of social roles: gender, as is the case with humanity, is presented not as a binary system, but as a complex and fluid social phenomenon. Methodologically, this close reading makes use of intra-text comparisons between the female characters located on different points of a spectrum between human and non-human. This comparative enterprise highlights how the text constructs and reifies categories of gender, humanity, and power along what is termed ‘pivoting axises’ of ontologies. This style of reading demonstrates the interaction and mutual construction of the categories of gender and the occult within the epic, which can produce and support insight into the dynamic imagination of gender in the Mamluk era. Methodological attention is given not only to work on magic and the occult sciences in medieval literature, but also to feminist scholarship regarding identity formation and women in the popular epics, including that of Nadia El-Cheikh, Remke Kruk, and Amanda Steinberg.