| Publication |
2013.
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| Summary/Abstract |
The twelfth-century poet Nizami Ganjavi 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-nama (containing two parts, the Sharaf-nama and the Iqbal-nama) 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 saqi. 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-nama.
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