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Weary of Rustam, Longing for Joseph: Authorship and the Textual Tradition of Pseudo-Firdawsī’s Yūsuf va Zulaykhā

Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: A versified version of the Joseph story has been attributed to Firdawsī (d. ca. 1019 CE) from at least the early fifteenth century. By the middle of the twentieth century, however, the attribution was cast into doubt; as a now-recognized spurious text, there has been little work on it until very recently. The present article takes the misattribution to Firdawsī not as an endpoint but as a beginning for inquiry, tracing how its textual tradition developed and intertwined with the elaboration of Firdawsī’s vita during the fifteenth century, a critical period of systemization in the Persian literary tradition. The analysis is based on a collation of the poem’s preface across thirteen manuscripts; the resulting stemma shows that the attribution was not a single event, but a progression of scribal interventions through which succeeding generations made the text meaningful within their own literary-historical contexts. These interventions were motivated by potentialities (and incongruencies) scribes observed in their exemplars, interpreted within an increasingly complex and historically aware literary ecosystem. The paper argues that the attribution took on especial importance in the Timurid period because it provided material for Firdawsī’s life narrative in an age of biographicization while simultaneously burnishing his religious bonafides. On a more practical level, the paper suggests that the critiques of the New Philologists ought to be taken seriously but do not invalidate the value of stemmatic analysis: as shown in the case of Yūsuf va Zulaykhā, such methods can be a powerful tool for centering the dynamic, generative development of textual traditions at the hands of scribes and readers.
DOI: 10.52214/p73e9s66
Language: English
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W7222813338
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