Learn Persian with giant conversation.

Shah Named, The Tale of Zal with Dr. Sapa Shoyani.

Hello, Safa Jan. Welcome to the program.

Thank you. Thank you for having me again. It's wonderful to be here.

Yes, and we had a long break before recording part one to now.

Probably those of you listening can't notice because we're releasing them after just a week,

but there's been a lot of occurrences that have happened and kept us from recording part two.

So I love if we can start with a little refresher of what we went over last time.

Yes, absolutely.

So we talked about last time our story began with Samin Ariman, the king of Zabolistan.

So just generally we talked about how the Shah Nama has, you have the Shah and Shah, the king of kings in the Shahnaame.

And then under him, you have minor kings, lesser kings that rule the different dominions within the greater kingdom of Iran.

And they all sort of report back to the greatest, the Shahan Shah,

which in this part of the Shah Nama is Manuchar Shah.

So you have Samin Arimann, who's the Shah of Zabolistan,

which is basically, if we think of modern-day

Iran, it's essentially southeast Iran, modern-day Iran, between Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

So you have Samin Ariman who has long wished for a son and prayed to God for a son,

and finally his wish is granted and he is given a son,

but the son that he is given is born with white hair, with white skin and very white hair.

And upon seeing this, he is horrified, he's mortified, mostly actually because I think we

talked about this part last time too, but if not good to highlight it, mostly because he's worried about what other people are going to say, you know? So that age old worry and anxiety of humanity, but also quite common in our culture of Mardom Chimigan, you know. Right. What are people going to say?

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