There is a moment in the Shahnameh when courage is not about winning a battle. It is about refusing to surrender. When Esfandiyar is sent by his father, King Goshtasp, to bring Rostam before him in chains, Rostam understands what is being asked of him. He does not refuse to appear before the king, but he refuses to be taken there bound and humiliated. He knows that refusing may bring terrible consequences, yet there are things a person cannot surrender without becoming someone else. His freedom, his honour and his refusal to bow simply because power demands it are among them.
The story is more complicated than a confrontation between a hero and an enemy. Esfandiyar himself is caught between obedience to his father and the consequences of carrying out his command. King Goshtasp has repeatedly promised him the throne, and now sends him to bring Rostam back in chains, despite knowing the prophecy surrounding his son's fate. Two men who have both served Iran are pushed towards a confrontation neither needed.
Perhaps this is one reason Rostam’s story has endured. His courage is not the absence of fear, and the Shahnameh does not present power as automatically just simply because it comes from those who hold authority.
Centuries later, that ancient image comes to mind when I hear the voice of Ali Zarei from inside Ghezel Hesar Prison.
Ali is one of the young Iranians whose life was changed by the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising of 2022. During those protests, he was struck by pellet fire and suffered a devastating injury to one of his eyes. He was arrested, faced legal proceedings and eventually left Iran for Germany. But exile did not silence him. He continued to speak about Iran and the future he believed his country deserved. He openly supported Prince Reza Pahlavi, participated in opposition gatherings and spoke publicly at a large demonstration in Munich in February 2026.
For Ali, these were not abstract political ideas. They were connected to his vision of Iran as a free, sovereign and democratic country and to his belief that Iranian people should have the right to determine their own future.
There is something especially painful about Ali’s story because he had already paid a physical price for speaking. He had already lost the sight in one eye, experienced arrest and lived in exile. Still, he returned to Iran in 2026.
On 28 April, after entering the country, he was arrested by agents of the Ministry of Intelligence. Branch 23 of the Tehran Revolutionary Court later sentenced him to death on the charge of efsad-e fel-arz, commonly translated as “corruption on earth”. The case cited allegations relating to his political activities, propaganda against the state, disrupting security and other charges. The sentence was communicated to him in August.
Ali is now in Ghezel Hesar Prison. In September 2026, reports emerged that he had been transferred from his prison ward to solitary confinement after he had sent an audio message from prison saying that his death sentence had been upheld.
Ali’s political beliefs are part of his story and should not be erased from it. He supported Prince Reza Pahlavi. He embraced the Lion and Sun as a symbol of the Iran he believed in and spoke of democracy and a free Iran. Whatever one’s own political beliefs may be, these were Ali’s beliefs, and he chose to stand openly behind them.
His story therefore raises a question larger than one political position. What happens when political belief and opposition to the state can become part of a case carrying a death sentence?
This is where Rostam enters Ali’s story.
Rostam is not remembered because he never faced danger. He is remembered because danger did not persuade him to surrender the part of himself he considered sacred. Those in power could threaten his body and demand his obedience, but their authority could not automatically make their demands just.
Ali’s story carries a similar question. What remains of a person when freedom has been taken away, when the ability to speak publicly has been taken away, when one eye has already been lost and when a prison cell becomes the whole visible world?
Perhaps this is also why the Shahnameh remains relevant to Iran today.
Iran’s ancient epic is filled with young lives interrupted by violence and injustice. Iraj approaches his brothers seeking peace and is killed. Siavash, falsely accused, rides through fire to prove his innocence and survives, only to be caught later in another web of suspicion and political intrigue that ends in his death. Esfandiyar obeys his father, survives extraordinary trials and continues to serve him, yet is ultimately sent towards a confrontation with Rostam that his father has reason to know may end in tragedy.
Their stories are different, but they share something important. Those who hold authority may determine what happens to a person, but they do not always determine how history judges what happened.
Siavash was killed, yet his innocence survived him. Iraj was murdered, yet the injustice of his death remained. Esfandiyar died, but the questions surrounding King Goshtasp’s decisions remained part of his story. The Shahnameh understood something that every generation eventually learns again: destroying a person is easier than controlling how that person will be remembered.
This is why Ali’s story reaches beyond one prisoner and one political movement. Across Iran, there is a generation of young people whose lives have been transformed by confrontation with a ruling system that repeatedly treats dissent as a threat. Some have been killed in the streets, some have disappeared into prisons and some have been sentenced to death.
They are not symbols first. They are people first. They are sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, students and workers. They are people who should have had ordinary futures: university, work, friendship, love, marriage, children, music, art, travel, arguments with friends, laughter with their families and all the small, unremarkable things that make a life.
When a young person is executed for political activity, the loss is not limited to the person who dies. A possible future disappears with them.
Ali’s life has already been marked by violence. In 2022, he suffered the injury that cost him the sight in one eye. In 2026, he returned to the country he had left, was arrested and sentenced to death. Yet his voice from prison shows that imprisonment has not removed his political identity or his attachment to the Iran he believes in.
Perhaps that is why Rostam remains relevant here, not because Ali should be turned into a warrior from an ancient epic, but because Rostam’s refusal raises a question that has never disappeared from Iranian history: where does legitimate authority end and forced submission begin?
The Shahnameh does not give us simple answers. Its rulers are not always just and its heroes are not always right. Ferdowsi gives us their actions and their consequences, and generations of readers have been left to judge them.
Ali Zarei is not a character in an ancient epic. He is a young Iranian man living through the consequences of his political choices and the actions of the Islamic Republic confronting him.
More than a thousand years separate his prison cell from Rostam’s refusal to accept the chains, yet the question behind both stories remains recognisable.
Power can command, punish and imprison, but having the power to do something does not by itself make it just.
The Shahnameh leaves that question with the reader.
So does the story of Ali Zarei.
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