Interview with Alireza Shafiee-Nasab (Ep 9 of the Lion, the Witch & the Evangelicals)

Alireza Shafiee-Nasab, born in 1990 in Dezful, Iran, is an Iranian translator, literary editor and teacher. You can follow him Instagram or visit his website http://shafieenasab.ir.

He holds an MA degree in English literature from the University of Tehran, with a thesis entitled “Christianized Archetypes in The Chronicles of Narnia”, in which he argues that the psychological ideas of Carl Gustav Jung might have influenced Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia, while Lewis, as a devout Christian, gives these ideas a Christian touch, modifying them wherever they contradict Christian doctrines. He is currently translating Fernando Aramburu’s Patria into Persian

Calormen is the country south of Narnia in the books--appearing most prominently in The Horse and His Boy and also The Last Battle. Calormen is obviously an Eastern/Oriental culture compared to Narnia’s northern European culture. 

Calormen culturally, according to Shafiee-Nasab, is a mixture of Arabic and Persian and Turkish elements: long beards and dark skin and upturned shoes. 

“Aslan” comes from a Turkish word which means lion. It’s also the name of one of the characters in Arabian Nights, a work which greatly influenced C. S. Lewis. Other influences from this book show up in Narnia, including naming the boy prince Caspian after the Caspian Sea.

Lewis was interested in psychology but was not a fan of Freud. But he found Carl Jung to have a more humane version of psychology. Shafiee-Nasab believes Lewis’ interest in Jung contributes to some of the archetypes in his work, including the figures of Aslan and Tash--and how people end up responding to a false Aslan because of their mental image of his. 

Lewis was also influenced by Dante, and possibly by his depiction of Islam in in works. Along with that, in old Persian Tash (the God of death in the Narnia world) means fire. 

How do we deal with the orientalism/racism underlying works like The Horse and His Boy? One thing we can do is wonder why there was such an appetite for works like Narnia while Persian/Islamic epics continue to be ignored. One such example is that one of the most famous Irianian books ever written--The Epic of Kings--still has yet to be completely translated into English.