The Hamzanama (Persian/Urdu: Hamzenâme, Epic of Hamza) or Dastan-e-Amir Hamza (Persian/Urdu: Dâstâne Amir Hamze, "Adventures of Amir Hamza") narrates the legendary exploits of an Arab warrior named Hamza, usually mistaken for Hamza ibn Abdul-Muttalib, an uncle of Muhammad. Most of the stories are extremely fanciful, "a continuous series of romantic interludes, threatening events, narrow escapes, and violent acts". The Hamzanama chronicles the fantastic adventures of Hamza as he and his band of heroes fight the enemies.
The stories, from a long-established oral tradition, were written down in Persian, the language of the courts of Persianate societies, in multiple volumes, presumably in the era of Mahmud of Ghazni (r. 998–1030). In the West, the work is best known for the enormous illustrated manuscript, the Akbar Hamzanama, commissioned by the Mughal emperor Akbar about 1562. The written text augmented the story as traditionally told orally in dastan performances. The dastan (storytelling tradition) about Amir Hamza persists far and wide up to Bengal and Arakan, as the Mughal Empire controlled those territories. The longest version of the Hamzanama exists in Urdu and contains 46 volumes comprising over 45,000 pages.
History: versions and translations
Iranian origins
In Persian, dastan and qissa both mean "story," and the narrative genre they refer to goes back to medieval Iran. William L. Hanaway, who has made a close study of Persian dastans, describes them as "popular romances" that were "created, elaborated, and transmitted" by professional storytellers. At least as early as the ninth century, the dastan was a widely popular form of story-telling. Dastan-narrators told tales of heroic romance and adventure—stories about gallant princes and their encounters with evil kings, enemy champions, demons, magicians, jinns, divine emissaries, tricky secret agents called ayyars, and beautiful princesses who might be human or of the Pari ("fairy") race. Their ultimate subject matter was always simple: "razm o bazm," the battlefield and the elegant courtly life, war and love. Hanaway mentions five principal dastans surviving from the pre-Safavid period (that is, from the fifteenth century and earlier): those that grew up around the adventures of the world-conqueror Alexander, the great Persian king Darius, the Prophet Muhammad's uncle Hamza, the legendary king Firoz Shah, and a trickster-hero named Samak the Ayyar. Of all the early dastans, the Hamza romance is thought to be the oldest.
The romance of Hamza claims to go back to the life of its hero, Hamza ibn Abdul-Muttalib, the paternal uncle of the Prophet, who was slain in the Battle of Uhud (625 CE) by a slave instigated by a woman named Hind bint Utbah, whose relatives Hamza had killed at Badr. Hind bint Utbah then went to the battlefield and mutilated the dead Hamza's body, cutting off his ears and nose, cutting out his liver and chewing it to fulfill the vow of vengeance she had made. Later, when the Prophet conquered Mecca, Hind bint Utbah accepted Islam, and was pardoned.
It has been argued that the romance of Hamza may actually have begun with the adventures of a Persian namesake of the original Hamza: Hamza ibn Abdullah, a member of a radical Islamic sect called the Kharijites, who was the leader of a rebel movement against the caliph Harun al-Rashid and his successors. This Persian Hamzah lived in the early ninth century, and seems to have been a dashing rebel whose colorful exploits gave rise to many stories. He was known to have fought against the Abbasid caliph-monarch, and the local warriors from Sistan, Makran, Sindh and Khorasan are said to have joined him in the battle, which lasted until the Caliph died. After the battle, Hamza left, inexplicably, for Sarandip (Ceylon) and China, leaving behind 5000 warriors to protect the powerless against the powerful. His disciples wrote the account of his travels and expeditions in a book Maghazi-e-Amir Hamza, which was the original source of Dastan-e-Amir Hamza. As these stories circulated, they eventually transferred to the earlier Hamza, who was an orthodox Muslim champion acceptable to all.