The main focus of the present paper, as the title suggests, is on a process that Richard Frye calls “the Persian Conquest of Islam” (Frye: 268). After the Arab invasion of Persia and the fall of the Sassanid dynasty, Persian culture faced a series of challenges one of the most important of which may be considered the linguistic one. During the first and the second century Hijra, the use of the Old Persian language, Pahlavi, diminished to the realm of the Zoroastrian Mobads, and the official language in the Umayyids and the early Abbasids ruling over Iran turned to be Arabic. Since then, the contributions and translations were all into Arabic, which led to the marginalization of Persian language. However, the situation did not stand still. Having infiltrated into the official and bureaucratic system of the Abbasids and mastered both Arabic and New Persian languages, Iranians began to translate their works and contributions from Arabic into the New Persian. This process bears resemblance to a translation movement aimed at resuming and restoring the Iranian contribution to Islam and Arab culture since the third century onwards. Consequently, Iranians succeeded, as Frye puts, to conquer and “persianize” Islam. Having a brief look at the Persian influence on the neighboring cultures, the Arab in particular, and studying the way the Old Persian was marginalized after the Arab conquest, the present study, providing as many relevant examples as possible, focuses on the socio-political factors at work which ushered in reviving the new Persian as the second language of the Islamic world since the third century.
The prevailing view of the development of Islamic civilization has been a relatively simple one. Islam was born in an opportune moment when the two superpowers of the seventh century, the Persian and the Byzantine Empires, had been exhausted by protracted war, heavy taxes and the abuses of royal and sacerdotal powers and had become paralyzed by their inner contradictions. The Arabs, inspired by a fervent faith and charismatic leadership, overran the crumbling Persian Empire and much of the Byzantine territory as well. The victorious Arab armies suddenly found themselves masters of a vast and expanding empire in which the conquered populations became united by a universal religion, Islam, and an official language, Arabic. Within a short span of time the Muslims gave rise to a new, dynamic civilization, to which the conquered people contributed their lore and learning, their political experience and their cultural traditions. (Yarshater: 4) It was during this post-Islamic period that the dominance of the Arabic language and culture led to the Persian language being marginalized. However, this stopped to last more than two centuries and Iranian literati and authors, backed by Persian dynasties, started to make their contribution to the Persian language and culture firstly by resuming and restoring their Arabic contributions through translation of the material into their native tongue. This resulted in the most vibrant and productive culture in the Islamic world for about six centuries, providing paradigms for thought, repertoires of imagery, artistic models and a philosophical outlook for a vast region stretching from Anatolia to Bengal. (Ibid: 89)
Persian and Arab Cultures Prior to Islam
The Persian Empire under the Sassanids was a huge one in size which extended from east to Merv and Tronsoxania, west to Armenia, north to Khwarazm and south to Yemen. Scholars unanimously hold that Persians were fertile in producing culture. They were fond of art, poetry and music in a way that simply influenced the neighboring cultures. Although Perso-Arab relations prior to Islam may appear unrelated to our topic, it is in fact important to bear them in mind for the appreciation of the influences that Persia exerted in pre-Islamic Arabia and, as a result, on the Muslim world. For, Islamic society inherited much of the pre-Islamic lore and customs, religious practices, literary norms, and, above all, the Arabic tongue, the chief repository of Arab tradition. (Ibid: 14)
The dealings between Persians and Arab tribes were nothing new in the pre-Islamic period. The appearance of Islam at the gate of Iran was neither as dramatic nor as sudden as some historians would have us believe. Ctesiphon and the Arabian tribes had been in contact for a long time and a special Bureau of Arab Affairs had been established at the Sassanian capital. By the time of the invasion, Yemen, in the south of the Arabian Peninsula, and Hira to the north, had been clients of the Sassanians for some time. (Mollanazar: 1) It was not primarily religious problems which made the victories of the Arabs seem so easy, but the exhausted and chaotic state of the Sassanian government during and after Chosroes II. (Frye: 273)
The final decades of the Sassanian Empire, after the death of Chosroes II reveal the decline of central authority in favor of the generals. (Frye: 269) After four years of internal warfare and many murders, the last Sassanian, a young prince related to Chosroes II, was raised to the throne by the nobles. Yazdgerd III was much like the last of the Achaemenids, and if he had had the time, perhaps he might have saved Persia from the Arabs. It was too late though; the Arabs were already united under the banner of Islam ready to embark on the conquest of both the Sassanian and Byzantine Empires. (Frye: 274)
Persian Culture Becomes Marginalized
In the second half of the first century Hijra, Islam gradually but continuously spread through the Iranian plateau. This event was a milestone in the history of Iran not only religiously but also culturally and linguistically. Contrary to what one might think, the Arab conquest of Persia did not lead to desirable results for the Persians, at least in the beginning. Unlike the great ancient Iranian rulers who, as documented in the history, set the people of the conquered regions free in practicing their own faith, the Arab Muslims “…refused the prophet of the Persians [and instead urged them] to try to see things through the “eyes” of Islam. Iranians like Firdowsi and Khayyam found themselves gradually stripped off from their cherished traditions by force and intimidation as well as by heavy taxes. They were alarmed that their contributions were credited to Islam and, consequently, to Arab culture, but they had no choice. Even today, sages like al-Biruni, Ibn-i Sina, and al-Razi are frequently referred to as Arabs by the uneducated, as Muslims by the less educated, and as Iranians by only some scholars. The fact that these writers wrote in Arabic, only served to vault them further into the Arabian sphere. (Mollanazar: 1)
Moreover, after the Arab conquest, a knowledge of Arabic became necessary, for it was not only the language of the new rulers and their state, but of the religion they brought with them and, later, of the new learning. This way, Arabic language became dominant in official circles for a century and a half (Mollanazar: 2) and completely displaced Pahlavi as the language of learning, so that Pahlavi was merely spoken in private lives and finally remained in the province of Mobads alone. (Frye: 285) Therefore, it soon became apparent to the Persians that the road to advancement lay in cooperation with the Arab conquerors, and this surly stimulated conversion to Islam, especially among the farmers, though mostly for political reasons. (Ibid: 276)
As their early measure, the Persian scholars began to render the old Pahlavi documents and inscriptions into Arabic in order to save them from being vanished. For, in the eyes of the Muslim Arabs, the religious documents written in Pahlavi had a tinge of heresy with them. This process went on “…until the 4th century when virtually all the literature by Persian Muslims which has survived was written in Arabic, with notable Persian statesmen and litterateurs.” (Bosworth: 224) The process of rendering the Persian documents into Arabic at this special period was at least two-fold in its practical side. An immediate effect, one can say the advantage, was to survive the ancient Persian traditions and heading them off from elimination. Another, though long-term compared with the first, was that the act of translation into Arabic was in essence a contribution to the Arab culture. As it was inferior to the Persian culture, therefore it provided a thirsty land for absorbing the Persian lore. In any event, with the increasing trend of translation from Persian to Arabic, the Persian influence in the Arab-Islamic ruling system was to the extent that “…within the court milieus there were literary and cultural alternatives to Islam and Arabism. In keeping with the recruitment of the late Umayyad and Abbasid political elites from all parts of the empire, Persian influences made themselves felt in Umayyad times. In the reign of Caliph Hisham, Persian court procedures were adopted and the first translations of Persian political documents were made. (Frye: 55)
On the other hand, the collective experience of the tribal Arabs does not remember something as governing a dynasty. Because of this, Islam had to borrow from rich traditions of Iran and Rome Empires and in doing so, the Muslims relied on the Mawali, the Non-Arab converts, who took the lead in the intellectual life of Islam. This provided a justifiable platform for the Iranians to increase their infiltration in the Umayyid bureaucratic system and ambush a gifted moment to exercise their will. With the weakening of the central power of the Caliphate, the moment came for the Iranians and as the first measure “…a modified form of Pahlavi emerged, with its Indo-European grammatical structure intact but simplified, though with a large infusion of Arabic words. This was the Modern Persian in use today.” (Mollanazar: 2)
Socio-Political Factors in the Rise of the New Persian Language
The Muslim empire was enormous in size; it included a great variety of peoples, many of whom had preserved ancient cultures and languages. For a long period, Arabic had become the literary language for many regions of the empire; but as time passed, local influences reasserted themselves and native languages once again came into use. This was particularly true in Persia, where the Arabic alphabet was adapted to the Persian language. (Ibid: 3) Considering the Islamic culture and civilization, it is important to distinguish clearly between the first, or Arabic, and the second, or the Persian phases of Islamic civilization. A clear-cut border between these two phases, one can say, was the rise of the New Persian Literature in the 4th century and the breakdown of classical Arabic at about the same time. It was when the Iranian dynasties began to rule. (Frye: 279) With the Abbasid revolution the Persian impact gained considerable strength; the social position and political power of the Mawali (Non-Arab Converts) increased dramatically, ushering in a new era of Islamic civilization. Moshe Sharon notes that the transfer of power from the Umayyads to the Abbasids deserves to be regarded as the second major turning point in the history of the Arabs. (Yarshater: 58)
As previously mentioned, it was in the Abbasid era that Iranians acquired the opportunity to restore their national identity and cultural heritage which had been assimilated in that of the Arabs. The Abbasid state was in nature a new Iranian Empire albeit one dressed in the formal attire of a “Persianized” Islam. (Frye: 60) It, during its five-century rule over the Islamic world, saw some major autonomous governors in different regions of Iran. The most significant of these governors were the Tahirids and the Samanids. One can imply that the ethnic genius of the Persians, having absorbed the Islamic message and even contributed to its expression in Arabic, was now moving toward the moment when it would break forth in its own tongue. (Ibid: 584) Therefore, in this section, an attempt is made to elaborate on the socio-political factors that brought about and nurtured the formation of Iranian national identity and dignity crystallized in its national epic, poetry, music, science and philosophy.
Under the Tahirids
The Tahirid dynasty (821-873) ruled the northeastern Persian Empire region of “Greater Khorasan” (parts that are presently in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan). The Tahirid capital was Nishapur and they reigned in the first half of the 3rd century. Although attached to Arabic letters, they ruled as masters in their own house, with considerable independence. (Frye: 584) Meanwhile, coming into power of the Tahirids joined the beginnings of a resurgence of Persian national feeling and culture. (Frye: 91) The dynasty was founded by Tahir ibn Husayn, a leading general at the service of the Abbasid caliph al-Ma’mun. Tahir’s military victories were rewarded with the gift of lands in the east of Persia, which were subsequently extended by his successors as far as the borders of India.
The Tahirid dynasty is considered to be the first independent dynasty from the Abbasid Caliphate established in Khorasan. They were overthrown by the Saffarid dynasty, who annexed Khorasan to their own empire in Eastern Persia. (wikipedia)
Having played their part in developing and enriching Islamic civilization during the Arabic phase, the Persians then began to recover their cultural identity, focusing their attention chiefly on creation and development of a new model of Islamic culture with deep roots in Iranian consciousness. From the early third century, when the Tahirids were established as governors of Khurasan, Persian territories assumed de facto independence, paying only nominal allegiance to the caliphs. They were sometimes governed by Iranian rulers, more often by Turks, but always according to a cultural and administrative structure that had been developed on the basis of local traditions and the Abbasid patterns shaped on the Sassanian model. (Frye: 96)
It is noteworthy that the founder of the Tahirid dynasty Tahir b. al-Husain’s normal tongue was Persian, and Ibn Taifur records his dying words in this language. When the Tahirids were at the zenith of their power, attempts were made by their partisans to inflate their modest origins. Mas’udi states that they claimed descent from the hero Rustam. (Frye: 92) Regardless of their true originality, the Tahirids’ position as anti-Arab rulers of Persia demanded that they prove to be authentically of Iranian origin. The public interest in applying Persian language, encouraged by scholars, authors as well as the Tahirid rulers paved the way for the emergence of a novel and compatible version of Persian language which was meant to be the first literary language of the Islamic world.
Under the Samanids
The Samanids (819–999) were a Persian dynasty in Central Asia and “Greater Khorasan”, named after its founder Saman Khuda who converted to Sunni Islam despite being from Zoroastrian theocratic nobility. It was among the first native Iranian dynasties in Greater Khorasan and Central Asia after the Arabs entered the region. (wikipedia) The rise to power of the Samanids in Transoxania corresponded to the decline of the central power of the Caliphate.
In this era, with the transfer of the center of the Empire to the east i.e. Bukhara, and as a result of the destruction of Arab aristocratic monopoly of high office, and the firm establishment in the power of the Barmakids, Persian influences became stronger. Sasanid Persian models were followed both in the court and the government, and Persians began to play an increasingly important part in political and cultural life of the region. (Yarshater: 6) The revitalization movement that had begun during the early Abbasids under the Tahirids flourished in the reign of the Samanid Emirs. It was in this period that “the richness of pre-Islamic Persian experience such as religious traditions, ethical wisdom, myths and legends, historical accounts, statecraft, administrative and fiscal organization was recognized, along with manners of court etiquette, most of which were incorporated into early Islamic civilization through the translation of Persian works and the direct influence of Persian officials and administrators.” (Ibid: 5)
Of the Samanids and the Persian renaissance, Ira Lapidus writes: “Samanids were patrons of a fabulously creative Islamic culture. Bukhara emerged as the center of a new Persian-Islamic literature and art as Arabic religious, legal, philosophical and literary ideas were recast into Persian. For the first time, the religion and culture of Islam became available in a language other than Arabic.” (Ibid: 141) As a result of this patronage, by the fifth century, the use of the Persian language had already begun to burgeon, particularly through the Eastern Persian lands. One factor at work here seems to be the continued strength of the Persian national tradition in the east which was actively encouraged by the Samanids and their patronage of Persian language as a vehicle for creative literary expression seen in the poetry of the time. (Ibid: 230)
The “New Persian” represented a new tradition formed by Muslim Persians well-versed in Arabic, but with a love for their own spoken language. The new Persian language written in the Arabic alphabet was formed in the third century in eastern Iran and came to flower in Bukhara, the capital of the Samanid dynasty. (Frye: 286)
The Rise of New Persian
The common language spoken in Iran during the first centuries under Islam was Dari, which, in the 3rd century Hijra became the common spoken language of the Iranian lands as a whole. (Ibid: 600) Paradoxically, Arab domination and the extension of Islam had the effect of largely unifying the spoken language for the Iranian countries, a factor which was decisive in formation of the Literary New Persian. (Ibid: 602)
The emergence of Persian literature involved the elevation of a widely distributed oral language, Dari, to the rank of a language of general culture. This process took at least two centuries, from the 3rd to the 5th, through the course of which literary Persian progressively extended from popular poetry to poetry of an elevated style and thence to science and administration. Its territory was likewise enlarged from eastern Iran to the regions of the west. (Ibid: 606)
Despite the claims of some, though Iranian, scholars who consider Persian as suitable merely for literary purposes while taking Arabic language as a lexically-rich language for scientific expression (Biruni had such an idea) “… in the 4th-5th centuries there was a definite movement for the creation of a scientific vocabulary which was authentically Persian. (Ibid: 632)” During the 4th to 6th century, translation from other languages to Persian accelerated and massive sum of knowledge from different areas such as medicine, astrology, geography, history and philosophy became available to the Persian reception. An atmosphere of religious tolerance and theoretical debate backed by the Abbasid Caliphate in Baghdad turned out to be a model for local dynasties in different regions of Iran particularly in Khurasan and Transoxania. Thanks to the court patronage, works from Greek, Latin, Cyriac, Areamic, Arabic, Sanskrit and even Chinese- mostly from sources already translated into Arabic- were gradually rendered into Persian. (Hakak: 56) [My translation]
The rise of Persian had more than purely literary consequences: it served to carry a new overall cultural orientation within Islamdom. Henceforth, while Arabic held its own as the primary language of the religious disciplines and, even, largely of natural science and philosophy, Persian became, in an increasingly large part of the Islamdom, the language of letters and culture; it even entered the realm of scholarship with an increasing effect. It was to form the chief model for the rise of still other languages to the literary level. (Yarshater: 77)
The way to revitalization of the Persians was a process which lasted at least two to three centuries and Persians eventually succeeded to pass it. No need to mention that the political autonomy heralded the rise of a culture of unprecedented vitality and creative energy based on revival, or reemployment of Persian as the medium of literary expression. With this restoration, Persians finally came into their own and returned to modes of expression more congenial to their spirit. The literary men revived the epic genre, wrote narrative Mathnavies, produced lyric Ghazals, and composed Rubais in abundance. The orientation basic to this culture was already manifest in Firdausi’s Shahnameh, an epic poem of Iranian legend and history which was both the symptom and instrument of a growing national self-awareness. In no other part of the Islamic world did attachment to national traditions and resistance to the obliteration of these traditions exhibit such strong roots as in Persia, more particularly in Khurasan and Transoxania.
It is true to say that Persians, equipped with a new faith and a new social order, rose from the ashes of their glorious past with fresh vigor and began a new phase of their cultural history. (Ibid: 97)
The Persian Conquest
It seems necessary to go through the detailed measures taken by the rulers and Emirs as well as translators and scholars in order to fully appreciate the precious works done in several historical moments of the Iranian life. The first Iranian attempt to preserve scientific and cultural repertoire of ancient Iran goes back to the early Islam in the reign of Harun, when the city of Baghdad was established with the considerable cooperation of Iranian scholars, physicians and translators already at work in Gundishapur University in southern Iran. The Muslim historians later referred to the Sassanian Imperial library as the House of Knowledge (Bayt al Hikmat). The same name was applied to the Royal Library in Baghdad after the Muslim conquest. The library functioned as a place where accounts of Iranian history and literature were transcribed and preserved. At the same time, it was a place where qualified translators, bookbinders and others worked to preserve, purchase, copy, illustrate, write and translate books. Persia and Byzantium dominated the area at the time. (Mollanazar: 4)
With the Abbasids, the translation of scientific texts was also added. Nawbakht, the court astrologer, and his son, Abu Sahl and his other colleagues as al-Farazi and Umar al-Tabari and many others who were sponsored by the Barmakid family (the chief ministers to the early Abbasids who were murdered later) translated and promoted texts from Pahlavi into Arabic and Neo-Persian. These figures were all Iranians aimed at incorporating Sassanian culture into Abbasid ideology to guarantee the continuity of the Iranian heritage (Mollanazar: 4). Persian translating of works originally written in Arabic began in the early fifth century. (Bosworth: 231) The literati who flourished at the courts of early Samanids continued to enjoy favor. Not only were religious works translated from Arabic into Persian by order of the Samanid Emirs, but secular works too were not neglected. (Frye: 154)
The most famous of the Samanid court poets were Rudaki and Daqiqi. Rudaki, generally regarded as the first of the great Persian poets, wrote a very large quantity of verse, of which but little has survived. Daqiqi, a composer of epics, was commissioned to write a work on the ancient kings of Persia, but only completed a thousand couplets before his death. Some of these were later incorporated in the celebrated Shahnameh. (Mollanazar: 2) The Samanid Emirs also promoted missionary activities, and patronized the translation of religious works from Arabic into Persian. It was under Mansur b. Nuh that the Tafsir or commentary on the Qur’an by Tabari was translated from Arabic into Persian by a group of scholars. Their vizier, Abu Ali Muhammad Bal’ami started his work on the translation of Tabari’s great history into Persian in 329 and finished it a few years later. Abu’l-Qasim Samarqandi (d.342) was a religious writer active under the Samanids who translated into Persian his own Arabic treaties on orthodoxy. (Frye: 154)
Abul Abbas Fadl b. ahmad Esfarayeni, an able Dabir in the Samanid era (4th century), had the official and court system, which up to that date were in Arabic, written in Persian. (Hoseini: 34) [My translation] A pamphlet titled “Hay-ibn Yaqzaan” which was one of mystic works of Avicenna was translated into Persian before his death. In scientific and philosophical treaties, Persian authors and translators made considerable attempts to produce technical vocabularies from Persian stock. This effort is particularly apparent in Isma’ili literature, firstly in the anonymous commentary on the qasida of Abul-Haitham and later in the works of Nasir Khusrau; it can also be observed in the Danish-nama of Avicenna. These authors did not abstain from using Arabic words, but their work also contained a number of abstract Persian words, which are partly neologisms and partly philosophical terms existing in the Middle Persian. The same tendency can be traced in science and may be observed in the Persian version of the Kitab al-tafhim, the author of which instead of reproducing Arabic technical terms, often endeavored to translate them, or, failing anything better, to paraphrase them.(Frye: 632)
Biruni, although himself a trilingual, avoided to write in “the less precise and less lexically-rich Persian for scientific purposes” However, his work on astrology, the Kitab al-Tafhim li-awail sin’at al-tanjim, Book of instruction in the basic principles of the science of Astrology, was at an early date, certainly within the century of its composition, rendered into Persian. (Bosworth: 232) At the opening of the 7th century, the book called Yamini by Utbi was turned into plain, intelligible Persian by Abu Sharaf Jubad Haqani. Interesting to note is that it was this version, and not the original Arabic one, which later authors, as Rashid al-Din, referred to in their works.
Original Contributions
After the Persian language and culture passed a stage of importing and surviving its literary and cultural arsenal through translation, it was time for Persian authors and poets to make their original contributions in Persian. This mainly occurred in the Seljuq Era, the second classical period of Persian Literature, being rich both in prose and poetry. Famous prose works include Ghazali’s influential Revivification of the Religious Sciences in Arabic and its Persian summary titled Kimiya-ye Sa’adat (The Alchemy of Happiness); Baihaqi’s History of the Ghaznavids, the Siasat Nameh, a Treatise on the Art of Governing by Nizam ul-Mulk who was the vizier to Alp Arslan and Malik Shah; the entertaining Qabus Nameh by Kai Kavus, translated as “A Mirror for Princess”; the collection of animal fables of Indian origin entitled Kalila va Dimna by Nasr Ullah Monshi; the charming Chahar Maqala or Four Discourses by Nizami Aruzi; the Fars Nameh by Ibn Balkhi, and the noted treatise on poetics of Rashid-i Vatvat. Four of the works above – the Chahar Maqala, the History of Baihaqi, the Qabus Nameh and the Siasat Nameh – are considered, by the poet Bahar, as four great masterpieces of early Persian prose. (Mollanazar: 2) Daneshname Alaee, ordered and supported by Ala-o-dowle Kakuyeh, was written originally in Persian by the great physician and philosopher Avicenna.
During the centuries that followed, Iranians continued to prevent Islam from making inroads into their cultural identity and divesting them of their heritage. Knowing their culture well, they influenced events and paved the way for posterity to turn the tide. (Mollanazar: 1) New Persian was now a language of Islam side by side with Arabic, and Islam had definitely outgrown its Arab background. It had become a multi-national, multi-lingual universal culture and faith and Iran played the leading role in this transformation. In a sense, Islam had to change before the Persians accepted it. One might also say that just as Greek civilization served as a vehicle for Christianity, so did the Iranian civilization for Islam. (Frye: 289)
Iranians managed to survive and to preserve their culture. The brilliant and ingenious adaptation of the Arabic alphabet (Aramaic in origin) guaranteed the survival of the Persian language. The script was changed but the phonetics remained the same. Pre-Islamic Persian literature flourished in Neo-Persian texts and was immortalized by the likes of Ferdowsi, Nezami and Attar. “One Thousand and One Nights” originally Hazar Afsanak became “Arabian Nights” and Shahrazad inspired European writers and composers. Children of the world came to know the legendary Barmakid minister Jafar through Walt Disney’s Aladdin. Persian became the court language of the Moguls and the Turks and Persian cultural influences remained in Pakistan, Afghanistan and the former Soviet Republics. (Mollanazar: 4)
Works Cited
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- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tahirids
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- Mollanazar, Hosein 3.http://www.library.cornell.edu/comptons/ceo/00254_A.html in CD No.1 on Translation Studies prepared by Mollanazar, Hosein.
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