Persianate
Encyclopedia
A Persianate/Persified society ( - "farhang-e-farsi zabanan") is a society that is either based on, or strongly influenced by the Persian language
, culture, literature
, art, and/or identity.
The term does not necessarily designate ethnic Persians, but has also been applied to those societies that may not have been ethnically Persian or Iranic
, but whose linguistic, material, or artistic cultural activities were influenced by, or based on Persianate culture. Examples of pre-19th-century Persianate societies were the Seljuq
, Timurid
, and Ottoman
dynasties, as well as the Qarmatians
who entertained Persianate notions of cyclical time even though they did not invoke the Iranian genealogies in which these precepts had converged. "Persianate" is a multiracial cultural category, but it appears at times to be a religious category of a racial origin.
Regarding the influence of Persian civilization on Islamic societies, Richard Nelson Frye
of Harvard University
writes:
, Asia Minor
, and South Asia
.
When, in the 7th and 8th centuries, the peoples of Greater Iran were conquered by Islamic forces
, they became part of an empire much larger than any previous one under Persian rule. The new Islamic culture was largely based on pre-Islamic Persian traditions of the area, as well as the Islamic rites
that were introduced to the region by the Arab conquerors.
Persianate culture, particularly among the elite classes, spread across the territories of western, central, and south Asia, although populations across this vast region had conflicting allegiances (sectarian, local, tribal, and ethnic affiliation) and spoke many different languages. It was spread by poets, artists, architects, artisans, jurists, and scholars, who maintained relations among their peers in the far-flung cities of the Persianate world, from Anatolia to India.
Persianate culture involved modes of consciousness, ethos, and religious practices that have persisted in the Iranian world against hegemonic
Arab Muslim (Sunni) cultural constructs. This formed a calcified Persianate structure of thought and experience of the sacred, entrenched for generations, which later informed history, historical memory, and identity among Alid loyalists and heterodox
groups labeled by sharia
-minded authority as ghulāt
. In a way, along with investing the notion of heteroglossia
, Persianate culture continuities and disjunction with the Iranian past and ways in which this past blended with the Islamic present or became transmuted. The historical change was largely on the basis of a binary model: a dualist struggle between the religious landscapes of late Iranian antiquity and a monotheist paradigm provided by the new religion, Islam.
, the language of Pre-Islamic Iran, continued in wide use well into the second Islamic century (8th century) as a medium of administration in the eastern lands of the Caliphate
. Despite the Islamisation of public affairs, the Iranians retained much of their pre-Islamic outlook and way of life, adjusted to fit the demands of Islam. Towards the end of the 7th century, the population began resenting the cost of sustaining the Arab Caliphs, the Umayyads, and in the 8th century, a general Iranian uprising—led by the Iranian national hero Abu Muslim Khorrasani
—brought another Arab family, the Abbasids, to the Caliph's throne.
Under the Abbasids, the capital transferred from Syria
to Iraq
, which had once been part of the Sassanid Empire
, and was still considered to be part of the Iranian cultural domain. Persian culture, and the customs of the Persian Barmakid
vizier
s, became the style of the ruling elite. Politically, the Abbasids soon started losing their control to Iranians. The governors in Khurasan
, the Tahirids, though appointed by the caliph, were effectively independent. When the Persian Saffarids from Sistan
freed the eastern lands, Buyyids in Western Iran, Ziyarids in Mazandaran, and in the north-west the Samanids announced their independencies.
The separateness of the eastern lands from Baghdad
was expressed in a distinctive Persianate culture that became dominant in west, central, and south Asia, and was the source of innovations elsewhere in the Islamic world. The Persianate culture was marked by the use of the New Persian language as a medium of administration and intellectual discourse, by the rise of Persianised-Turks
to military control, by the new political importance of non-Arab ulama
, and by the development of an ethnically composite Islamic society.
Pahlavi was the lingua franca
of the Sasanian Empire before the Arab invasion, but towards the end of the 7th and the beginning of the 8th century Arabic
became a medium of literary expression. In the 9th century, a New Persian language emerged as the idiom of administration and literature. Persian dynasties of Tahirids and Saffarids continued using Persian as an informal language, although for them Arabic was the "language for recording anything worthwhile, from poetry to science", but the Samanids made Persian a language of learning and formal discourse. The language that appeared in the 9th and 10th centuries was a new form of Persian, derivative of on the Middle-Persian of pre-Islamic times, but enriched by ample Arabic vocabulary and written in Arabic script.
The Persian language
was, according to Marshall Hodgson
in his The Venture of Islam, to form the chief model for the rise of still other languages to the literary level. Like Turkish
, most of the more local languages of high culture that later emerged among Muslims depended upon Persian [here Urdu would be a prime example]. One may call these traditions, carried in Persian or reflecting Persian inspiration, ‘Persianate’ by extension. This seems to be the origin of the term Persianate.
, began using the Persian lingua franca in public. The crowning literary achievement in the early New Persian language, Shahnameh
(The Book of Kings) compiled by greatest of Iranian epic-poet Ferdowsi
, presented his Shahnameh
to the court of Mahmud of Ghazni
(998-1030), was more than a literary achievement; it was a kind of Iranian
nationalistic resurrection. Ferdowsi galvanized Persian nationalistic sentiments by invoking pre-Islamic Persian heroic imagery and enshrined in literary form the most treasured stories of popular folk-memory.
Ferdowsi’s Shahnamah enjoyed a special status in Iranian courtly culture as not just a mythical but a historical narrative as well. The powerful effect that this text came to have on the poets of this period is partly due to the value that was attached to it as a legitimizing force, especially for new rulers in the Eastern Islamic world:
The Persianate culture that emerged under the Samanid dynasty rule in Khorasan
, in northeast of Persia and borderlands of Turkistan and Turks were exposed to Persianate-Islamic culture; the preparation for the incorporation of the Turks into the main body of the Middle Eastern Islamic civilization, which was followed by the Ghaznavids, thus began in Khorasan; "not only did the inhabitants of Khurasan not succumb to the language of the nomadic invaders, but they imposed their own tongue on them. The region could even assimilate the Turkic Ghaznavids and Seljuks (11th and 12th centuries), the Timurids (14th and 15th centuries), and the Qajars (19th and 20th centuries).
Mahmud of Ghazni
the rivals and future hirers of the Samanids ruled over southeastern extremities of Samanid territories from the city of Ghazni
. It attracted many Persian scholars, artists and became the patrons of Persianate culture, and as they subjugated Western and Southern Asia, they took with themselves the Persianate culture. Under the Ghaznavid patronage, Persian culture flourished further. Apart from Ferdowsi, Rumi, Abu Ali Sina
, Al-Biruni
, Unsuri Balkhi
, Farrukhi Sistani
, Sanayi Ghaznawi and Abu Sahl Testari were among the great Iranian polymaths and poets of the period, supported by the Ghazanavids.
The Persianate culture was carried by succeeding dynasties into Western and Southern Asia, in particular, by the Persianized
-Seljuqs (1040–1118), and their successor states, who presided over Iran
, Syria
, and Anatolia
until the 13th century, and by the Ghaznavids, who in the same period dominated Greater Khorasan
and India
. These two dynasties together drew the centres of the Islamic world eastward. The institutions stabilized Islamic society into a form that would persist, at least in Western Asia, until the 20th century.
The Ghaznavids moved their capital from Ghazni to Lahore
in modern Pakistan, which they turned into another centre of Islamic culture. Under Ghaznavids, poets and scholars from Kashgar
, Bukhara
, Samarkand
, Baghdad
, Nishapur
, Amol
and Ghazni
congregated in Lahore. Thus, the Persian language and Persianate culture was brought deep into India and carried further in the 13th century. Seljuqs won a decisive battle with the Ghaznavids then swept into Khurasan
; they brought Persianate culture westward into western Persia, Iraq, Anatolia, and Syria. Iran proper along with Central Asia became a heartland of Persian language and culture.
As the Seljuqs came to dominate Persia (including Iraq, Syria, and Anatolia), they carried this Persianate culture beyond, and made it the culture of their courts as far west as the Mediterranean Sea
. Under Seljuq rule, many pre-Islamic Iranian traditional arts including the Sasanian traditional architecture resurrected, and indulged many of the great Iranian scholars. At the same time, the Islamic religious institutions became more organized and Sunni orthodoxy became more codified.
The Persian jurist and theologian Al-Ghazali
was amongst the scholars at Seljuq court who proposed a synthesis of Sufism
and sharia
, which became a basis of a richer Islamic theology. Formulating the Sunni concept of division between temporal and religious authorities, he provided a theological basis for the existence of Sultanate, a temporal office alongside the Caliphate, which by that time was merely a religious office. The main institutional means of establishing a consensus of the ulama on these dogmatic issues was the Nezāmīyeh, better known as the madrasas, named after its founder Khwajeh Nezam ul-Mulk, the Persian Vizier of Seljuqs. These schools became means of uniting Sunni ulama, which legitimized the rule of the Sultans. The bureaucracies were staffed by graduates of the madrasas, so both the ulama and the bureaucracies were under the influence of esteemed professors at the madrasas.
as well as ingredient of the political ambitions of a ruler in the Persianate lands to not only commission a copy of the Shahnameh
, but also have his own epic, which allowed court poets to attempt to reach the level of Ferdowsi:
The Iranian as well as the Persianate poets received the Shahnameh
and modeled themselves after it.
First, Persian poets attempted to continue the chronology to a later period, usually the poet’s, such as the Zafar-Nameh
of the Ilkhanid historian Hamdollah Mostowfi
(d. 1334 or 1335), which deals with Iranian history from the Arab conquest to the Mongols and is longer than Ferdowsi’s work, and the Shahanshahnamah (or Changiznamah) of Ahmad Tabrizi in 1337-38, which is a history of the Mongols written for Abu Sa‘id. Second, poets versified the history of a contemporary ruler for reward, such as the Ghāzānnāmeh written in 1361-62 by Nur al-Din ibn Shams al-Din. Third, heroes not treated in the Shahnamah and those who have minor roles in it became the subjects of their own epics, such as the 11th century Garshāspnāmeh by Asadi Tusi
. The other source of inspiration for Persianate culture was another Persian poet, Nizami, the most admired, illustrated and imitated writer of romantic masnavis.
Along with Ferdowsi's and Nizami's works, Amir Khusraw Dehlavi’s khamseh
came to enjoy tremendous prestige, and multiple copies of it were produced at Persianate courts.
under Genghis Khan
(1220–58) and Timur
(Tamerlane, 1336–1405) stimulated the development of Persianate culture in Central and West Asia, because of the new concentrations of specialists of high culture created by the invasions. Many Iranians had to seek refuge in few safe havens, primarily India, where scholars, poets, musicians, and fine artisans intermingled and cross-fertilized, and because the broad peace secured by the huge imperial systems established by the Il-Khanids
(in the 13th century) and Timurids (in the 13th century), when travel was safe, and scholars and artists, ideas and skills, and fine books and artifacts circulated freely over a wide area. Il-Khanids and Timurids were patrons of Persianate high culture. Under their rule developed new styles of architecture based on pre-Islamic Iranian tradition, Persian literature was encouraged, and flourished the Persian school of miniature painting and book production established in Herat, Tabriz and Esfahan.
In the 16th century, Persianate culture became sharply distinguishable from the Arabic Islamic world to the west, the dividing zone falling along the Euphrates
. Socially the Persianate world was marked by a system of ethnologically defined elite statuses: the rulers and their soldiery were non-Iranians in origin, but the administrative cadres and literati were Iranians. Cultural affairs were marked by characteristic pattern of language use: New Persian
was the language of state affairs and literature; New Persian became the languages of scholarship; and Arabic the language of religion.
court, as in other Persianate courts, leaned towards the eclectic gnostic
dimension of Sufi Islam
, having similarities with Hindu Vedantism, indigenous Bhakti
and popular theosophy
.
The Mughals strengthened the Persianate, or Indo-Persian culture
, in South Asia. For centuries, Iranian scholar-officials had immigrated to the region where their expertise in Persianate culture and administration secured them honoured service within the Mughal Empire. Networks of learned masters and madrasas taught generations of young South Asian men Persian language and literature in addition to Islamic values and sciences. Further, educational institutions such as Farangi Mahall and Delhi College
developed innovative and integrated curricula for modernizing Persian-speaking South Asians. They cultivated Persian art, enticing to their courts artists and architects from Bukhara, Tabriz
, Herat
, Shiraz
, and other cities of Greater Iran
. The Taj Mahal
and its Charbagh
were commissioned by the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan
for his half-Iranian bride.
Iranian poets, such as Sa’di
, Hafez
, Rumi and Nizami, who were the great masters of Sufi mysticism from the Persianate world, were favorite poets of the Mughals. Their works were present in Mughal libraries and counted among the emperors’ prized possessions, which they gifted to each other; Akbar
and Jahangir
often quoted from them, signifying that they had imbibed them to a great extent. The court poets Naziri, ‘Urfi, Faizi
, Khan-i Khanan, Zuhuri, Sanai
, Qodsi, Talib-i Amuli
and Abu Talib Kalim were all masters imbued with a similar Sufi spirit, thus following the norms of any Persianate court.
The tendency towards Sufi mysticism through Persianate culture in Mughal court circles is also testified by the inventory of books that were kept in Akbar’s library, and are especially mentioned by his historian, Abu'l Fazl, in the Ā’in-ī Akbarī. Some of these books that were read out continually to the emperor include the mathnawīs of Nizami, works of Amir Khusraw, Sharaf Manayri and Jami, the Mathnawī-i ma’nawī of Molana Jalal al-Din Rumi, the Jām-i Jam of Awhadi-e Maraghei, the Hakika o Sanā’i, the Qābusnāmeh of Kai Kāvus, Sa’di’s Gulestān and Būstān, and the Dīwāns of Khaqani and Anwari.
This Indo-Iranian intellectual symmetry continued until the end of the 19th century, when a Persian newspaper, Miftah al-Zafar (1897), campaigned for the formation of Anjuman-i Ma’arif, an academy devoted to the strengthening of Persian language as a scientific language. Whereas the notion of "Western civilization" provided a safety net supplementing European national histories, no common historiographical practice captures the residues of the colonial and national conventions of historical writing that separates the joint Persianate literary culture of Iran and India—a literary culture that is irreducible to Islam and the Islamic civilization.
The founder of the dynasty, Shah Isma'il
, adopted the title of Persian Emperor Pādišah-ī Īrān, with its implicit notion of an Iranian state stretching from Afghanistan as far as the Euphrates, and from the Oxus to the southern Territories of the Persian Gulf. Shah Isma'il's successors went further and adopted the title of "Shāhanshāh" (king of the kings). The Safavid kings considered themselves, like the Sasanian
Emperors, the khudāygān (the shadow of God on earth), revived the Sasanian architecture, erected grand mosques, revived and built elegant "Charbagh
" gardens, collected books (one Safavid ruler had a library of 3,000 volumes), and patronized whole "Men of Pen" The Safavids introduced Shiism into Persia to distinguish Persia society from the Ottomans, their Sunni rivals to the west. The Mughals dominated India from I526 until the 18th century, when Muslim successor states and non-Muslim powers of the Sikh
, Maratha
, and British replaced them.
At the beginning of the 14th century, the Ottomans
rose to predominance in Asia Minor
. The Ottomans patronized Persian literature for five and a half centuries and attracted great numbers of writers and artists, especially in the 16th century. One of the most renowned Persian poets in the Ottoman court was Fethullah Arifi Çelebi, also a painter and historian, and the author of the Süleymanname (or Suleyman-nama), a biography of Süleyman the Magnificent. In the end of 17th century, they gave up Persian as the court and administrative language, using Turkish instead; a decision that shocked the highly Persianized Mughals in India. The Ottoman Sultan Suleyman
wrote an entire divan
in Persian language.
According to Hodgson:
Toynbee's assessment of the role of the Persian language is worth quoting in more detail A Study of History
:
E. J. W. Gibb is the author of the standard A Literary History of Ottoman Poetry in six volumes, whose name has lived on in an important series of publications of Arabic, Persian, and Turkish texts, the Gibb Memorial Series. Gibb classifies Ottoman poetry between the "Old School", from the 14th century to about the middle of the 19th century, during which time Persian influence was dominant; and the "Modern School", which came into being as a result of the Western impact. According to Gibb in the introduction (Volume I):
The Saljuqs had, in the words of the same author:
Although most of the articles concentrate either on Persian language sources or on the somewhat indeterminate geographical domain of "Greater Persia", the category of "Persian" or "Persianate" Sufism
remains elastic, yet coherent, enough to encompass articles that acknowledge the importance of writings in other Muslim languages and the practice of Sufism among non-Persians.
From about the 12th century, Persian lyric poetry was enriched with a spirituality and devotional depth not to be found in earlier works. This development was due to the pervasive spread of mystical experience. Sufism developed in all Muslim
lands, but its literary expression reached its zenith in the countries located within the sphere of Persian cultural influence. As a counterpoise to the rigidity of formal Islamic theology
and law, mysticism sought to approach the divine through acts of devotion and love rather than through mere rituals and observance. Love of God
being the focus of the Sufis' religious sentiments, it was only natural for them to express it in lyrical terms, and Persian mystics, often of exceptional sensibility and endowed with poetic verve, did not hesitate to do so. The famous 11th-century Sufi, Abu Sa'id of Mehna, for example, frequently used his own love quatrains (as well as others) to express his spiritual yearnings, and with the appearance of a vowed mystic poets such as Attar and Eraqi, mysticism became a legitimate, even fashionable subject of lyric poems among the Persianate societies. Furthermore, as Sufi orders and centers (Khaneghah) spread throughout Persian societies, Persian mystic poetry thought gradually became so much a part of common culture that even poets who did not share Sufi experiences ventured to express mystical ideas and imagery in their poems.
Persian painting had been one of the vessels of Persianate culture, in which almost every artwork was accompanied by Persian texts. In the late 14th and 15th centuries, political control in Iran passed to Timur (Tamerlane) and his heirs. The Timurids moved the capital from Tabriz
in the west to Samarkand
and Herat
in the east of Iranian world
. In the first half of the 15th century, Iranian artists working for the Timurid sultans and their heirs developed the highly detailed, jewel-like style of painting that typifies Persian painting, which became known as the "Persian School of Heart".
When the Safavid dynasty
of Persia came to power in 1501 and unified the eastern and western parts of Iran, the Persian painting styles of the east and the west mingled. The political unity under the first two Safavid rulers Shah Isma'il I
and Shah Tahmasp, and the establishment of the Safavid capital at Tabriz in the west, caused Persian artists to move from Herat. One of the most celebrated Iranian painters Behzad, known as "the master of Persian painting", influenced many other Persian painters, such as Reza Abbasi
and Sultan Muhammed, the most gifted of the Safavid artists. He eventually painted perhaps the most extraordinary example of Persian painting The Court of the Gayumars from an opulent edition of the Shahnameh, commissioned by Shah Tahmasp c. 1522–1525. The painting depicts the legendary court of Gayumars, the first shah in the epic.
In Anatolia, a vigorous school of painting developed at the courts of Turkic rulers in the second half of the 15th century. The style of Ottoman miniature
illustrations depended on the Persian models, especially the painting of Shiraz
. The long reign of the Ottoman sultan Suleyman (the Magnificent) enabled his successor Selim II (r. 1566-1574) to enjoy the pleasures of the palace without much concern for military conquests. A painting of Sultan Selim II in the exhibition depicts him partaking in one of his favourite pastimes, wine drinking, which earned him the nickname "Selim the Sot".
By the mid-16th century, some Iranian artists from the Safavid Persian court had immigrated to Istanbul. Others made their way to India in the retinue of the Mughal emperor Humayun
, who returned to India in 1555 from exile in Iran. It was at the court of Humayun's son and successor Akbar (r. 1556-1605), however, that the Mughal style of painting
came into its own.
The most important early project in this new style was a 14-volume Hamzanama
produced by a team of Indian artists, both Muslim and Hindu, working under the supervision of Mir Sayyid Ali and Abd al-Samad, two Persian émigré
artists. Akbari paintings incorporated the synthesis of the precise, linear style of Persian painting with the dynamism and vibrant palette of indigenous Indian painting. With the introduction of European-style perspective and modelling, Mughal painting became increasingly naturalistic from the 1580s until the mid-17th century, but the core of both Ottoman and Mughal painting remained Persian.
first appeared in Persian records in the 2nd century CE, but it was also an important day during the Achaemenid
times (c. 648-330 BCE), in which kings from different nations under Persian empire would bring gifts to the emperor (Shahanshah) of Persia[5]. It has been suggested that the famous Persepolis
complex, or at least the palace of Apadana
and the "Hundred Columns Hall", were built for the specific purpose of celebrating Nowruz. However, no mention of Nowruz exists in Achaemenid inscriptions (see picture).
The oldest records of Nowruz go back to the King Yima of Eastern Iran Afghanistan around 5000 BCE. Later it became the national holiday of the Arsacid/Parthian Empires, which ruled western Iran (247 BCE-224 CE). There are specific references to the celebration of Nowruz during the reign of Vologases I
(51-78 CE), but these include no details.
Extensive records on the celebration of Nowruz appear following the accession of Ardashir I
of Persia, the founder of the Sassanid dynasty
(224-650 CE). Under the Sassanid kings, Nowruz was celebrated as the most important day of the year. Most royal traditions of Nowruz, such as royal audiences with the public, cash gifts, and the pardoning of prisoners, were established during the Sassanian era, and they persisted unchanged until modern times.
Nowruz, along with Sadeh
(celebrated in mid-winter), survived in society following the introduction of Islam in 650 CE. Other celebrations such as Gahanbar and Mehregan
were eventually side-lined or were only followed by the Zoroastrians
, who carried them as far as Turkey. Nowruz, however, was most honored even by the early founders of Islam. There are records of the Four Great Caliphs presiding over Nowruz celebrations, and it was adopted as the main royal holiday during the Abbasid period.
Following the demise of the caliphate
and the subsequent re-emergence of Persian dynasties such as the Samanids and Buyids, Nowruz was elevated to an even more important event. The Buyids revived the ancient traditions of Sasanian times and restored many smaller celebrations that had been eliminated by the caliphate. Even the Turkish and Mongol invaders did not attempt to abolish Nowruz in favor of any other celebration. Thus, Nowruz remained as the main celebration in the Persian lands by both the officials and the people.
In his Norouznama, poet Omar Khayyám
wrote a vivid description of the celebration in ancient Persian:
Persian language
Persian is an Iranian language within the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European languages. It is primarily spoken in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and countries which historically came under Persian influence...
, culture, literature
Persian literature
Persian literature spans two-and-a-half millennia, though much of the pre-Islamic material has been lost. Its sources have been within historical Persia including present-day Iran as well as regions of Central Asia where the Persian language has historically been the national language...
, art, and/or identity.
The term does not necessarily designate ethnic Persians, but has also been applied to those societies that may not have been ethnically Persian or Iranic
Iranian peoples
The Iranian peoples are an Indo-European ethnic-linguistic group, consisting of the speakers of Iranian languages, a major branch of the Indo-European language family, as such forming a branch of Indo-European-speaking peoples...
, but whose linguistic, material, or artistic cultural activities were influenced by, or based on Persianate culture. Examples of pre-19th-century Persianate societies were the Seljuq
Seljuq dynasty
The Seljuq ; were a Turco-Persian Sunni Muslim dynasty that ruled parts of Central Asia and the Middle East from the 11th to 14th centuries...
, Timurid
Timurid Dynasty
The Timurids , self-designated Gurkānī , were a Persianate, Central Asian Sunni Muslim dynasty of Turko-Mongol descent whose empire included the whole of Iran, modern Afghanistan, and modern Uzbekistan, as well as large parts of contemporary Pakistan, North India, Mesopotamia, Anatolia and the...
, and Ottoman
Ottoman Dynasty
The Ottoman Dynasty ruled the Ottoman Empire from 1299 to 1922, beginning with Osman I , though the dynasty was not proclaimed until Orhan Bey declared himself sultan...
dynasties, as well as the Qarmatians
Qarmatians
The Qarmatians were a Shi'a Ismaili group centered in eastern Arabia, where they attempted to established a utopian republic in 899 CE. They are most famed for their revolt against the Abbasid Caliphate...
who entertained Persianate notions of cyclical time even though they did not invoke the Iranian genealogies in which these precepts had converged. "Persianate" is a multiracial cultural category, but it appears at times to be a religious category of a racial origin.
Regarding the influence of Persian civilization on Islamic societies, Richard Nelson Frye
Richard Nelson Frye
Richard Nelson Frye is an American scholar of Iranic and Central Asian Studies, and Aga Khan Professor Emeritus of Iranian Studies at Harvard University...
of Harvard University
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
writes:
History
Persianate culture flourished for nearly fourteen centuries. It was a mixture of Persian and Islamic cultures that eventually became the dominant culture of the ruling and elite classes of Greater IranGreater Iran
Greater Iran refers to the regions that have significant Iranian cultural influence. It roughly corresponds to the territory on the Iranian plateau and its bordering plains, stretching from Iraq, the Caucasus, and Turkey in the west to the Indus River in the east...
, Asia Minor
Asia Minor
Asia Minor is a geographical location at the westernmost protrusion of Asia, also called Anatolia, and corresponds to the western two thirds of the Asian part of Turkey...
, and South Asia
South Asia
South Asia, also known as Southern Asia, is the southern region of the Asian continent, which comprises the sub-Himalayan countries and, for some authorities , also includes the adjoining countries to the west and the east...
.
When, in the 7th and 8th centuries, the peoples of Greater Iran were conquered by Islamic forces
Islamic conquest of Persia
The Muslim conquest of Persia led to the end of the Sassanid Empire in 644, the fall of Sassanid dynasty in 651 and the eventual decline of the Zoroastrian religion in Persia...
, they became part of an empire much larger than any previous one under Persian rule. The new Islamic culture was largely based on pre-Islamic Persian traditions of the area, as well as the Islamic rites
Muslim culture
Islamic culture is a term primarily used in secular academia to describe the cultural practices common to historically Islamic peoples. As the religion of Islam originated in 7th century Arabia, the early forms of Muslim culture were predominantly Arab...
that were introduced to the region by the Arab conquerors.
Persianate culture, particularly among the elite classes, spread across the territories of western, central, and south Asia, although populations across this vast region had conflicting allegiances (sectarian, local, tribal, and ethnic affiliation) and spoke many different languages. It was spread by poets, artists, architects, artisans, jurists, and scholars, who maintained relations among their peers in the far-flung cities of the Persianate world, from Anatolia to India.
Persianate culture involved modes of consciousness, ethos, and religious practices that have persisted in the Iranian world against hegemonic
Hegemony
Hegemony is an indirect form of imperial dominance in which the hegemon rules sub-ordinate states by the implied means of power rather than direct military force. In Ancient Greece , hegemony denoted the politico–military dominance of a city-state over other city-states...
Arab Muslim (Sunni) cultural constructs. This formed a calcified Persianate structure of thought and experience of the sacred, entrenched for generations, which later informed history, historical memory, and identity among Alid loyalists and heterodox
Heterodoxy
Heterodoxy is generally defined as "any opinions or doctrines at variance with an official or orthodox position". As an adjective, heterodox is commonly used to describe a subject as "characterized by departure from accepted beliefs or standards"...
groups labeled by sharia
Sharia
Sharia law, is the moral code and religious law of Islam. Sharia is derived from two primary sources of Islamic law: the precepts set forth in the Quran, and the example set by the Islamic prophet Muhammad in the Sunnah. Fiqh jurisprudence interprets and extends the application of sharia to...
-minded authority as ghulāt
Ghulat
Ghulāt , is a term used in the theology of Shia Islam to describe some minority Muslim groups who either ascribe divine characteristics to a member of Muhammad's family , or hold beliefs deemed deviant by mainstream Shi'i theology...
. In a way, along with investing the notion of heteroglossia
Heteroglossia
The term heteroglossia describes the coexistence of distinct varieties within a single "linguistic code". In Greek hetero = different + glōssa = tongue, language...
, Persianate culture continuities and disjunction with the Iranian past and ways in which this past blended with the Islamic present or became transmuted. The historical change was largely on the basis of a binary model: a dualist struggle between the religious landscapes of late Iranian antiquity and a monotheist paradigm provided by the new religion, Islam.
Origins
After the Arab Muslim conquest of Iran, PahlaviMiddle Persian
Middle Persian , indigenously known as "Pârsig" sometimes referred to as Pahlavi or Pehlevi, is the Middle Iranian language/ethnolect of Southwestern Iran that during Sassanid times became a prestige dialect and so came to be spoken in other regions as well. Middle Persian is classified as a...
, the language of Pre-Islamic Iran, continued in wide use well into the second Islamic century (8th century) as a medium of administration in the eastern lands of the Caliphate
Caliphate
The term caliphate, "dominion of a caliph " , refers to the first system of government established in Islam and represented the political unity of the Muslim Ummah...
. Despite the Islamisation of public affairs, the Iranians retained much of their pre-Islamic outlook and way of life, adjusted to fit the demands of Islam. Towards the end of the 7th century, the population began resenting the cost of sustaining the Arab Caliphs, the Umayyads, and in the 8th century, a general Iranian uprising—led by the Iranian national hero Abu Muslim Khorrasani
Abu Muslim
- External links :* *...
—brought another Arab family, the Abbasids, to the Caliph's throne.
Under the Abbasids, the capital transferred from Syria
Syria
Syria , officially the Syrian Arab Republic , is a country in Western Asia, bordering Lebanon and the Mediterranean Sea to the West, Turkey to the north, Iraq to the east, Jordan to the south, and Israel to the southwest....
to Iraq
Iraq
Iraq ; officially the Republic of Iraq is a country in Western Asia spanning most of the northwestern end of the Zagros mountain range, the eastern part of the Syrian Desert and the northern part of the Arabian Desert....
, which had once been part of the Sassanid Empire
Sassanid Empire
The Sassanid Empire , known to its inhabitants as Ērānshahr and Ērān in Middle Persian and resulting in the New Persian terms Iranshahr and Iran , was the last pre-Islamic Persian Empire, ruled by the Sasanian Dynasty from 224 to 651...
, and was still considered to be part of the Iranian cultural domain. Persian culture, and the customs of the Persian Barmakid
Barmakids
The Barmakids were a noble Persian family from Balkh that came to great political power under the Abbasid caliphs. Khalid, the son of Barmak became the Prime Minister or Wazir of Al Saffah, the first Caliph of the Abbasid dynasty. His son Yahya aided Harun Al-Rashid in capturing the throne and...
vizier
Vizier
A vizier or in Arabic script ; ; sometimes spelled vazir, vizir, vasir, wazir, vesir, or vezir) is a high-ranking political advisor or minister in a Muslim government....
s, became the style of the ruling elite. Politically, the Abbasids soon started losing their control to Iranians. The governors in Khurasan
Greater Khorasan
Greater Khorasan or Ancient Khorasan is a historical region of Greater Iran mentioned in sources from Sassanid and Islamic eras which "frequently" had a denotation wider than current three provinces of Khorasan in Iran...
, the Tahirids, though appointed by the caliph, were effectively independent. When the Persian Saffarids from Sistan
Sistan
Sīstān is a border region in eastern Iran , southwestern Afghanistan and northern tip of Southwestern Pakistan .-Etymology:...
freed the eastern lands, Buyyids in Western Iran, Ziyarids in Mazandaran, and in the north-west the Samanids announced their independencies.
The separateness of the eastern lands from Baghdad
Baghdad
Baghdad is the capital of Iraq, as well as the coterminous Baghdad Governorate. The population of Baghdad in 2011 is approximately 7,216,040...
was expressed in a distinctive Persianate culture that became dominant in west, central, and south Asia, and was the source of innovations elsewhere in the Islamic world. The Persianate culture was marked by the use of the New Persian language as a medium of administration and intellectual discourse, by the rise of Persianised-Turks
Persianization
Persianization or Persianisation is a sociological process of cultural change in which something non-Persian becomes Persianate. It is a specific form of cultural assimilation that often includes linguistic assimilation...
to military control, by the new political importance of non-Arab ulama
Ulama
-In Islam:* Ulema, also transliterated "ulama", a community of legal scholars of Islam and its laws . See:**Nahdlatul Ulama **Darul-uloom Nadwatul Ulama **Jamiatul Ulama Transvaal**Jamiat ul-Ulama -Other:...
, and by the development of an ethnically composite Islamic society.
Pahlavi was the lingua franca
Lingua franca
A lingua franca is a language systematically used to make communication possible between people not sharing a mother tongue, in particular when it is a third language, distinct from both mother tongues.-Characteristics:"Lingua franca" is a functionally defined term, independent of the linguistic...
of the Sasanian Empire before the Arab invasion, but towards the end of the 7th and the beginning of the 8th century Arabic
Arabic language
Arabic is a name applied to the descendants of the Classical Arabic language of the 6th century AD, used most prominently in the Quran, the Islamic Holy Book...
became a medium of literary expression. In the 9th century, a New Persian language emerged as the idiom of administration and literature. Persian dynasties of Tahirids and Saffarids continued using Persian as an informal language, although for them Arabic was the "language for recording anything worthwhile, from poetry to science", but the Samanids made Persian a language of learning and formal discourse. The language that appeared in the 9th and 10th centuries was a new form of Persian, derivative of on the Middle-Persian of pre-Islamic times, but enriched by ample Arabic vocabulary and written in Arabic script.
The Persian language
Persian language
Persian is an Iranian language within the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European languages. It is primarily spoken in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and countries which historically came under Persian influence...
was, according to Marshall Hodgson
Marshall Hodgson
Marshall Goodwin Simms Hodgson , was an Islamic Studies academic and a world historian at the University of Chicago. He was chairman of the interdisciplinary Committee on Social Thought in Chicago...
in his The Venture of Islam, to form the chief model for the rise of still other languages to the literary level. Like Turkish
Turkish language
Turkish is a language spoken as a native language by over 83 million people worldwide, making it the most commonly spoken of the Turkic languages. Its speakers are located predominantly in Turkey and Northern Cyprus with smaller groups in Iraq, Greece, Bulgaria, the Republic of Macedonia, Kosovo,...
, most of the more local languages of high culture that later emerged among Muslims depended upon Persian [here Urdu would be a prime example]. One may call these traditions, carried in Persian or reflecting Persian inspiration, ‘Persianate’ by extension. This seems to be the origin of the term Persianate.
Spread of Persianate culture
The Iranian dynasty of the Samanids began recording its court affairs in Arabic as well as Persian, and the earliest great poetry in "New Persian" was written for the Samanid court. Samanids encouraged translation of religious works from Arabic into Persian. In addition, the learned authorities of Islam, the ulamaUlama
-In Islam:* Ulema, also transliterated "ulama", a community of legal scholars of Islam and its laws . See:**Nahdlatul Ulama **Darul-uloom Nadwatul Ulama **Jamiatul Ulama Transvaal**Jamiat ul-Ulama -Other:...
, began using the Persian lingua franca in public. The crowning literary achievement in the early New Persian language, Shahnameh
Shahnameh
The Shahnameh or Shah-nama is a long epic poem written by the Persian poet Ferdowsi between c.977 and 1010 AD and is the national epic of Iran and related societies...
(The Book of Kings) compiled by greatest of Iranian epic-poet Ferdowsi
Ferdowsi
Ferdowsi was a highly revered Persian poet. He was the author of the Shahnameh, the national epic of Iran and related societies.The Shahnameh was originally composed by Ferdowsi for the princes of the Samanid dynasty, who were responsible for a revival of Persian cultural traditions after the...
, presented his Shahnameh
Shahnameh
The Shahnameh or Shah-nama is a long epic poem written by the Persian poet Ferdowsi between c.977 and 1010 AD and is the national epic of Iran and related societies...
to the court of Mahmud of Ghazni
Mahmud of Ghazni
Mahmud of Ghazni , actually ', was the most prominent ruler of the Ghaznavid dynasty who ruled from 997 until his death in 1030 in the eastern Iranian lands. Mahmud turned the former provincial city of Ghazni into the wealthy capital of an extensive empire which covered most of today's Iran,...
(998-1030), was more than a literary achievement; it was a kind of Iranian
Iranian peoples
The Iranian peoples are an Indo-European ethnic-linguistic group, consisting of the speakers of Iranian languages, a major branch of the Indo-European language family, as such forming a branch of Indo-European-speaking peoples...
nationalistic resurrection. Ferdowsi galvanized Persian nationalistic sentiments by invoking pre-Islamic Persian heroic imagery and enshrined in literary form the most treasured stories of popular folk-memory.
Ferdowsi’s Shahnamah enjoyed a special status in Iranian courtly culture as not just a mythical but a historical narrative as well. The powerful effect that this text came to have on the poets of this period is partly due to the value that was attached to it as a legitimizing force, especially for new rulers in the Eastern Islamic world:
The Persianate culture that emerged under the Samanid dynasty rule in Khorasan
Greater Khorasan
Greater Khorasan or Ancient Khorasan is a historical region of Greater Iran mentioned in sources from Sassanid and Islamic eras which "frequently" had a denotation wider than current three provinces of Khorasan in Iran...
, in northeast of Persia and borderlands of Turkistan and Turks were exposed to Persianate-Islamic culture; the preparation for the incorporation of the Turks into the main body of the Middle Eastern Islamic civilization, which was followed by the Ghaznavids, thus began in Khorasan; "not only did the inhabitants of Khurasan not succumb to the language of the nomadic invaders, but they imposed their own tongue on them. The region could even assimilate the Turkic Ghaznavids and Seljuks (11th and 12th centuries), the Timurids (14th and 15th centuries), and the Qajars (19th and 20th centuries).
Mahmud of Ghazni
Mahmud of Ghazni
Mahmud of Ghazni , actually ', was the most prominent ruler of the Ghaznavid dynasty who ruled from 997 until his death in 1030 in the eastern Iranian lands. Mahmud turned the former provincial city of Ghazni into the wealthy capital of an extensive empire which covered most of today's Iran,...
the rivals and future hirers of the Samanids ruled over southeastern extremities of Samanid territories from the city of Ghazni
Ghazni
For the Province of Ghazni see Ghazni ProvinceGhazni is a city in central-east Afghanistan with a population of about 141,000 people...
. It attracted many Persian scholars, artists and became the patrons of Persianate culture, and as they subjugated Western and Southern Asia, they took with themselves the Persianate culture. Under the Ghaznavid patronage, Persian culture flourished further. Apart from Ferdowsi, Rumi, Abu Ali Sina
Avicenna
Abū ʿAlī al-Ḥusayn ibn ʿAbd Allāh ibn Sīnā , commonly known as Ibn Sīnā or by his Latinized name Avicenna, was a Persian polymath, who wrote almost 450 treatises on a wide range of subjects, of which around 240 have survived...
, Al-Biruni
Al-Biruni
Abū al-Rayḥān Muḥammad ibn Aḥmad al-BīrūnīArabic spelling. . The intermediate form Abū Rayḥān al-Bīrūnī is often used in academic literature...
, Unsuri Balkhi
Unsuri
Abul Qasim Hasan Unsuri Balkhi was a 10-11th century Persian poet.He is said to have been born in Balkh, today located in Afghanistan, and he eventually became a poet of the royal court, and was given the title Malik-us Shu'ara .His Divan is said to have contained 30,000 distichs, of which only...
, Farrukhi Sistani
Farrukhi Sistani
Abul Hasan Ali ibn Julugh Farrukhi Sistani was a 10th- and 11th-century royal poet of Ghaznavids.As an ethnic Persian, he was one of the brightest masters of the panegyric school of poetry in the court of Mahmud of Ghazni...
, Sanayi Ghaznawi and Abu Sahl Testari were among the great Iranian polymaths and poets of the period, supported by the Ghazanavids.
The Persianate culture was carried by succeeding dynasties into Western and Southern Asia, in particular, by the Persianized
Persianization
Persianization or Persianisation is a sociological process of cultural change in which something non-Persian becomes Persianate. It is a specific form of cultural assimilation that often includes linguistic assimilation...
-Seljuqs (1040–1118), and their successor states, who presided over Iran
Iran
Iran , officially the Islamic Republic of Iran , is a country in Southern and Western Asia. The name "Iran" has been in use natively since the Sassanian era and came into use internationally in 1935, before which the country was known to the Western world as Persia...
, Syria
Syria
Syria , officially the Syrian Arab Republic , is a country in Western Asia, bordering Lebanon and the Mediterranean Sea to the West, Turkey to the north, Iraq to the east, Jordan to the south, and Israel to the southwest....
, and Anatolia
Anatolia
Anatolia is a geographic and historical term denoting the westernmost protrusion of Asia, comprising the majority of the Republic of Turkey...
until the 13th century, and by the Ghaznavids, who in the same period dominated Greater Khorasan
Greater Khorasan
Greater Khorasan or Ancient Khorasan is a historical region of Greater Iran mentioned in sources from Sassanid and Islamic eras which "frequently" had a denotation wider than current three provinces of Khorasan in Iran...
and India
India
India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...
. These two dynasties together drew the centres of the Islamic world eastward. The institutions stabilized Islamic society into a form that would persist, at least in Western Asia, until the 20th century.
The Ghaznavids moved their capital from Ghazni to Lahore
Lahore
Lahore is the capital of the Pakistani province of Punjab and the second largest city in the country. With a rich and fabulous history dating back to over a thousand years ago, Lahore is no doubt Pakistan's cultural capital. One of the most densely populated cities in the world, Lahore remains a...
in modern Pakistan, which they turned into another centre of Islamic culture. Under Ghaznavids, poets and scholars from Kashgar
Kashgar
Kashgar or Kashi is an oasis city with approximately 350,000 residents in the western part of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of the People's Republic of China. Kashgar is the administrative centre of Kashgar Prefecture which has an area of 162,000 km² and a population of approximately...
, Bukhara
Bukhara
Bukhara , from the Soghdian βuxārak , is the capital of the Bukhara Province of Uzbekistan. The nation's fifth-largest city, it has a population of 263,400 . The region around Bukhara has been inhabited for at least five millennia, and the city has existed for half that time...
, Samarkand
Samarkand
Although a Persian-speaking region, it was not united politically with Iran most of the times between the disintegration of the Seleucid Empire and the Arab conquest . In the 6th century it was within the domain of the Turkic kingdom of the Göktürks.At the start of the 8th century Samarkand came...
, Baghdad
Baghdad
Baghdad is the capital of Iraq, as well as the coterminous Baghdad Governorate. The population of Baghdad in 2011 is approximately 7,216,040...
, Nishapur
Nishapur
Nishapur or Nishabur , is a city in the Razavi Khorasan province in northeastern Iran, situated in a fertile plain at the foot of the Binalud Mountains, near the regional capital of Mashhad...
, Amol
Amol
Amol is a city in and the capital of Amol County, Mazandaran Province, Iran. At the 2006 census, its population was 197,470, in 55,183 families.Amol and the old part of town is the first of the four towns that populate the world in which there is Nzamyh...
and Ghazni
Ghazni
For the Province of Ghazni see Ghazni ProvinceGhazni is a city in central-east Afghanistan with a population of about 141,000 people...
congregated in Lahore. Thus, the Persian language and Persianate culture was brought deep into India and carried further in the 13th century. Seljuqs won a decisive battle with the Ghaznavids then swept into Khurasan
Greater Khorasan
Greater Khorasan or Ancient Khorasan is a historical region of Greater Iran mentioned in sources from Sassanid and Islamic eras which "frequently" had a denotation wider than current three provinces of Khorasan in Iran...
; they brought Persianate culture westward into western Persia, Iraq, Anatolia, and Syria. Iran proper along with Central Asia became a heartland of Persian language and culture.
As the Seljuqs came to dominate Persia (including Iraq, Syria, and Anatolia), they carried this Persianate culture beyond, and made it the culture of their courts as far west as the Mediterranean Sea
Mediterranean Sea
The Mediterranean Sea is a sea connected to the Atlantic Ocean surrounded by the Mediterranean region and almost completely enclosed by land: on the north by Anatolia and Europe, on the south by North Africa, and on the east by the Levant...
. Under Seljuq rule, many pre-Islamic Iranian traditional arts including the Sasanian traditional architecture resurrected, and indulged many of the great Iranian scholars. At the same time, the Islamic religious institutions became more organized and Sunni orthodoxy became more codified.
The Persian jurist and theologian Al-Ghazali
Al-Ghazali
Abu Hāmed Mohammad ibn Mohammad al-Ghazzālī , known as Algazel to the western medieval world, born and died in Tus, in the Khorasan province of Persia was a Persian Muslim theologian, jurist, philosopher, and mystic....
was amongst the scholars at Seljuq court who proposed a synthesis of Sufism
Sufism
Sufism or ' is defined by its adherents as the inner, mystical dimension of Islam. A practitioner of this tradition is generally known as a '...
and sharia
Sharia
Sharia law, is the moral code and religious law of Islam. Sharia is derived from two primary sources of Islamic law: the precepts set forth in the Quran, and the example set by the Islamic prophet Muhammad in the Sunnah. Fiqh jurisprudence interprets and extends the application of sharia to...
, which became a basis of a richer Islamic theology. Formulating the Sunni concept of division between temporal and religious authorities, he provided a theological basis for the existence of Sultanate, a temporal office alongside the Caliphate, which by that time was merely a religious office. The main institutional means of establishing a consensus of the ulama on these dogmatic issues was the Nezāmīyeh, better known as the madrasas, named after its founder Khwajeh Nezam ul-Mulk, the Persian Vizier of Seljuqs. These schools became means of uniting Sunni ulama, which legitimized the rule of the Sultans. The bureaucracies were staffed by graduates of the madrasas, so both the ulama and the bureaucracies were under the influence of esteemed professors at the madrasas.
Shahnameh’s impact and affirmation of Persianate culture
As the result of the impacts of Persian literaturePersian literature
Persian literature spans two-and-a-half millennia, though much of the pre-Islamic material has been lost. Its sources have been within historical Persia including present-day Iran as well as regions of Central Asia where the Persian language has historically been the national language...
as well as ingredient of the political ambitions of a ruler in the Persianate lands to not only commission a copy of the Shahnameh
Shahnameh
The Shahnameh or Shah-nama is a long epic poem written by the Persian poet Ferdowsi between c.977 and 1010 AD and is the national epic of Iran and related societies...
, but also have his own epic, which allowed court poets to attempt to reach the level of Ferdowsi:
The Iranian as well as the Persianate poets received the Shahnameh
Shahnameh
The Shahnameh or Shah-nama is a long epic poem written by the Persian poet Ferdowsi between c.977 and 1010 AD and is the national epic of Iran and related societies...
and modeled themselves after it.
First, Persian poets attempted to continue the chronology to a later period, usually the poet’s, such as the Zafar-Nameh
Zafar-Nameh
Zafar-Nameh, Zafar-Nameh, Zafar-Nameh, (Persian ظفرنامه, Zafar-nāmé, the Book of Victory is an epic poem written by the Persian poet Hamdollah Mostowfi (d. 1334). The epic history, compiled in 75,000 couplets, explores Iranian history from the Arab conquest to the Mongols....
of the Ilkhanid historian Hamdollah Mostowfi
Hamdollah Mostowfi
Hamdollah Mostowfi was a Persian historian, geographer and epic poet.Mostowfi is the author of Nozhat ol-Gholub , Zafar-Nameh , and the Tarikh e Gozideh . His tomb is a structure with a blue turquoise conical dome, at Qazvin.-References and notes:...
(d. 1334 or 1335), which deals with Iranian history from the Arab conquest to the Mongols and is longer than Ferdowsi’s work, and the Shahanshahnamah (or Changiznamah) of Ahmad Tabrizi in 1337-38, which is a history of the Mongols written for Abu Sa‘id. Second, poets versified the history of a contemporary ruler for reward, such as the Ghāzānnāmeh written in 1361-62 by Nur al-Din ibn Shams al-Din. Third, heroes not treated in the Shahnamah and those who have minor roles in it became the subjects of their own epics, such as the 11th century Garshāspnāmeh by Asadi Tusi
Asadi Tusi
Abu Mansur Ali ibn Ahmad Asadi Tusi is arguably the second most important Persian poet of the Iranian national epics, after Ferdowsi who also happens to come from the same town of Tus. He was a poet, a linguist and copyist of ancient manuscripts.- Life :The information on Asadi's lifetime is scant...
. The other source of inspiration for Persianate culture was another Persian poet, Nizami, the most admired, illustrated and imitated writer of romantic masnavis.
Along with Ferdowsi's and Nizami's works, Amir Khusraw Dehlavi’s khamseh
Khamseh
The Khamseh are an Iranian Arabs and tribal confederation in the province of Fars in southwestern Iran....
came to enjoy tremendous prestige, and multiple copies of it were produced at Persianate courts.
Mongol invasion
The culture of the Persianate world in the 13th, 14th, and 15th centuries was tested by invading armies of inland Asia. The MongolsMongols
Mongols ) are a Central-East Asian ethnic group that lives mainly in the countries of Mongolia, China, and Russia. In China, ethnic Mongols can be found mainly in the central north region of China such as Inner Mongolia...
under Genghis Khan
Genghis Khan
Genghis Khan , born Temujin and occasionally known by his temple name Taizu , was the founder and Great Khan of the Mongol Empire, which became the largest contiguous empire in history after his death....
(1220–58) and Timur
Timur
Timur , historically known as Tamerlane in English , was a 14th-century conqueror of West, South and Central Asia, and the founder of the Timurid dynasty in Central Asia, and great-great-grandfather of Babur, the founder of the Mughal Dynasty, which survived as the Mughal Empire in India until...
(Tamerlane, 1336–1405) stimulated the development of Persianate culture in Central and West Asia, because of the new concentrations of specialists of high culture created by the invasions. Many Iranians had to seek refuge in few safe havens, primarily India, where scholars, poets, musicians, and fine artisans intermingled and cross-fertilized, and because the broad peace secured by the huge imperial systems established by the Il-Khanids
Ilkhanate
The Ilkhanate, also spelled Il-khanate , was a Mongol khanate established in Azerbaijan and Persia in the 13th century, considered a part of the Mongol Empire...
(in the 13th century) and Timurids (in the 13th century), when travel was safe, and scholars and artists, ideas and skills, and fine books and artifacts circulated freely over a wide area. Il-Khanids and Timurids were patrons of Persianate high culture. Under their rule developed new styles of architecture based on pre-Islamic Iranian tradition, Persian literature was encouraged, and flourished the Persian school of miniature painting and book production established in Herat, Tabriz and Esfahan.
In the 16th century, Persianate culture became sharply distinguishable from the Arabic Islamic world to the west, the dividing zone falling along the Euphrates
Euphrates
The Euphrates is the longest and one of the most historically important rivers of Western Asia. Together with the Tigris, it is one of the two defining rivers of Mesopotamia...
. Socially the Persianate world was marked by a system of ethnologically defined elite statuses: the rulers and their soldiery were non-Iranians in origin, but the administrative cadres and literati were Iranians. Cultural affairs were marked by characteristic pattern of language use: New Persian
Persian language
Persian is an Iranian language within the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European languages. It is primarily spoken in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and countries which historically came under Persian influence...
was the language of state affairs and literature; New Persian became the languages of scholarship; and Arabic the language of religion.
Persianate culture of South Asia
South Asian society was enriched by the influx of Persian and Islamic scholars, historians, architects, musicians, and other specialists of high Persianate culture who fled the Mongol devastations. After the invasion of Persia, and sack of Baghdad by the Mongols in 1258, Delhi became the most important cultural centre of the Muslim east. The Delhi Sultans modelled their lifestyles after the Persian upper classes. They patronized Persian literature and music, but became especially notable for their architecture, because their builders drew from the Irano-Islamic world architecture, combined with Indian traditions to produce a profusion of mosques, palaces, and tombs unmatched in any other Islamic country. The speculative thought of the times at the MughalMughal Empire
The Mughal Empire , or Mogul Empire in traditional English usage, was an imperial power from the Indian Subcontinent. The Mughal emperors were descendants of the Timurids...
court, as in other Persianate courts, leaned towards the eclectic gnostic
Gnosticism
Gnosticism is a scholarly term for a set of religious beliefs and spiritual practices common to early Christianity, Hellenistic Judaism, Greco-Roman mystery religions, Zoroastrianism , and Neoplatonism.A common characteristic of some of these groups was the teaching that the realisation of Gnosis...
dimension of Sufi Islam
Sufism
Sufism or ' is defined by its adherents as the inner, mystical dimension of Islam. A practitioner of this tradition is generally known as a '...
, having similarities with Hindu Vedantism, indigenous Bhakti
Bhakti
In Hinduism Bhakti is religious devotion in the form of active involvement of a devotee in worship of the divine.Within monotheistic Hinduism, it is the love felt by the worshipper towards the personal God, a concept expressed in Hindu theology as Svayam Bhagavan.Bhakti can be used of either...
and popular theosophy
Theosophy
Theosophy, in its modern presentation, is a spiritual philosophy developed since the late 19th century. Its major themes were originally described mainly by Helena Blavatsky , co-founder of the Theosophical Society...
.
The Mughals strengthened the Persianate, or Indo-Persian culture
Indo-Persian culture
"Indo-Persian culture" refers to those Persian aspects that have been integrated into or absorbed into the culture of the Indian subcontinent, and in particular, into North India and modern-day Pakistan....
, in South Asia. For centuries, Iranian scholar-officials had immigrated to the region where their expertise in Persianate culture and administration secured them honoured service within the Mughal Empire. Networks of learned masters and madrasas taught generations of young South Asian men Persian language and literature in addition to Islamic values and sciences. Further, educational institutions such as Farangi Mahall and Delhi College
Delhi College
Delhi College can refer to:* Zakir Husain College, Delhi, formerly known as The Delhi College, founded in 1792.* State University of New York at Delhi* Delhi College of Engineering* Delhi College of Arts and Commerce* Jagan Institute of Management Studies...
developed innovative and integrated curricula for modernizing Persian-speaking South Asians. They cultivated Persian art, enticing to their courts artists and architects from Bukhara, Tabriz
Tabriz
Tabriz is the fourth largest city and one of the historical capitals of Iran and the capital of East Azerbaijan Province. Situated at an altitude of 1,350 meters at the junction of the Quri River and Aji River, it was the second largest city in Iran until the late 1960s, one of its former...
, Herat
Herat
Herāt is the capital of Herat province in Afghanistan. It is the third largest city of Afghanistan, with a population of about 397,456 as of 2006. It is situated in the valley of the Hari River, which flows from the mountains of central Afghanistan to the Karakum Desert in Turkmenistan...
, Shiraz
Shiraz
Shiraz may refer to:* Shiraz, Iran, a city in Iran* Shiraz County, an administrative subdivision of Iran* Vosketap, Armenia, formerly called ShirazPeople:* Hovhannes Shiraz, Armenian poet* Ara Shiraz, Armenian sculptor...
, and other cities of Greater Iran
Greater Iran
Greater Iran refers to the regions that have significant Iranian cultural influence. It roughly corresponds to the territory on the Iranian plateau and its bordering plains, stretching from Iraq, the Caucasus, and Turkey in the west to the Indus River in the east...
. The Taj Mahal
Taj Mahal
The Taj Mahal is a white Marble mausoleum located in Agra, India. It was built by Mughal emperor Shah Jahan in memory of his third wife, Mumtaz Mahal...
and its Charbagh
Charbagh
Charbagh is a Persian-style garden layout. The quadrilateral garden is divided by walkways or flowing water into four smaller parts...
were commissioned by the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan
Shah Jahan
Shah Jahan Shah Jahan (also spelled Shah Jehan, Shahjehan, , Persian: شاه جهان) (January 5, 1592 – January 22, 1666) Shah Jahan (also spelled Shah Jehan, Shahjehan, , Persian: شاه جهان) (January 5, 1592 – January 22, 1666) (Full title: His Imperial Majesty Al-Sultan al-'Azam wal Khaqan...
for his half-Iranian bride.
Iranian poets, such as Sa’di
Saadi (poet)
Abū-Muḥammad Muṣliḥ al-Dīn bin Abdallāh Shīrāzī better known by his pen-name as Saʿdī or, simply, Saadi, was one of the major Persian poets of the medieval period. He is not only famous in Persian-speaking countries, but he has also been quoted in western sources...
, Hafez
Hafez
Khwāja Shamsu d-Dīn Muhammad Hāfez-e Shīrāzī , known by his pen name Hāfez , was a Persian lyric poet. His collected works composed of series of Persian poetry are to be found in the homes of most Iranians, who learn his poems by heart and use them as proverbs and sayings to this day...
, Rumi and Nizami, who were the great masters of Sufi mysticism from the Persianate world, were favorite poets of the Mughals. Their works were present in Mughal libraries and counted among the emperors’ prized possessions, which they gifted to each other; Akbar
Akbar the Great
Akbar , also known as Shahanshah Akbar-e-Azam or Akbar the Great , was the third Mughal Emperor. He was of Timurid descent; the son of Emperor Humayun, and the grandson of the Mughal Emperor Zaheeruddin Muhammad Babur, the ruler who founded the Mughal dynasty in India...
and Jahangir
Jahangir
Jahangir was the ruler of the Mughal Empire from 1605 until his death. The name Jahangir is from Persian جهانگیر,meaning "Conqueror of the World"...
often quoted from them, signifying that they had imbibed them to a great extent. The court poets Naziri, ‘Urfi, Faizi
Faizi
Shaikh Abu al-Faiz ibn Mubarak, popularly known by his pen-name, Faizi was a poet of late medieval India. In 1588, he became the Malik-ush-Shu'ara of Akbar's Court. He was the elder brother of Akbar's historian Abul Fazl...
, Khan-i Khanan, Zuhuri, Sanai
Sanai
Hakim Abul-Majd Majdūd ibn Ādam Sanā'ī Ghaznavi was a Afghan Sufi poet who lived in Ghazna, in what is now Afghanistan between the 11th century and the 12th century. Some people spell his name as Sanayee. He died around 1131.-Life:...
, Qodsi, Talib-i Amuli
Taleb Amoli
-Bioghraphy:Sayyed Mohammad Taleb-e-Amoliand died in Kashmir, India .Taleb was one of the most distressed poets in the Sibk e Hindi Indian poetry, and had taken refuge in India. He was very skilful in mathematics, astronomy, wisdom, and philosophy in Indian style...
and Abu Talib Kalim were all masters imbued with a similar Sufi spirit, thus following the norms of any Persianate court.
The tendency towards Sufi mysticism through Persianate culture in Mughal court circles is also testified by the inventory of books that were kept in Akbar’s library, and are especially mentioned by his historian, Abu'l Fazl, in the Ā’in-ī Akbarī. Some of these books that were read out continually to the emperor include the mathnawīs of Nizami, works of Amir Khusraw, Sharaf Manayri and Jami, the Mathnawī-i ma’nawī of Molana Jalal al-Din Rumi, the Jām-i Jam of Awhadi-e Maraghei, the Hakika o Sanā’i, the Qābusnāmeh of Kai Kāvus, Sa’di’s Gulestān and Būstān, and the Dīwāns of Khaqani and Anwari.
This Indo-Iranian intellectual symmetry continued until the end of the 19th century, when a Persian newspaper, Miftah al-Zafar (1897), campaigned for the formation of Anjuman-i Ma’arif, an academy devoted to the strengthening of Persian language as a scientific language. Whereas the notion of "Western civilization" provided a safety net supplementing European national histories, no common historiographical practice captures the residues of the colonial and national conventions of historical writing that separates the joint Persianate literary culture of Iran and India—a literary culture that is irreducible to Islam and the Islamic civilization.
Safavids and the resurrection of Iranianhood
The Safavid dynasty ascended to predominance in Iran in the 16th century—the first native Iranian dynasty since the Buyyids. The Safavids, whom according to the consensus of scholars were originally from Persian Kurdistan moved to the Ardabil region in the 11th century. They re-asserted the Iranian identity and established an independent Iranian state and patronized Iranian culture. They made Iran the spiritual bastion of Shi’ism against the onslaughts of orthodox Sunni Islam, and the repository of Persian cultural traditions and self-awareness of Iranianhood.The founder of the dynasty, Shah Isma'il
Ismail I
Ismail I , known in Persian as Shāh Ismāʿil , was a Shah of Iran and the founder of the Safavid dynasty which survived until 1736. Isma'il started his campaign in Azerbaijan in 1500 as the leader of the Safaviyya, an extremist heterodox Twelver Shi'i militant religious order and unified all of Iran...
, adopted the title of Persian Emperor Pādišah-ī Īrān, with its implicit notion of an Iranian state stretching from Afghanistan as far as the Euphrates, and from the Oxus to the southern Territories of the Persian Gulf. Shah Isma'il's successors went further and adopted the title of "Shāhanshāh" (king of the kings). The Safavid kings considered themselves, like the Sasanian
Sassanid Empire
The Sassanid Empire , known to its inhabitants as Ērānshahr and Ērān in Middle Persian and resulting in the New Persian terms Iranshahr and Iran , was the last pre-Islamic Persian Empire, ruled by the Sasanian Dynasty from 224 to 651...
Emperors, the khudāygān (the shadow of God on earth), revived the Sasanian architecture, erected grand mosques, revived and built elegant "Charbagh
Charbagh
Charbagh is a Persian-style garden layout. The quadrilateral garden is divided by walkways or flowing water into four smaller parts...
" gardens, collected books (one Safavid ruler had a library of 3,000 volumes), and patronized whole "Men of Pen" The Safavids introduced Shiism into Persia to distinguish Persia society from the Ottomans, their Sunni rivals to the west. The Mughals dominated India from I526 until the 18th century, when Muslim successor states and non-Muslim powers of the Sikh
Sikh
A Sikh is a follower of Sikhism. It primarily originated in the 15th century in the Punjab region of South Asia. The term "Sikh" has its origin in Sanskrit term शिष्य , meaning "disciple, student" or शिक्ष , meaning "instruction"...
, Maratha
Maratha
The Maratha are an Indian caste, predominantly in the state of Maharashtra. The term Marāthā has three related usages: within the Marathi speaking region it describes the dominant Maratha caste; outside Maharashtra it can refer to the entire regional population of Marathi-speaking people;...
, and British replaced them.
Ottomans
Ottoman Empire
The Ottoman EmpireIt was usually referred to as the "Ottoman Empire", the "Turkish Empire", the "Ottoman Caliphate" or more commonly "Turkey" by its contemporaries...
rose to predominance in Asia Minor
Asia Minor
Asia Minor is a geographical location at the westernmost protrusion of Asia, also called Anatolia, and corresponds to the western two thirds of the Asian part of Turkey...
. The Ottomans patronized Persian literature for five and a half centuries and attracted great numbers of writers and artists, especially in the 16th century. One of the most renowned Persian poets in the Ottoman court was Fethullah Arifi Çelebi, also a painter and historian, and the author of the Süleymanname (or Suleyman-nama), a biography of Süleyman the Magnificent. In the end of 17th century, they gave up Persian as the court and administrative language, using Turkish instead; a decision that shocked the highly Persianized Mughals in India. The Ottoman Sultan Suleyman
Suleiman the Magnificent
Suleiman I was the tenth and longest-reigning Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, from 1520 to his death in 1566. He is known in the West as Suleiman the Magnificent and in the East, as "The Lawgiver" , for his complete reconstruction of the Ottoman legal system...
wrote an entire divan
Divan
A divan was a high governmental body in a number of Islamic states, or its chief official .-Etymology:...
in Persian language.
According to Hodgson:
Toynbee's assessment of the role of the Persian language is worth quoting in more detail A Study of History
A Study of History
A Study of History is the 12-volume magnum opus of British historian Arnold J. Toynbee, finished in 1961, in which the author traces the development and decay of all of the major world civilizations in the historical record...
:
E. J. W. Gibb is the author of the standard A Literary History of Ottoman Poetry in six volumes, whose name has lived on in an important series of publications of Arabic, Persian, and Turkish texts, the Gibb Memorial Series. Gibb classifies Ottoman poetry between the "Old School", from the 14th century to about the middle of the 19th century, during which time Persian influence was dominant; and the "Modern School", which came into being as a result of the Western impact. According to Gibb in the introduction (Volume I):
The Saljuqs had, in the words of the same author:
Persian poetry (Sufi poetry)
Sufism
Sufism or ' is defined by its adherents as the inner, mystical dimension of Islam. A practitioner of this tradition is generally known as a '...
remains elastic, yet coherent, enough to encompass articles that acknowledge the importance of writings in other Muslim languages and the practice of Sufism among non-Persians.
From about the 12th century, Persian lyric poetry was enriched with a spirituality and devotional depth not to be found in earlier works. This development was due to the pervasive spread of mystical experience. Sufism developed in all Muslim
Muslim
A Muslim, also spelled Moslem, is an adherent of Islam, a monotheistic, Abrahamic religion based on the Quran, which Muslims consider the verbatim word of God as revealed to prophet Muhammad. "Muslim" is the Arabic term for "submitter" .Muslims believe that God is one and incomparable...
lands, but its literary expression reached its zenith in the countries located within the sphere of Persian cultural influence. As a counterpoise to the rigidity of formal Islamic theology
Theology
Theology is the systematic and rational study of religion and its influences and of the nature of religious truths, or the learned profession acquired by completing specialized training in religious studies, usually at a university or school of divinity or seminary.-Definition:Augustine of Hippo...
and law, mysticism sought to approach the divine through acts of devotion and love rather than through mere rituals and observance. Love of God
God
God is the English name given to a singular being in theistic and deistic religions who is either the sole deity in monotheism, or a single deity in polytheism....
being the focus of the Sufis' religious sentiments, it was only natural for them to express it in lyrical terms, and Persian mystics, often of exceptional sensibility and endowed with poetic verve, did not hesitate to do so. The famous 11th-century Sufi, Abu Sa'id of Mehna, for example, frequently used his own love quatrains (as well as others) to express his spiritual yearnings, and with the appearance of a vowed mystic poets such as Attar and Eraqi, mysticism became a legitimate, even fashionable subject of lyric poems among the Persianate societies. Furthermore, as Sufi orders and centers (Khaneghah) spread throughout Persian societies, Persian mystic poetry
Persian painting
Tabriz
Tabriz is the fourth largest city and one of the historical capitals of Iran and the capital of East Azerbaijan Province. Situated at an altitude of 1,350 meters at the junction of the Quri River and Aji River, it was the second largest city in Iran until the late 1960s, one of its former...
in the west to Samarkand
Samarkand
Although a Persian-speaking region, it was not united politically with Iran most of the times between the disintegration of the Seleucid Empire and the Arab conquest . In the 6th century it was within the domain of the Turkic kingdom of the Göktürks.At the start of the 8th century Samarkand came...
and Herat
Herat
Herāt is the capital of Herat province in Afghanistan. It is the third largest city of Afghanistan, with a population of about 397,456 as of 2006. It is situated in the valley of the Hari River, which flows from the mountains of central Afghanistan to the Karakum Desert in Turkmenistan...
in the east of Iranian world
Greater Iran
Greater Iran refers to the regions that have significant Iranian cultural influence. It roughly corresponds to the territory on the Iranian plateau and its bordering plains, stretching from Iraq, the Caucasus, and Turkey in the west to the Indus River in the east...
. In the first half of the 15th century, Iranian artists working for the Timurid sultans and their heirs developed the highly detailed, jewel-like style of painting that typifies Persian painting, which became known as the "Persian School of Heart".
When the Safavid dynasty
Safavid dynasty
The Safavid dynasty was one of the most significant ruling dynasties of Iran. They ruled one of the greatest Persian empires since the Muslim conquest of Persia and established the Twelver school of Shi'a Islam as the official religion of their empire, marking one of the most important turning...
of Persia came to power in 1501 and unified the eastern and western parts of Iran, the Persian painting styles of the east and the west mingled. The political unity under the first two Safavid rulers Shah Isma'il I
Ismail I
Ismail I , known in Persian as Shāh Ismāʿil , was a Shah of Iran and the founder of the Safavid dynasty which survived until 1736. Isma'il started his campaign in Azerbaijan in 1500 as the leader of the Safaviyya, an extremist heterodox Twelver Shi'i militant religious order and unified all of Iran...
and Shah Tahmasp, and the establishment of the Safavid capital at Tabriz in the west, caused Persian artists to move from Herat. One of the most celebrated Iranian painters Behzad, known as "the master of Persian painting", influenced many other Persian painters, such as Reza Abbasi
Reza Abbasi
Riza Abbasi, Riza yi-Abbasi or Reza-e Abbasi, رضا عباسی in Persian, usually "Riza" or Reza Abbasi also Aqa Riza or Āqā Riżā Kāshānī was the leading Persian miniaturist of the Isfahan School during the later Safavid period, spending most of his career working for Shah Abbas I...
and Sultan Muhammed, the most gifted of the Safavid artists. He eventually painted perhaps the most extraordinary example of Persian painting The Court of the Gayumars from an opulent edition of the Shahnameh, commissioned by Shah Tahmasp c. 1522–1525. The painting depicts the legendary court of Gayumars, the first shah in the epic.
In Anatolia, a vigorous school of painting developed at the courts of Turkic rulers in the second half of the 15th century. The style of Ottoman miniature
Ottoman miniature
Ottoman Miniature or Turkish miniature was an art form in the Ottoman Empire, which can be linked to the Persian miniature tradition, as well as strong Chinese artistic influences. It was a part of the Ottoman Book Arts together with illumination , calligraphy , marbling paper and bookbinding...
illustrations depended on the Persian models, especially the painting of Shiraz
Shiraz
Shiraz may refer to:* Shiraz, Iran, a city in Iran* Shiraz County, an administrative subdivision of Iran* Vosketap, Armenia, formerly called ShirazPeople:* Hovhannes Shiraz, Armenian poet* Ara Shiraz, Armenian sculptor...
. The long reign of the Ottoman sultan Suleyman (the Magnificent) enabled his successor Selim II (r. 1566-1574) to enjoy the pleasures of the palace without much concern for military conquests. A painting of Sultan Selim II in the exhibition depicts him partaking in one of his favourite pastimes, wine drinking, which earned him the nickname "Selim the Sot".
By the mid-16th century, some Iranian artists from the Safavid Persian court had immigrated to Istanbul. Others made their way to India in the retinue of the Mughal emperor Humayun
Humayun
Nasir ud-din Muhammad Humayun was the second Mughal Emperor who ruled present day Afghanistan, Pakistan, and parts of northern India from 1530–1540 and again from 1555–1556. Like his father, Babur, he lost his kingdom early, but with Persian aid, he eventually regained an even larger one...
, who returned to India in 1555 from exile in Iran. It was at the court of Humayun's son and successor Akbar (r. 1556-1605), however, that the Mughal style of painting
Mughal painting
Mughal painting is a particular style of South Asian painting, generally confined to miniatures either as book illustrations or as single works to be kept in albums, which emerged from Persian miniature painting, with Indian Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist influences, and developed largely in the court...
came into its own.
The most important early project in this new style was a 14-volume Hamzanama
Hamzanama
The Hamzanama or Dastan-e-Amir Hamza narrates the legendary exploits of Amir Hamza, the uncle of the prophet of Islam, though most of the story is extremely fanciful, "a continuous series of romantic interludes, threatening events, narrow escapes, and violent acts"...
produced by a team of Indian artists, both Muslim and Hindu, working under the supervision of Mir Sayyid Ali and Abd al-Samad, two Persian émigré
Émigré
Émigré is a French term that literally refers to a person who has "migrated out", but often carries a connotation of politico-social self-exile....
artists. Akbari paintings incorporated the synthesis of the precise, linear style of Persian painting with the dynamism and vibrant palette of indigenous Indian painting. With the introduction of European-style perspective and modelling, Mughal painting became increasingly naturalistic from the 1580s until the mid-17th century, but the core of both Ottoman and Mughal painting remained Persian.
Persian music
Iranian celebrations of Nowruz and Chaharshanbeh-Suri
The term NowruzNowruz
Nowrūz is the name of the Iranian New Year in Iranian calendars and the corresponding traditional celebrations. Nowruz is also widely referred to as the Persian New Year....
first appeared in Persian records in the 2nd century CE, but it was also an important day during the Achaemenid
Achaemenid Empire
The Achaemenid Empire , sometimes known as First Persian Empire and/or Persian Empire, was founded in the 6th century BCE by Cyrus the Great who overthrew the Median confederation...
times (c. 648-330 BCE), in which kings from different nations under Persian empire would bring gifts to the emperor (Shahanshah) of Persia[5]. It has been suggested that the famous Persepolis
Persepolis
Perspolis was the ceremonial capital of the Achaemenid Empire . Persepolis is situated northeast of the modern city of Shiraz in the Fars Province of modern Iran. In contemporary Persian, the site is known as Takht-e Jamshid...
complex, or at least the palace of Apadana
Apadana
The Apadāna is a collection of biographical stories found in the Khuddaka Nikaya of the Pāli Canon, the scriptures of Theravada Buddhism. It is thought by most scholars to be a late addition to the canon, composed during the 1st and 2nd century BCE...
and the "Hundred Columns Hall", were built for the specific purpose of celebrating Nowruz. However, no mention of Nowruz exists in Achaemenid inscriptions (see picture).
The oldest records of Nowruz go back to the King Yima of Eastern Iran Afghanistan around 5000 BCE. Later it became the national holiday of the Arsacid/Parthian Empires, which ruled western Iran (247 BCE-224 CE). There are specific references to the celebration of Nowruz during the reign of Vologases I
Vologases I of Parthia
Vologases I of Parthia, sometimes called Vologaeses or Vologeses or, following Zoroastrian usage, Valakhsh ruled the Parthian Empire from about 51 to 78. Son of Vonones II by a Thracian concubine, he succeeded his father in 51 AD. He gave the kingdom of Media Atropatene to his brother Pacorus II,...
(51-78 CE), but these include no details.
Extensive records on the celebration of Nowruz appear following the accession of Ardashir I
Ardashir I
Ardashir I was the founder of the Sassanid Empire, was ruler of Istakhr , subsequently Fars Province , and finally "King of Kings of Sassanid Empire " with the overthrow of the Parthian Empire...
of Persia, the founder of the Sassanid dynasty
Sassanid Empire
The Sassanid Empire , known to its inhabitants as Ērānshahr and Ērān in Middle Persian and resulting in the New Persian terms Iranshahr and Iran , was the last pre-Islamic Persian Empire, ruled by the Sasanian Dynasty from 224 to 651...
(224-650 CE). Under the Sassanid kings, Nowruz was celebrated as the most important day of the year. Most royal traditions of Nowruz, such as royal audiences with the public, cash gifts, and the pardoning of prisoners, were established during the Sassanian era, and they persisted unchanged until modern times.
Nowruz, along with Sadeh
Sadeh
Sadé or Sada Jashn-e Sada/Sadé , also transliterated as Sadeh, is an ancient Iranian tradition celebrated 50 days before Nowruz. Sadeh in Persian means "hundred" and refers to one hundred days and nights past the end of summer...
(celebrated in mid-winter), survived in society following the introduction of Islam in 650 CE. Other celebrations such as Gahanbar and Mehregan
Mehregan
Mehrgân or Jashn-e Mehregân is a Zoroastrian and Persian festival celebrated since the pre-Islamic era to honor the Yazata of "Mehr" , which is responsible for friendship, affection and love. It is also widely referred to as Persian Festival of Autumn...
were eventually side-lined or were only followed by the Zoroastrians
Zoroastrians in Iran
Zoroastrians in Iran are the oldest religious community of the nation, with a long history continuing up to the present day.Prior to the Islamization of Iran, Zoroastrianism was the primary religion of the Iranian peoples...
, who carried them as far as Turkey. Nowruz, however, was most honored even by the early founders of Islam. There are records of the Four Great Caliphs presiding over Nowruz celebrations, and it was adopted as the main royal holiday during the Abbasid period.
Following the demise of the caliphate
Caliphate
The term caliphate, "dominion of a caliph " , refers to the first system of government established in Islam and represented the political unity of the Muslim Ummah...
and the subsequent re-emergence of Persian dynasties such as the Samanids and Buyids, Nowruz was elevated to an even more important event. The Buyids revived the ancient traditions of Sasanian times and restored many smaller celebrations that had been eliminated by the caliphate. Even the Turkish and Mongol invaders did not attempt to abolish Nowruz in favor of any other celebration. Thus, Nowruz remained as the main celebration in the Persian lands by both the officials and the people.
In his Norouznama, poet Omar Khayyám
Omar Khayyám
Omar Khayyám was aPersian polymath: philosopher, mathematician, astronomer and poet. He also wrote treatises on mechanics, geography, mineralogy, music, climatology and theology....
wrote a vivid description of the celebration in ancient Persian: