A History of Iran

by Michael Axworthy

  Through the translations, Aristotelian and Platonic philosophies were especially influential, thanks to prestigious philosophers al-Kindi and al-Farabi. The great historian al-Tabari (838–923) also worked in Baghdad at this time. Medicine made significant advances through properly scientific researches into anatomy, epidemiology, and other disciplines, building on and eventually far surpassing the work of the classical Greek physician Galen. Many of these achievements were later collated and made known in the West through the writings of another Persian, the great Avicenna (born Ibn Sina, 980–1037). Avicenna’s writings were important in both East and West for his presentation of Aristotelian philosophical method and especially logic. Disputations along Aristotelian lines became central to teaching at the higher level in eastern madresehs from the time of Avicenna onward.

  It was a period of great intellectual energy, excitement, and discovery, and as the Abbasid court became a model for succeeding generations in government and in other ways, so too it became a model in the intellectual and cultural sphere. The translations into Arabic done by Persians in Baghdad in the eleventh century were later put into Latin for Western readers by translators like Gerard of Cremona, working in Toledo in Spain in the twelfth century. Access to these writings gave a new vitality to Western scholarship. Avicenna and Averroes—the latter an Arab and an Aristotelian like Avicenna—became familiar names in the new universities of Europe, and after the time of Thomas Aquinas the philosophy of Aristotle, following their model, dominated European learning for two hundred years or more.

  But at the same time there developed a separate tradition of Islamic scholarship across the towns and cities of the empire. This learning, independent of the authority of the caliph, was based instead on the authority of the Qor’an and the hadith (the huge body of traditions of the Prophet’s life and sayings, and related material, collated with varying degrees of reliability in the centuries after his death). The ulema—scholars practiced in the study and interpretation of those religious texts—tended to be hostile to the sophistication and magnificence of the court. This was particularly the case in the time of al-Ma‘mun and his immediate successors, when the caliph and the court inclined toward the religious thinking of the group called the Mu‘tazilis, who favored ideas of free will, a doctrine of the created nature of the Qor’an, and (partly under the influence of Greek philosophy) the legitimacy of interpretation of religious texts based on reason.

  In contrast, many of the ulema outside court circles tended to favor more deterministic positions and a strict traditionalism that insisted on the sufficiency of the texts on their own. They also disapproved of extra-Islamic influences. The parallel cultures of the Abbasid court and the ulema expressed the continuing tension between political authority and religion under Islam. In the end, the traditionalist tendency was the one that prevailed—with variations and some compromises—in the four schools or mazhabs of Sunnism: the Hanbali, Shafi‘i, Maliki, and Hanafi.

  But aspects of Mu‘tazili thinking endured more strongly in the separate Shi‘a tradition. The great Arab historian and social theorist Ibn Khaldun recognized in the fourteenth century that most of the hadith scholars and theologians were Persians working in Arabic (two of the four Sunni mazhabs were founded by Persians). So too were the philologists who established the grammar of the Arabic language and recorded it formally.16 In the Iranian lands, the usages of the ulema were a major conduit for bringing Arabic words into Persian, and to this day the Persian of the mullahs tends to be the most Arabized.

  On a more popular level, religious sects and groups proliferated in the towns and villages of Iran including sects that were regarded as heretical by both Muslims and Zoroastrians. These groups, often encompassing sub-Mazdakite ideas, were labelled Khorramites,17 a term that may derive from a word meaning ribald or joyous. Some such groups were involved in the initial revolt of Abu Muslim, but also in other revolts, including those of Sonbad the Magian (756), Ustad-sis (767–768), al-Muqanna (780)—all mainly centered on Khorasan—and again in the revolt of Papak in what is now Kurdistan and Azerbaijan in 817–838. Several of these revolts showed millenarian and other features (including an anti-Muslim celebration of wine and women), drawing in part on Mazdaism—features that were to resurface later in Shi‘ism, and Sufism. On women, for example, a contemporary said that some of the Khorramites:

  . . . believe in communal access to women, provided that the women agree, and in free access to everything in which the self takes pleasure and to which nature inclines, as long as no-one is harmed thereby

  And another:

  They say that a woman is like a flower, no matter who smells it, nothing is detracted from it. 18

  As early as the caliphate of Harun al-Rashid (786–809), the processes of dislocation and separation that were to split the united empire of the Abbasids became manifest. Provincial governors, valued for their local authority and retained in place for that reason, began to pass on their governorships to their sons, creating local dynasties. The latter acquired courts of their own, new poles of culture, and authority. As they did so their expenses became greater, and less tax revenue was sent to the center. They quickly became effectively independent, though most of them still deferred to the caliphate as the continuing central authority in Islam.

  It is in the nature of the history of empires that their story gets told in terms of their decline and fall. Historians are always looking for explanations, causes, and the origins of things. When it comes to empires, this tends to mean that their end casts a long shadow backward in time. This could make the system and institutions of the Abbasid empire, for example, look flawed and faulty almost from the very beginning. That would be misleading. The Abbasid period was a time of enormous human achievement, in political terms as well as in terms of civilization, art, architecture, science, and literature. The release of new ideas and the exchange of old ones within a huge area, held together by a generally benign and tolerant government, brought about a dynamic and hugely influential civilization, way ahead of what was going on in Europe at the time.

  The first of the regional dynasties to establish itself as a real rival to central authority was that of the Taherids of Khorasan (821–873), followed by the Saffarids of Sistan (861–1003) and the Samanids of Bokhara (875–999)—all dynasties of Iranian origin. The Samanids were based on Bokhara and the region around Balkh, claiming descent from the Sassanid prince Bahram Chubin. Each of these dynasties (especially the Samanids) and those that followed (notably the Ghaznavids and Buyids) tended to set up courts adorned with Persian bureaucrats, scholars, astrologers, and poets. Imitating in this way the great caliphal court of Baghdad, these provincial courts enhanced their own dynasties’ prestige and also disguised their tenure of power, which otherwise might have appeared as more nakedly dependent on brute military force. The patronage of these courts, working on the intellectual and religious ferment of the eastern Iranian lands at a time when the potential of the new form of the Persian language was ready to be explored, produced the beginnings of a great outpouring of wonderful poetic literature, including some of the most sublime poetry ever created. The poetry is so unfamiliar to most Western readers, so fresh and surprising in its content, and so important in its effect on later Iranian and Persianate culture across the region that it warrants more detailed attention.

  DRUNK WITH LOVE: THE POETS AND THE SUFIS, THE TURKS AND THE MONGOLS

  From the very beginning, the grand theme of Persian poetry is love. But it is a whole teeming continent of love—sexual love, divine love, homoerotic love, unrequited love, hopeless love, and hopeful love. It is love aspiring to oblivion, love aspiring to union, and love as solace and resignation. Often it may be two or more of these at the same time, intermingled and ambiguously hinted at through metaphor. Other times love may not even be mentioned, but will be present nonetheless through other metaphors—notably through another great poetic theme, wine.

  It is possible that the Persian poetry of this period in
herited ideas and patterns from a lost tradition of Sassanid court poetry—love poetry and heroic poetry—just as Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh emerged from a known tradition of stories about the kings of Persia. But most of the verse forms, along with the immediate precedents of themes of love, derive from previous Arabic poetic traditions and reflect the exchange of linguistic and other cultural materials between Iranians and Arabs in the years after the conquest. While there are fragments of poetry known from earlier times, the first more substantial verses from known poets come from the period of the Taherids. But the first great figure was a poet at the Samanid court—Rudaki:

  Del sir nagardadat ze bidadgari

  Cheshm ab nagardadat cho dar man nagari

  In torfe ke dusttar ze janat daram

  Ba anke ze sad hezar doshman batari

  Your heart never has its fill of cruelty

  Your eyes do not soften with tears when you look at me

  It is strange that I love you more than my own soul,

  Because you are worse than a hundred thousand enemies.19

  Rudaki (who died around 940), along with other poets like Shahid Balkhi and Daqiqi Tusi, benefited from the deliberate Persianizing policy of the Samanid court. The Samanids gave the poets their patronage and generally encouraged the use of Persian rather than Arabic. Abolqasem Ferdowsi (c. 935–c. 1020) was less fortunate. He was born in the period of Samanid rule, but later, when the Samanid regime crumbled, he came under the rule of the Ghaznavids, a dynasty of Turkic origin. His Shahnameh (which continued and completed a project begun for the Samanids by Daqiqi) can be seen as the logical fulfillment of Samanid cultural policy—avoiding Arabic words, eulogizing the pre-Islamic Persian kings, and going beyond a non-Islamic position to an explicitly pro-Mazdaean one. Some of the concluding lines of the Shahnameh, speaking as if from just before the defeat at Qadesiyya and the coming of Islam, echo the earliest Mazdaean inscriptions of Darius at Bisitun. This is shocking in an eleventh-century Islamic context (the minbar, mentioned in the first line, is the raised platform, rather like a church pulpit, from which prayers are led in the mosque):

  They’ll set the minbar level with the throne,

  And name their children Omar and Osman.

  Then will our heavy labours come to ruin.

  O, from this height a long descent begins. . .

  . . .

  Then men will break their compact with the Truth

  And crookedness and Lies will be held dear.20

  It’s no surprise then that Ferdowsi’s great work, when finished, got a less-than-enthusiastic welcome from the ruling Ghaznavid prince, whose views were more orthodox. Many of the stories passed down through the centuries about the lives of the poets are unreliable, but some of them may at least reflect some aspects of real events. One story about the Shahnameh says that the Ghaznavid sultan, having expected a shorter work of different character, sent only a small reward to Ferdowsi in return. The poet, disgusted, split the money between his local wine seller and a bath attendant. The sultan eventually read a particularly brilliant passage from the Shahnameh, realized its greatness, and sent Ferdowsi a generous gift, but too late—as the pack animals bearing Ferdowsi’s treasure entered his town through one gate, his body was carried out for burial through another.

  The great themes of the Shahnameh are the exploits of proud heroes on horseback with lance and bow, their conflicts of loyalty between their consciences and their kings, their affairs with feisty women who are as slim as cypresses and radiant as the moon, and royal courts full of fighting and feasting—razm o bazm. It is not difficult to read into this the nostalgia of a class of bureaucrats and scholars descended from the small gentry landowners (the dehqans) who had provided the proud cavalry of the Sassanid armies. Reduced now from the sword to the pen, they watch Arabs and Turks play the great games of war and politics.

  Tahamtan chinin pasokh avord baz

  Ke hastam ze Kavus Key bi niaz

  Mara takht zin bashad o taj targ

  Qaba joshan o del nahade bemarg

  The brave Rostam replied to them in turn,

  “I have no need of Kay Kavus.

  This saddle is my throne, this helm my crown.

  My robe is chain mail; my heart’s prepared for death”21

  The Shahnameh has had a significance in Persian culture comparable to that of Shakespeare in English or the Lutheran Bible in German, only perhaps more so—it has been a central text in education and in many homes, second only to the Qor’an and the great fourteenth-century poet Hafez. It has helped to fix and unify the language, to supply models of morality and conduct, and to uphold a sense of Iranian identity—reaching back beyond the Islamic conquest—that might otherwise have faded with the Sassanids.

  The poetry of the Shahnameh, and its themes of heroism on horseback, love, loyalty, and betrayal, has much in common with the romances of medieval Europe, and it is thought-provoking that it first attained fame a few decades before the First Crusade brought an increased level of contact between western Europe and the lands at the eastern end of the Mediterranean. There is also a theory that the troubadour tradition, and thus the immensely fruitful medieval European trope of courtly love, originated at least in part with the Sufis of Arab Spain.22 But it may just be a case of parallel development.

  The Ghaznavids did not reverse the Samanid pattern of patronage and continued to encourage poets writing in Persian. But the later poets were less strict about linguistic purity and more content to use commonplace Arabic loan words. Further west the Buyid dynasty, originating among Shi‘a Muslims in Tabarestan, had expanded to absorb Mesopotamia and take Baghdad (in 945), ending the independent rule of the Abbasid caliphs and ruling from then on in their name. But the great literary revival continued to be centered in the east.

  Naser-e Khosraw, born near Balkh in 1003, is believed to have written perhaps thirty thousand lines of verse in his lifetime, of which about eleven thousand have survived. He was brought up as a Shi‘a, made the pilgrimage to Mecca in 1050, and later became an Ismaili before returning to Badakhshan to write. Most of his poetry is philosophical and religious:

  Know yourself; for if you know yourself

  You will also know the difference between good and evil.

  First become intimate with your own inner being,

  Then commander of the whole company.

  When you know yourself, you know everything;

  When you know that, you have escaped from all evil

  Be wakeful for once: how long have you been sleeping?

  Look at yourself: you are something wonderful enough.23

  For many years the Abbasid caliphs and the other dynasties had employed Turkish mercenaries, taken as slaves from Central Asia, to fight their wars and police their territories. Turks had in turn become important in the politics of the empire, and on occasion had threatened to take control—the Ghaznavids had succeeded in doing so in the eastern part of the empire. But in the middle of the eleventh century a confederation of Turkic tribes under the leadership of the Seljuk Turks went farther. Defeating the Ghaznavids in the northeast, they broke into the heartlands of the empire and took Baghdad before fighting their way farther west. In 1071 they defeated the Byzantines and occupied most of the interior of Asia Minor.

  Centuries of contact with the Abbasid regime and its successors had Islamized the Turks and had made them relatively assimilable. The second Seljuk sultan, Alp Arslan, had as his chief vizier a Persian, Hasan Tusi Nizam ol-Mulk (1018–1092), and before long the dynasty was ruling according to the Persianate Abbasid model like the others before it. Nizam ol-Mulk wrote a book of guidance for Alp Arslan’s successor. Called the Siyasat-Nameh, which translates as The Book of Government, it (along with the slightly earlier Qabus-name) was for centuries the model for the Mirror-of-Princes genre of literature, providing manuals of guidance for rulers. It also influenced European versions of the same kind of thing, down to the time of Machiavelli and his Principe.

  Nizam ol-Mu
lk was a friend of Omar Khayyam (c. 1048–c. 1124/1129) and there are some famous stories of dubious veracity about the friendship.24 But it is probably true that when Nizam ol-Mulk became vizier he gave some financial help to Omar Khayyam, and possibly some protection, too. Among Iranians it is commonplace to say that Omar Khayyam was a more distinguished mathematician and astronomer than a poet. To assess the validity of this is like trying to compare apples with billiard balls. He did work on Euclidean geometry, cubic equations, binomial expansion, and quadratic equations that experts in mathematics regard as influential and important. He developed a new calendar for the Seljuk sultan, based on highly accurate observations of the sun, that was at least as accurate as the Gregorian calendar ordained in sixteenth-century Europe by the Catholic church.25 And it seems he was probably the first to demonstrate the theory that the nightly progression of the constellations through the sky was due to the earth spinning around its axis, rather than the movement of the skies around a fixed earth as had previously been assumed.

  Omar Khayyam’s dry skepticism in his poetry makes his voice unique among the other Persian poets, but also reflects a self-confidence drawn perhaps from his preeminent position in his other studies—his knowledge that in them he had surpassed what was known before. His name is famous in the West through the translations of Edward Fitzgerald, which were taken by readers to represent a spirit of eat, drink, and be merry hedonism. This is not quite right. Fitzgerald’s are free translations, and his nineteenth-century idiom (fine though his verses are), with its dashes and exclamation marks, ohs and ahs, to a degree misrepresents the sober force of the originals. Here, for example, is Fitzgerald:

  “How sweet is mortal Sovranty!”—think some:

  Others—“How blest the Paradise to come!”

  Ah, take the cash in hand and waive the Rest;