Mahmud, whose father had founded a strong kingdom in the mountains towards India just as the Caliphate sank into insignificance on the plains of the Euphrates, continued the work of his predecessor and became as renowned as Alexander and Frederick [the Great]. He allowed the Caliphate to be reckoned as a kind of spiritual power, which might well be acknowledged as to some extent to his own advantage; meanwhile he extended his realm on all sides, pressing even into India, with great force and singular success. A most zealous Muslim, he proved himself both tireless and severe in spreading his faith and destroying idolatry. The belief in one God always works to create exaltation in that it directs man back to the oneness of his own innermost being. The nation’s prophet stands closer; he demands only adherence and the protocols of devotion and commands the spread of a religion which, like every other, provides scope to the partisan and sectarian mentality for endless interpretations and misinterpretations, all the while remaining at bottom the same.
So plain a worship of God had to come into the harshest opposition with Indian idol worship and incite struggle and reaction – indeed, bloody wars of attrition – in which the zeal for destruction and for conversion grew ever more intense through the capture of countless treasures. Monstrous and grimacing images, the hollow bodies of which were found to be stuffed with gold and jewels, were broken down into pieces and when quartered, despatched to deck the various portals of Muslim shrines. Detestable as the Indian monstrosities are even today to every pure sensibility, how hideous must they have appeared to Muslims with their absence of images.
Here it may not be wholly misplaced to note that the original value of each and every religion can be assessed from its effects only after the course of centuries. The Jewish religion will always diffuse a certain rigid obstinacy though accompanied as well by unrestrained cleverness and lively activity; the Muslim religion never releases its adherent from an oppressive narrowness;32 without demanding onerous obligations, it provides him with all that he may desire within its confines and at the same time, by focusing on the future, inculcates and preserves both bravery and religious patriotism.33
Indian [Hindu] doctrine is by its very nature worthless, since now as then, its many thousands of gods – not even in any hierarchy indeed, but all of them equally powerful divinities – merely serve to complicate life’s contingencies further, preaching the pointlessness of all passion and fostering the notion that vice is madness as the highest stage of sanctity and bliss.34
Even a purer polytheism, like that of the Greeks and Romans, must in the end lose both itself and its adherents on false paths. By contrast, the Christian religion merits the highest praise; its pure and noble origin is efficacious in such a way that after the greatest aberrations in which muddled man can draw it, it emerges again and again, almost before one knows it, in all its loveable and unmistakable originality, as mission, as brotherhood and fellowship, to revivify man’s ethical requirements.
If we approve the zeal of Mahmud the iconoclast, at the same time we grant him the countless treasures he won and revere him above all as the founder of Persian poetry and high culture. Of Persian ancestry himself, he refused to be drawn into the narrowness of the Arabs; indeed, he felt strongly that the finest basis and foundation for religion lay in national identity. This in turn relies on poetry, which transmits the most ancient tales in fabulous images, then bit by bit advances in clarity and conveys the past seamlessly into the present.
We have now arrived in our considerations at the tenth century according to our calendar. Cast a glance at the lofty level of culture which continually permeated the Orient, the exclusive aspect of its religions apart. Here, virtually against the will of weak and obstreperous rulers, the surviving vestiges of Greek and Roman achievement were gathered together along with those of so many brilliant Christians expelled from the Church for their eccentricities, since it too strove for uniformity of belief, as in Islam.
And yet, two great branches of human knowledge and action managed to operate freely!
Medicine was expected to heal the microcosm while astronomy sought to interpret all that with which the heavens menaced or caressed us for the future; the former owed reverence to nature, the latter to mathematics, and so both were well received and maintained.
Under the rule of despots the conduct of business affairs, even with the greatest attention and exactitude, was always hazardous; a member of the chancellery needed as much courage to move within the Divan35 as a hero on the battle-field; the one was not more certain of seeing his hearth again than the other.
Travelling merchants brought ever new increases in both treasure and useful knowledge; the interior of the territory, from the Euphrates to the Indus, offered a world of objects all its own. A swarm of peoples in conflict with one another, rulers now ousted, now ousting others, underwent astonishing changes from triumph to servitude, from supremacy to servility, before one’s very eyes and this prompted thoughtful men to utter the most melancholy reflexions on the dreamlike transience of all earthly things.
It’s necessary to have all this, and much more – on the broadest scale of unending fragmentation and instantaneous recovery – firmly in view in order to be fair to the poets, and especially the Persian poets, to come. For everyone must admit that the conditions as described were in no sense propitious as a milieu in which a poet might find sustenance, might develop and prosper. We may be permitted then to treat the high merit of the earliest period of Persian poets as somewhat problematic. Even if they cannot be measured against the highest, still they must be read with indulgence and pardoned once they have been read.