TEN ISLAMIC PERSIA AND PERSIAN ISLAM

The Arab conquest of Persia took place with astonishing speed. One of the two great historic empires that had dominated the Middle East for many centuries collapsed within a decade of the invasion by what were, by comparison with Persia at the time, a relatively primitive desert people. Muslim chroniclers themselves referred to the conquest as a miracle. Undoubtedly one of the most important causes of this sudden collapse was the weakness of the country following its final and unsuccessful war with Byzantium, which had only just come to an end. Thus by defeating one of the two great Middle Eastern empires, the victor had paved the way for the complete transformation of the region. There was also another cause, and this was the favourable reception that Islam received in so many of the countries that the Arabs invaded. Its simple monotheism, the removal of ruling classes – which had often been oppressive and disliked – and the preaching of egalitarianism were for large sections of the population very positive features of the new religion. The remission of taxes for conversion to Islam was another bonus, making the arrival of the Arabs more of a liberation than an occupation. What was now being offered seemed to be a distinct improvement on what had been there before.

For the great majority of the Persian population this was certainly the case. Their Sasanid rulers had become remote and were embroiled in endless wars. The heavy burden of taxation, which the people had been called upon to bear during the final war with Byzantium, had made the dynasty highly unpopular during the final years of its rule. The reality was that who their rulers were was of little consequence to the people, so long as they were not unbearably oppressive and were able to maintain law and order. Peace was something that the population desired more than anything after such a long period of war. The remission of taxes was certainly an easy and non-violent way of ensuring acceptance of the new rulers, and mass conversion to Islam took place with considerable ease.

For the former Sasanid ruling class, the situation was very different. They had been overthrown by the Arabs and so had lost their privileged position in society. In most cases the estates of the landowners, the dihqan, were confiscated and became the property of the caliph. In other cases they were taken over by local Arab chieftains, who in this way became the inheritors of the wealth and property of their predecessors.1

It was not at all easy for the Arabs to do away entirely with the ancient civilization of Persia and to replace it with their own. The indigenous civilization was far too strong and ingrained for this to happen and in many ways the opposite began to take place. Almost immediately, Persian civilization influenced the conquerors and this soon brought about many changes in Islam itself. Alessandro Bausani even maintained that: ‘It is quite unreal to equate the Arabs with Islam and the Persians with non-Islam. The Persian conquest marked a vital stage in the development of Islam as we know it today.’² The success of Islam in Persia was by no means entirely an Arab achievement. The Arabs may have been the conquerors, but there were many native Persians who took rapidly to the new religion and put their particular stamp upon it. This was most especially the case in Pars, where the link with Islam appears to have been particularly strong from the early years (see Chapter Fourteen). Over the following two centuries, Persia gradually developed its own particular brand of Islam, which became important in determining the evolution of the whole Islamic world, as well as of Persia itself.

With the arrival of the Arabs, the language of the conquerors became the official language of the country, as it did in all other parts of their empire. The Arabic script was introduced and, as with the language, this had to be learned by the old governing class if they were to have any role in the new Islamic province of the caliphate. The Koran, the holy text of Islam, was of course written in Arabic, and in order to begin to understand the new religion a knowledge of that language was essential. While Zoroastrianism and even some of the cults survived and even flourished in the more remote parts of the country, many of its temples were taken over by the new rulers and converted into mosques. This was usually a temporary measure and soon mosques were being built, many of which were later considered to be among the most beautiful anywhere in the Islamic world. Madrasas – religious schools – also soon appeared and a new class of Persians educated in the Arabic language began to emerge. It was from this educated class that the new Islamic priesthood came into being. However, although the Persian educated classes learned Arabic, the language of the country remained Persian, and although the Arabic script soon replaced the Persian script, the language itself continued to be used. Arabic always remained a foreign tongue, although knowledge of it was essential to secure advancement in the new world of which Persia was now a part. However, it was quite evident that Persia was very different from the rest of the Islamic Middle East and from the beginning there were many revolts against Arab rule there.

The whole question of the succession had been a contentious one since the death of the Prophet in 632, and at first it had been in the hands of his blood relatives and his closest companions. This period of the so-called ‘orthodox caliphs’ came to an end with the assassination of Ali, Muhammad’s son-in-law, in 661. After much discussion, the Umayyads, who claimed a distant kinship with the Prophet, secured the caliphate. This Umayyad caliphate lasted for a little over a century, and during this period there was considerable dissatisfaction in Persia, and elsewhere in the Arab world, with what was very quickly seen as a remote and autocratic rule. The autocratic Sasanids had been replaced by an Islamic dynasty that was behaving in all too similar a manner. In 750 came a series of rebellions throughout Islam, the one in Persia being led by Abu Muslim. The Umayyads were toppled and the caliphate was taken over by Abu al-Abbas of the Hashemite tribe. It was he who established the Abbasid caliphate, which ruled the empire for the next 500 years.

Initially, the Abbasids made many promises to the dissatisfied people, and at first this made the prospect of their rule attractive to the Persians. One of these was that the capital of the caliphate would be moved to a more central location. In the event, the Abbasids moved the capital from Damascus in Syria to Baghdad in Mesopotamia, an outcome that was seen as very satisfactory by the Persian rebels. This new capital was within the territory of the old Sasanid Empire and was very close to the legendary city of Babylon and, more importantly, to Ctesiphon, the Sasanid capital. Located as it was within the land that had been part of earlier Persian empires, and in the historic ‘capital region’ of the Middle East, this opened up the prospect of strengthening the Persian influence in the Islamic world. The new city of Baghdad soon developed into a great centre of learning and much of this was the work of Persian-speaking scholars.3 The following centuries were a time of great advance in science and the arts in the Islamic world and the Persian contribution, as previously discussed, proved to be considerable.

Nevertheless, there was still great dissatisfaction in Persia and the clash between the Arab and Persian cultures remained very much in evidence. The fact that the country, which had been for so long the great empire of the Middle East and in many ways its centre, was now reduced to being a part of another empire was something that was difficult for the Persians to accept. It was this that underlay the frequent rebellions and the rise of local dynasties, many of which were successful in taking control of large parts of the country. Important among these dynasties were the Tahirids, who were made governors of Khorasan by the caliph but who rebelled against him and established their own quasi-independent state. Later there were the Saffarids from Sijistan who spread out into Khorasan in the later ninth century. Most important and successful was the Samanid dynasty, the founder of which, Samankhudat, claimed descent from the Sasanids. The original heart of Samanid power had been Transoxiana, well away from the principal centres of Arab rule. From there the Samanids moved southwards into Khorasan and Sijistan, and then eastwards into Afghanistan. The caliph Al-Mamun had considerable respect for the Persians and granted the Samanids governorship of a number of provinces, including Samarkand, Ferghana and Herat.

It was in this way that the dynasty built up its strength, eventually becoming virtually independent of the caliph. While Transoxiana remained of considerable importance to them, they established their capital in Khorasan at Nishapur, a city from which they were able to exercise effective control over most of the east of the country. This dynasty provided a link with the pre-Islamic past and also, through the Sasanids, even back to the Achaemenids. In this way, although great changes had taken place since the Islamic conquest, there remained a certain sense of continuity back to the remote past of the country. This gave the new dynasties an element of the legitimacy that they all sought in order to justify their rule. It was this sense of past greatness that inspired the Persians to think of themselves as different from, and in so many ways superior to, the caliphate.

As a result, the ancient heritage re-emerged alongside Islam, which for the previous two centuries had made vigorous attempts to suppress it in favour of its own. By the tenth century the caliphs in Baghdad were in no position to bring the rebellious subjects to heel and were forced even to endorse the new situation by giving impressive titles to the new rulers. It was from this time on that the Persians began again to take great pride in their own identity, and it was out of this that the Shuubiyya movement developed, which has been seen by some as an early form of nationalism. It looked back to the ancient empire and its achievements and did much to emphasize that Persian sense of superiority over the Arabs. While the Persians saw themselves as having been a great and historic civilization, the Arabs increasingly came to be looked down upon as desert nomads having little real culture. The Persians came to resent being subjected to control by a people to whom they felt superior and for whom in many ways they felt contempt. The Shuubiyya movement strengthened their desire to separate themselves from the Arab caliphate and to revert to their historic independence.4

With Arabic control – and even that of Islam itself – loosening, not only was a return to independent statehood possible, but so was a new flourishing of the Persian language and culture. This took place within what were strictly the Persian lands, as well as more widely throughout the extensive territory of the old Persian Empire. This renaissance was nowhere more visible than in Baghdad itself. At that time the Abbasid capital became one of the greatest centres of learning in the world and the Persian influence in this was very much in evidence.

By the time of the Samanid dynasty, which ruled for almost the whole tenth century, Persia had developed its own particular character, which was to make it from then on quite distinct from most of the rest of the Islamic world. This character was the result partly of developments that took place in Islamic times and partly of other characteristics derived from the earlier inheritance. By this time Islam itself was by no means monolithic and there was considerable religious diversity within it. In Persia such diversity was to a large extent the result of the survival of the Zoroastrian religion and the proliferation of sects that, in many ways, were related to this. The first Samanid leader Saman-khudat was himself a Zoroastrian, but he seems to have converted to Islam mainly because he felt it to be in his best interests to do so. He was by no means the first or the last to think in such terms. Many of the sects that emerged were syncretic, drawing on other religions, including Christianity and Buddhism. The Mazdakites were Zoroastrian extremists who were violently opposed to Islam. Manichaeism, which dated from the time of the Sasanid king Shapur I, was based on the teachings of the prophet Mani, who came from a Christian family. This also survived in places well into Islamic times. Another religious sect was Khorramdin, ‘the happy religion’, which represented an attempt to fuse Zoroastrianism and Islam.

While the Samanids, and the dynasties that had preceded them, were centred in Khorasan and the east of the country, the west behaved quite differently. In the Zagros mountains and around the southern shores of the Caspian Sea there had always remained a strong feeling of independence. Here the Ziyarid dynasty gained power by the ninth century and soon subscribed to a very different version of Islam. Similarly, in the historic Persian homeland of Pars the sense of Persian identity remained very strong and here the Buyid dynasty gained power, with a similar sense of its own particular role.

In the context of Islam as a whole, these diverse ideas came to be centred on Shi’ism, which was a particularly Persian version of the religion. This had originated due to the problem of the caliph, the successor to the Prophet. The Shi’ites believed that the successor should be in the bloodline of the Prophet, in other words a member of the ‘dynasty’ of the Prophet, rather than quite different dynasties to which the Umayyads, and later the Abbasids, belonged. The Shi’ites therefore held the belief that the succession should be through the line of Ali, the son-in-law of the Prophet, who had also been the last of the orthodox caliphs. It was believed that Ali had inherited the Prophet’s wilayah, his spiritual qualities, and had passed these on to his own sons, Hasan and Husayn. Ali was assassinated by the Umayyads in 661 and his son Husayn, grandson of the Prophet and claimant to the caliphate, was assassinated in 680 at Karbala near Baghdad. Karbala then became for the Shi’a one of their holiest shrines, and the martyrdom of Husayn was from then on commemorated there in the lunar month of Muharram. This led to the Shi’ite belief in the Twelve Imams, beginning with Ali and continuing through his successors. The line of succession continued until 878, when the last of the Twelve, al-Muntazar, withdrew from the world to return only when a new age was born. In addition to this, there was a further dimension to Shi’ism that linked it to ancient Persia. A legend appeared that Husayn had been married to one of the daughters of Yazdegerd III, the last of the Sasanid kings. In this way a sense of continuity could be established between Islam and the pre-Islamic past. Out of this Islam then came to be seen as not just something imposed and alien but as the heir to the earlier state and its rulers. The legitimacy of the new rulers of Persia was based not just on religious belief but on this other firm belief that the blood of the Sasanids flowed in the veins of the true successors to the Prophet.

In the early eleventh century new conquerors arrived on the scene. These were the Seljuk Turks who, like so many before them, came from Central Asia. There they had converted to Islam but they were unwelcome to the Persians not only because they were yet another set of conquerors from the north but because they had espoused the Sunni version of Islam, which accepted the Abbasid caliphate and its primacy throughout the Islamic Empire. In 1055 came the conquest of Baghdad itself by the Seljuks, and the caliph, unable to resist this new and powerful intruder, granted their leader the title of ‘sultan’, meaning sovereign, which from then on became the title given to Seljuk and later to Ottoman rulers. While they established themselves as rulers of Persia by the use of force, they were from the outset regarded as aliens and the period of their rule was peppered by constant outbreaks of rebellion, mainly linked to Shi’a beliefs that were hostile to the Turks and their orthodox Sunni version of Islam. Other rebellions were motivated by extreme religious convictions, but many of them were also forms of proto-nationalism – one of the principal objectives of which was to re-establish the independence of the country.

It was this fusion of Shi’a beliefs and hostility to the conquerors that produced one of the early forms of proto-nationalism. This was the Ismaili sect, which originated in Syria but which spread from there to other parts of the Islamic world and eventually established itself strongly in northern Persia. While following the basic Shi’a doctrine, they believed that the Seventh Imam was actually Ismail – not Musa, his brother, who was believed by the orthodox Shi’a to have been the true imam. As a result of this, Ismail became the centre of veneration for this sect. Among these Ismailis were the more extreme Nizaris, who engaged in murder and built strongholds in the mountains from which they waged constant war on all who held opposing beliefs. They were led at the time by Hasan-i Sabbah and were known by the Crusaders as the Assassins. It came to be widely believed that they gained this name through their use of hashish in their rituals.5

The principal stronghold of the Assassins was the fortress of Alamut – the Eagle’s Nest – established in 1090 in the Alborz mountains. They went on to build a chain of other strong and inaccessible fortresses throughout the area. Hasan-i Sabbah came to be known as Shaykh al-jabal, ‘the master of the mountain’, translated by the Crusaders as ‘the old man of the mountain’. They gained a bad reputation, both among the Seljuks and the Crusaders, and were considered to be little more than the terrorists of the age. However, the truth seems to have been rather different, since the evidence shows the Nizaris to have engaged in a great deal of philosophical thought about religion. The Ismailis as a whole were widespread throughout Persia at this time and their religious ideas led to much thought about the nature of Islam and the development of its role in the world. They attempted to reconcile Hellenistic Gnosticism with Islam and had a profound effect on the future development of Islamic thinking.

By the thirteenth century, the Seljuk Turks, like so many conquerors before them, were much weakened and were quite unable to defend themselves from one of the most powerful and ruthless invaders ever to emerge from Central Asia. These were the Mongols under Genghis Khan and his successors, and by the middle of the thirteenth century they had not only defeated the Seljuks but had destroyed both the Assassins and the caliphate and had become the dominant force in the Middle East. However, the Mongol Empire soon split up into a number of constituent parts owing only a nominal allegiance to the Great Khan. The Il-Khan dynasty, which became the dominant power in the Middle East, lasted barely a century, and with the collapse of the caliphate the last semblance of unity in Islam came to an end. Persia also once more became lawless and for a time a variety of dynasties and sects held sway in different parts of the country.

This situation lasted until the end of the fifteenth century, when a new and strong ruler was at last able to reunite the country. This was Ismail, the first of the Safavid dynasty, which took power in 1500. The Safavids were Turkish-speakers who came from the Kurdish lands in the northwest of the country. Ismail, having defeated other contenders for power, was proclaimed Shahanshah-i-Iran in 1501. Most importantly, the Safavids were Shi’ites and were members of the Qizilbash – Red Head – order. Shah Ismail claimed descent from the seventh of the Twelve Imams and this put him firmly in the line of succession from the caliph Ali. While there seems to have been very little substance to this claim, it served to place the new dynasty in the bloodline of the Prophet and thus secured the legitimacy of its shahs as rulers of Iran. The Shi’a version of Islam was proclaimed to be the official religion of the country and conversion was made obligatory, with refusal to convert resulting in execution. The only exceptions to this were the Christians, who became a protected minority. During the reign of Ismail the lands conquered by this northern dynasty steadily increased, and, most significantly, the Persian homeland of Pars and Mesopotamia, political and economic heart of the Sasanid Empire, were added. For the first time since the Islamic conquest over 700 years earlier, Persia had become a powerful independent state and one that was very different from its Middle Eastern neighbours. Besides Persia itself, only in southern Mesopotamia was there another large population of Shi’a Muslims. Mesopotamia was particularly important to the Shi’a because of its historic sites, which were of especial significance to their religion. Most significant among them was Karbala, the place where Husayn, the son of Ali, had been murdered by the supporters of the Umayyads.

The most significant reign of the Safavid dynasty was that of Shah Abbas, known as ‘The Great’ (r. 1587–1628). He consolidated the dynasty’s grip on supreme power and diminished the role of the Qizilbash, which had developed into a kind of powerful and self-perpetuating aristocracy. He established his own royal army, which was quite independent of them and very much under his direct control. This new army was made up largely of non-Persians, among them many Georgians and Armenians, and it was modelled on the Turkish Janissaries. This ensured that it was outside the Persian religious and political disputes that had made the country so turbulent for much of the time since the coming of Islam. Abbas also strengthened governmental control over the administration of the country and moved the capital to Isfahan, which was very centrally located. There he proceeded to build a most magnificent city, with mosques and palaces of great beauty in that Persian Islamic architectural style, which is considered to have produced some of the most splendid buildings in the Islamic world.

The reign of Shah Abbas was in many ways the culmination of this particular period in Persian history. The Safavids reigned from the beginning of the sixteenth century, a time considered by European historians to have been the beginning of modern history, until the eighteenth century, when many European political ideas had become fully developed and were being spread across the world through colonization. While such historical divisions and subdivisions cannot easily be applied to the Middle East, during this dynasty one can discern distinct threads of continuity linking the empire of ancient times to the modern era. In this way many aspects of the legacy of the ancient empire came to be present in the modern development of the country.

An important feature of this continuity was the search for legitimacy by claims of a common ancestry, not only with the Prophet Muhammad through Shi’ite Islam, but with the Shahanshahs, the Great Kings, themselves. Since the end of the Achaemenid Empire the successive rulers of Persia had sought to legitimize their rule by referring back to earlier rulers and dynasties. This search for continuity over the centuries, perhaps more than anything else, enabled the Persians to maintain their own particular sense of identity in a way in which the other peoples conquered by the Arabs never could. The feeling of being heirs to a great empire was retained and this led to the retention and encouragement of many other features, setting Persia well apart from its neighbours.

Important among these was the language, which from the Islamic conquest remained the means of communication of the bulk of the population. While the new conquerors introduced Arabic as the language of government and religion, it was taken up by only a small – though very important – minority. The first administrators of the new regime were themselves Arabs and the first teachers of the new religion were too. However, as Persians took on these roles, they were obliged to achieve a fluency in Arabic. Arabic also gained considerable importance as the language of commerce, and Arab traders, moving widely throughout Asia, brought their language with them. However, when the grip of the Arabs began to loosen in the time of the Samanids, Persian once more moved into a position of importance in most walks of life. By the time of the Safavids, Turkish had also become widespread. It had been brought by the Seljuks and had retained its importance after their fall. Turkish had been the original language of the Safavids, although they soon changed over to Persian. This then became the language that was of special importance in creating and maintaining the Persian sense of identity, and it was soon being used widely again. It was only in Islamic teaching that Arabic retained its special role. The Koran was in Arabic and remained so – the study of the holy book in the mosques necessitated the attainment of a good knowledge of that language.

Thus while Persia underwent immense changes throughout the Islamic period, the memory of the ancient civilization was never lost. While this is evident from the desire of successive rulers to seek legitimacy by proving their relationship to the former dynasties, there was also the history and legend present in the literary tradition. Central to this were the epic poems containing stories of early Persia. The most important of these was the Shahnameh, the ‘Book of Kings’ by Ferdowsi, which is largely the story of the early kings and heroes of Persia, discussed in Chapter Fifteen.

The Persia that emerged in the sixteenth century as a quite distinct and independent entity within the Islamic world was not in any sense an empire. In many ways it was beginning to develop along lines that were more similar to what was happening in Europe. There, with the break-up of Christendom and the formation of nation-states such as England and France, a post-imperial situation was evolving. The surviving elements of the ancient Persian Empire were being used to create a different, and more modern, political entity that during the following centuries remained more typical of geopolitical structures in Europe than in the Middle East. However, in the twentieth century the memory of the glorious past was to prove stronger than the desire to become a modern nation, and this was to produce one last attempt to resurrect the ancient empire. The importance of Persia in Asia had always remained considerable and it retained a strong influence on the way in which large parts of the continent evolved into modern times.