Iran: Empire of the Mind

by Michael Axworthy

  … His first task is to attack the composition of the Qor’an and denounce its inconsistencies… If anyone in his presence acknowledges the pre-eminence of the Companions of the Prophet he pulls a grimace, and turns his back when their merits are extolled… And then he straight away interrupts the conversation to speak of the policies of Ardashir Papagan, the administration of Anushirvan, and the admirable way the country was run under the Sasanians… 12

  In time, as elsewhere, the solution to such conflicts was assimilation and synthesis, but the shu’ubiyya gave the Persians in Baghdad a collective self-confidence and helped to ensure the survival of a strong element of pre-Islamic Persian culture as part of that synthesis.13 Like the religious controversies about free will and the nature of the Qor’an that were going on at the same time, like other conflicts in other times and places, the shu’ubiyya was a sign of conflict, change and creative energy.

  Boosted by the creativity of the Persians, the Abbasid regime set a standard, and was looked back on later as a golden age. Baghdad grew to be the largest city in the world outside China, with a population of around 400,000 by the ninth century. The Abbasids endeavoured to evade the tensions between piety and government and to cement their support among all Muslims by abandoning the Umayyad principle of Arab supremacy, and by establishing the principle of equality between all Muslims. The same inclusive principle extended even to taking supporters of the descendants of Ali, Christians and Jews into some parts of the government, provided they proved loyal to the regime. The integration of the huge area of the Arab conquests under the peaceful and orderly rule of the Abbasid caliphate brought new and dynamic patterns of trade, and a great release of economic energy. The caliphs encouraged improvements in agriculture, particularly through irrigation, which created new prosperity especially in Mesopotamia, but also on the Iranian plateau, where the following centuries saw the widespread introduction of rice cultivation, groves of citrus fruits, and other novelties.14 The region of Khorasan and Transoxiana profited hugely from revitalised trade along the ancient Silk Route to China, from the agricultural improvements, from the mixing of old and new, Arab and Iranian; and entered an economic and intellectual golden age of its own.

  The Abbasid system relied first on the local networks of control set up by provincial governors across the vast territories of the empire, and second on the bureaucracy that tied those governors to the centre in Baghdad. The governors collected tax locally, deducted for their expenses (including military outgoings), and remitted the remainder to the Abbasid court. The hand of central government was relatively light, but these arrangements put considerable power in the hands of the governors, which in the long run was to erode the authority of the Caliphate.

  The Abbasid court became rich, but it also became very learned. The caliphs, especially caliph Al-Ma’mun (813-833; himself the son of a Persian concubine), encouraged and supported scholars who translated ancient texts into Arabic, initially from Persian, but later also from Syriac and Greek, drawing on writings discovered across the conquered territories. Al-Ma’mun’s predecessor Al-Mansur (754-775) had founded a new library, the Beyt al-Hikma (House of Wisdom), which attempted to assimilate all knowledge in one place, and translate it into Arabic. It was an idea taken directly from the model of the Sassanid royal libraries, and drew extensively on writings and scholars from Gondeshapur in Khuzestan, the most famous of the Sassanid academies.15 Gondeshapur had survived up to that time, but seems thereafter to have been eclipsed by Baghdad. At the same time the diffusion of scholarship profited from the introduction of paper manufacture from China, replacing the more expensive and awkward papyrus and parchment. Al-Ma’mun seems to have encouraged a shift in emphasis toward astrology and mathematics, and the translation of Greek texts, under the eye of his chief translator, Hunayn ibn Ishaq. These developments led to what has been called the ninth-century renaissance, as Persian scholars writing in Arabic discovered and applied the lessons especially of Greek philosophy, mathematics, science, medicine, history and literature. The new scholarship was not merely passive, but creative, producing new scientific writings, literature, histories and poetry, of great and lasting quality, forming the basis of much later intellectual endeavour, including in Europe, in the centuries that followed.

  Through the translations, Aristotelian and Platonic philosophy were especially influential, through figures like Al-Kindi and Al-Farabi. The great historian al-Tabari (838-923) also worked in Baghdad at this time (he came from Amol in Tabarestan, on the south coast of the Caspian, in what is now the province of Mazanderan). Medicine made significant advances through properly scientific researches into anatomy, epidemiology and other disciplines, building on but 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 (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 onwards. 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, giving a new vitality to western scholarship. Avicenna and Averroes, the latter an Arab and another Aristotelian, 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 was independent of the authority of the caliph, 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, the scholars practised 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 favoured 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 (ijtihad) of religious texts, based on reason. By contrast many of the ulema outside court circles tended to favour more deterministic positions and a strict traditionalism that insisted on the sufficiency of the texts on their own; and disapproved of extra-Islamic influences. The parallel, fundamentally inimical cultures of the Abbasid court and the ulema expressed the continuing tension between political authority and religion under Islam. In the end, the anti-Mu’tazili, 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 recognised 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, in the towns and villages of Iran, there was a proliferation of religious sects and groups, including sects in villages and towns that were
regarded as heretical by both Muslims and Zoroastrians, often encompassing sub-Mazdakite ideas and labelled Khorramites17 (the term may derive from a word meaning ribald or joyous). Some such groups were involved in the initial revolt of Abu Muslim, but also in the revolts of Sonbad the Magian (756), Ustad-sis (767-768), al-Muqanna (780)—all mainly centred on Khorasan — and again in the revolt of Papak in what is now Kurdistan and Azerbaijan in 817-838. Several of these revolts, and others, showed millenarian and other features (including an anti-Muslim celebration of wine and women), drawing in part on Mazdaism, 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 centre. 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 history 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 the story of their end casts a long shadow backwards in time, which can mean that the system and institutions of the Abbasid empire for example look flawed and faulty almost from the very beginning. This is misleading. The Abbasid period was a time of enormous human achievement, in political terms as well as in terms of civilisation, 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 civilisation, way ahead (it need hardly be said) 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 (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 in imitation of the great caliphal court of Baghdad, as enhancements of their prestige, and as a disguise for their tenure of power, which otherwise might have appeared as more nakedly dependent on brute military force. The patronage of these provincial courts, working on the intellectual and religious ferment of the eastern Iranian lands at this 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; 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, ambiguously hinted at through metaphor and intermingled. And often love may not be mentioned at all, but be massively present nonetheless through other metaphors, notably through another great theme—wine.

  It is possible that the Persian poetry of this period inherited 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 of metre and rhyme, along with the immediate precedents of themes of love, derive from previous Arabic poetic traditions, reflecting the exchange of linguistic and other cultural materials between Iranians and Arabs in the years after the conquest. There are fragments of poetry known from earlier, and 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 Persianising policy of the Samanid court. The Samanids gave the Persian poets their patronage, and encouraged the use of Persian rather than Arabic at court, in literature and generally. Abolqasem Ferdowsi (c. 935- c. 1020) was less fortunate. He was born in the period of Samanid rule but later came under the rule of the Ghaznavids, a dynasty of Turkic origin, when the Samanid regime crumbled. His Shahnameh (which continued and completed a project begun for the Samanids by Daqiqi) can be seen as the logical fulfilment of Samanid cultural policy—avoiding Arabic words, eulogising 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—shocking in an eleventh-century Islamic context (the minbar 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

  No surprise then that his great work, when finished, got a less than enthusiastic welcome from the ruling Ghaznavid prince, whose views were more orthodox. Many of the stories that have been 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, when read a particularly brilliant passage from the Shahnameh, realised 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, slim as cypresses and radiant as the moon, and royal courts full of music and feasting; a life full of fighting and feasting—razm o bazm. It is not difficult to read into it the nostalgia of a class of bureaucrats and scholars, descended f
rom the small gentry landowners (the dehqans) who had provided the proud cavalry of the Sassanid armies, reduced from the sword to the pen, now watching 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 chainmail; my heart’s prepared for deat’21