36. Bausani, Religion in Iran, 101.
37. Ibid., 100; Daryaee, Sasanian Persia.
38. Al-Tabari, 149.
39. Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (London: Printed by A. Strahan for T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1802), vol. 7, 149–151 (the passage draws on the Byzantine historian Agathias).
40. “The Sassanids,” in Encyclopedia Iranica.
41. Steven Runciman, A History of the Crusades (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), 10–11.
42. “The Sassanids,” in Encyclopedia Iranica.
CHAPTER 3—ISLAM AND INVASIONS: THE ARABS, TURKS, AND MONGOLS
1. Modern colloquial Persian is in many ways simplified from the written form of classical Persian, and the Persian of young Iranians now is changing further, borrowing many words from English, via films, television, and the Internet.
2. The interpretation of the Prophet’s dealings with the Jews of Medina is a controversial subject. See Bertold Spuler, The Age of the Caliphs: A History of the Muslim World (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener Publishers, 1995), 11–12; Norman A. Stillman, The Jews of Arab Lands: A History and Source Book (Philadelphia: Jewish Publications Society, 1979), 11–16.
3. See Abdelwahab Bouhdiba, Sexuality in Islam (New York: Routledge, 1985),19–20 and passim.
4. See for example Ira M. Lapidus, A History of Islamic Societies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 30.
5. Richard N. Frye, The Golden Age of Persia: The Arabs in the East (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1975), 64–65.
6. Aptin Khanbaghi, The Fire, the Star and the Cross: Minority Religions in Medieval and Early Modern Iran (London: I. B. Tauris, 2006), 25.
7. Bausani, Religion in Iran, 118.
8. Ibid., 111–121.
9. Ibid., 111; for the changes after the conquest see The Cambridge History of Iran: From the Arab Invasion to the Saljuq, vol. 4 (London: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 40–48.
10. Ibid., 63–64.
11. Hugh Kennedy, The Court of the Caliphs (London: Phoenix, 2005), 134–136.
12. Ehsan Yarshater, “The Persian Presence in the Islamic World,” in The Persian Presence in the Islamic World, Richard Hovannasian and Georges Sabagh, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 70–71.
13. Frye, The Golden Age of Persia, 122–123; Bausani, Religion in Iran, 143.
14. Bausani, The Persians, 84–85.
15. Mehdi Nakosteen, History of the Islamic Origins of Western Education, AD 800–1350 (Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 1964), 20–27.
16. Quoted in Frye, The Golden Age of Persia, 150.
17. Bausani, Religion in Iran, 121–130; see also Khanbaghi, 20–27.
18. Quoted in Crone, 450.
19. Persian transliterated from Reza Saberi, A Thousand Years of Persian Rubaiyat: An Anthology of Quatrains from the Tenth to the Twentieth Century Along with the Original Persian (Bethesda, MD: Ibex Publishers, 2000), 20; for the translation I am grateful to Hashem Ahmadzadeh and Lenny Lewisohn for their help. The selection of poetry that follows here is a personal one and includes a disproportionate number of ruba‘iyat—largely because the quatrain form is shorter than the other main verse forms and enabled me to incorporate more poetry from a variety of poets in a short space, and to include the original Persian.
20. Jerome Clinton, “A Comparison of Nizami’s Layli and Majnun and Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet,” in The Poetry of Nizami Ganjavi: Knowledge, Love and Rhetoric, K. Talattof and J. Clinton, eds. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), xvii.
21. Ibid., 72–73.
22. Idries Shah, The Sufis (London: Octagon Press, 1964), xiv.
23. A. J. Arberry, Classical Persian Literature (London: George Allen/Ruskin House, 1958), 67
24. Mehdi Aminrazavi, The Wine of Wisdom: The Life, Poetry and Philosophy of Omar Khayyam (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2007), 25–27.
25. Ibid., 199–200.
26. Saberi, 75; translation by Axworthy, Ahmadzadeh, and Lewisohn. There are examples of quatrains where Fitzgerald took greater liberties with the originals.
27. Aminrazavi, 131–133; Ehsan Yarshater, ed., Persian Literature (New York: Bibliotheca Persica Press, 1988), 148–150.
28. Saberi, 78; translation by Axworthy, Ahmadzadeh, and Lewisohn.
29. A. J. Arberry, The Ruba‘iyat of Omar Khayyam: Edited from a Newly Discovered Manuscript Dated 658 (1259–60) in the Possession of A. Chester Beatty Esq. (London: Emery Walker Ltd., 1949), 14; Ahmad Saidi, ed. and trans., Ruba‘iyat of Omar Khayyam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 36; translation by Axworthy, Ahmadzadeh, and Lewisohn.
30. For Sufism generally, see especially Leonard Lewisohn, The Heritage of Sufism, Volume I: Classical Persian Sufism from Its Origins to Rumi (700–1300) (Oxford: Oneworld, 1999), and Annemarie Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975).
31. Lewisohn, The Heritage of Sufism, 11–43; Marshall Hodgson, The Venture of Islam, vol. 2 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 203, 209, 213, 217–222, 293, 304.
32. The Cambridge History of Iran, Volume 5: The Saljuq and Mongol Periods (London: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 299.
33. Arberry, Classical Persian Literature, 90–91.
34. R. Gelpke, Nizami: The Story of Layla and Majnun (Colchester: Bruno Cassirer, 1966), 168.
35. Clinton, 25.
36. Leonard Lewisohn and C. Shackle, eds., Attar and the Persian Sufi Tradition: The Art of Spiritual Flight (London: I. B. Tauris, 2006), 255; and L. Lewisohn, “Attar, Farid al-Din,” in Lindsay Jones, ed., Encyclopedia of Religion, 15-Volume Set (New York: MacMillan Reference Books, 2005), 601—cf. Nietzsche: Was aus Liebe getan wird, geschieht immer jenseits von Gut und Böse—That which is done out of love, always takes place beyond Good and Evil.
37. Farid al-Din Attar, The Conference of the Birds, Afkham Darbandi and Dick Davis, eds. and trans. (London: Penguin Classics, 1984), 57–75.
38. David Morgan, Medieval Persia 1040–1797: History of the Near East (London: Longman Publishing Group, 1988), 88–96 and passim.
39. The Cambridge History of Iran, Volume 5, 313–314; based on John Andrew Boyle, ed. and trans., The History of the World-Conqueror (Juvayni) (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958), 159–162.
40. Ibid., 337.
41. Levy, 245.
42. Jalal al-Din Rumi, The Masnavi, Book One, Jawid Mojaddedi, ed. and trans. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 4–5.
43. Saberi, 257; translation by Axworthy and Ahmadzadeh.
44. William C. Chittick and Peter Lamborn Wilson, eds. and trans., Fakhruddin Iraqi: Divine Flashes (London: Paulist Press, 1982), 34.
45. Ibid., 36.
46. Baqer Moin, Khomeini: Life of the Ayatollah (London: I. B. Tauris, 1999), 47. These are deep waters; the idea of the Perfect Man refers back to Sohravardi, Neoplatonism, and possibly to the personifications (daena, fravashi) and angels in Zoroastrianism; see also Henry Corbin, En Islam Iranien: Aspects Spirituels et Philosophiques, vol. 2 (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), 297–325.
47. Henry Corbin, Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth: From Mazdean Iran to Shi‘ite Iran (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), 139; the similarity to the earlier extracts describing the daena is obvious.
48. Chittick and Wilson, 60.
49. G. M. Wickens, trans., The Bustan of Sa’di (Leiden: 1974), 150.
50. Edward Granville Browne, A Literary History of Persia: Volume II, From Firdawsi to Sa‘di (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 530.
51. Saberi, 274; translation by Axworthy and Ahmadzadeh.
52. Ibid., 277; translation by Axworthy and Ahmadzadeh.
53. Arberry, Classical Persian Literature, 331. There is more than an echo of this poem in Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach.
54. Arberry, 43; I am grateful to Lenny Lewisohn for his translation. Compare with Thomas Hardy’s poem “Moments of Vision”:
That mirror
Which makes of men a transparency
Who holds that mirror
And bids us such a breast-bare spectacle see
Of you and me?
55. And not just Iranians—Western commentators have agonized over whether such poems, addressed to a Beloved in the third person singular—which in Persian is gender neutral—are homoerotic or conventionally heterosexual. The answer, given the absence of clear gender markers, such as one finds in other poems, is surely that the ambiguity is deliberate. One might more profitably reflect how appropriate the neutral third person is to the higher meaning of the Beloved, i.e., to God.
56. P. Natil Khanlari, ed., Divan-e Hafez (Tehran: 1980), ghazal 197; also quoted in John W. Limbert, Iran: At War with History (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1987), 144.
57. Saberi, 384; Saberi’s translation.
58. The Cambridge History of Iran, Volume 5, 546–547.
59. Jürgen Paul, “L’invasion Mongole comme revelateur de la société Iranienne,” in L’Iran face à la domination Mongole (Tehran: 1997), 46–47 and passim.
60. Cf. Mostafa Vaziri, Iran as Imagined Nation: The Construction of National Identity (New York: Marlowe and Company, 1994), passim.
61. Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967), 353–355; E. Gellner, “Tribalism and the State in the Middle East,” in Tribes and State Formation in the Middle East (London: I. B. Tauris, 1991), passim.
CHAPTER 4—SHI‘ISM AND THE SAFAVIDS
1. The following draws largely on Moojan Momen, An Introduction to Shi‘i Islam: The History and Doctrines of Twelver Shi‘ism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), 28–33 and passim.
2. See for example James A. Bill and John Alden Williams, Roman Catholics and Shi‘i Muslims: Prayer, Passion, and Politics (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 1–7.
3. Kathryn Babayan, Mystics, Monarchs and Messiahs: Cultural Landscapes of Early Modern Iran (Cambridge: Harvard Center for Middle Eastern Studies, 2002), xxxviii.
4. Ibid., xxxix.
5. Encyclopedia Iranica “Esmail” (Savory); see also Andrew J. Newman, Safavid Iran: Rebirth of a Persian Empire (London: I. B. Tauris, 2006), 9–12.
6. “Esmail,” in Encyclopedia Iranica (Savory).
7. Newman, 24–25, passim.
8. The extent of Shi‘ism in Iran before 1500 and the changes thereafter have been thoroughly explored by Rasul Ja‘farian, Din va Siyasat dar Dawrah-ye Safavi (Qom: 1991).
9. Foltz, 134.
10. V. Minorsky, ed. and trans., Tadhkirat al-Muluk: A Manual of Safavid Administration (London: Gibb Memorial Trust, 1980), 33–35.
11. See Willem Floor, The Economy of Safavid Persia (Wiesbaden, Germany: 2000), and Rudolph Matthee, The Pursuit of Pleasure: Drugs and Stimulants in Iranian History 1500–1900 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005).
12. C. A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World 1780–1830 (London: Longman, 1989), 30; J. Foran, “The Long Fall of the Safavid Dynasty: Moving Beyond the Standard Views,” in The International Journal of Middle East Studies, no. 24 (1992): 281–304 (passim); Mansur Sefatgol, “Safavid Administration of Avqaf: Structure, Changes and Functions, 1077–1135/1666–1722,” in Society and Culture in the Early Modern Middle East: Studies on Iran in the Safavid Period (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2003), 408.
13. See Willem Floor, Safavid Government Institutions (Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers, 2001) and Minorsky.
14. “Molla Sadra Shirazi,” in Encyclopaedia Iranica (Sajjad Rizvi). “Molla” and “Mullah” are the same word, but I refer to Molla Sadra in this way in an attempt to distance him from modern connotations that could be misleading.
15. Roy Mottahedeh, The Mantle of the Prophet (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), 179.
16. Yarshater, Persian Literature, 249–288, and, notably, the quotation from Bausani, 275.
17. Levy, 293–295; see also Eliz Sanasarian, Religious Minorities in Iran (Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 45.
18. To get a sense of this, albeit in a description from a later period, the relationship between the Jewish family and their village mullah in Dorit Rabinyan’s Persian Brides (Edinburgh: George Braziller Publishers, 1998) is vivid and memorable.
19. Mottahedeh, 203. The thinker Ali Shariati (1933–1977) also attacked the Shi‘ism of the Safavid period (Black Shiism) but arguably was addressing deficiencies of religious practice in his own time rather than making a historical point. His priority was to encourage a resurgence of true Shi‘ism (Red Shi‘ism)—a revolutionary Shi‘ism of social justice—see Chapter 7.
20. See Rudolph Matthee, “Unwalled Cities and Restless Nomads: Firearms and Artillery in Safavid Iran,” in Safavid Persia: The History and Politics of an Islamic Society (London: I. B. Tauris, 1996), and Michael Axworthy, “The Army of Nader Shah,” in Iranian Studies (December 2007).
21. Matthee, The Pursuit of Pleasure, 61.
22. Ibid., 50–56.
23. Roger Savory, Iran Under the Safavids (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 232.
24. Matthee, The Pursuit of Pleasure, 58–60.
25. Ibid., 91–92, 92n. The evidence comes not just from Western observers at court, but also from Persian sources; the Shaykh ol-Eslam of Qom had the temerity to criticize the shah’s drinking and was lucky to escape execution for it.
26. Newman, Safavid Iran, 99; “Part of this struggle for the hearts and minds of the ‘popular’ classes.”
27. See V. Moreen, “Risala-yi Sawa‘iq al-Yahud [The treatise Lightning Bolts Against the Jews] by Muhammad Baqir b. Muhammad Taqi al-Majlisi (d. 1699),” in Die Welt des Islams 32 (1992), passim.
28. J. Calmard, “Popular Literature Under the Safavids,” in Society and Culture in the Early Modern Middle East: Studies on Iran in the Safavid Period (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2003), 331.
CHAPTER 5—THE FALL OF THE SAFAVIDS, NADER SHAH, THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY INTERREGNUM, AND THE EARLY YEARS OF THE QAJAR DYNASTY
1. This version is taken from Sir John Malcolm, History of Persia: Containing an Account of the Religion, Government, Usages, and Character of the Inhabitants of That Kingdom (London: Murray, 1829), 399–400; but a number of Persian and other sources give the same story—cf. Mohammad Kazem Marvi, 18, and Fr. Judasz Tadeusz Krusinski, The History of the Late Revolutions of Persia (London: 1740; New York: Arno Press, reprint 1973), 62–64.
2. Matthee, The Pursuit of Pleasure, 92–94; Babayan, 485; Lewisohn, The Heritage of Sufism, Volume I, 132–133.
3. Birgitt Hoffmann, ed. and trans., Persische Geschichte 1694–1835 erlebt, erinnert und erfunden—das Rustam at-Tawarikh in deutscher Bearbeitung (Bamberg, Germany: Aku, 1986), 203–204, 290; Krusinski, 121–122; Michael Axworthy, The Sword of Persia: Nader Shah, from Tribal Warrior to Conquering Tyrant (London: I. B. Tauris, 2006), 31–33.
4. Bayly, 30; Foran.
5. Krusinski, 196–198.
6. Axworthy, The Sword of Persia, 142.
7. N. D. Miklukho-Maklai, “Zapiski S Avramova ob Irane kak istoricheskii Istochnik,” in Uchenye Zapiski Leningradskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta. Seriia vostokovedcheskikh nauk, Part 3 (Leningrad.: 1952), 97.
8. Basile Vatatzes (ed. N. Iorga), Persica: Histoire de Chah-Nadir (Bucharest, Romania: 1939), 131–133.
9. Levy, 360–362; Axworthy, The Sword of Persia, 169.
10. The full significance of Nader’s religious policy is covered admirably in Ernest Tucker’s Nadir Shah’s Quest for Legitimacy in Post-Safavid Iran (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006).
11. See Axworthy, The Sword of Persia, 249–250; as well as Axworthy, “The Army of Nader Shah.” The size of the army is corroborated from a number of sources, and is plausible given earlier trends.
12. Bayly, 23 (Ottoman and Moghul figures); Floor, The Economy of Safavid Persia, 2; Charles Issawi, The Economic History of Iran, 1800–1914 (Chicago: University of Chica
go Press, 1971), 20; Willem Floor, “Dutch Trade in Afsharid Persia” Studia Iranica, Tome 34, fascicule 1, 2005.
13. Axworthy, The Sword of Persia, 280–281.
14. Mirza Mohammad Mahdi Astarabadi, Jahangusha-ye Naderi, translated into French by Sir William Jones as the Histoire de Nader Chah (London: 1770) (original Persian text edited by Abdollah Anvar, Tehran, 1377), 187.
15. The Cambridge History of Iran, vol. 7, 63–65.
16. Floor, The Economy of Safavid Persia, 3.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid., 2–3; Issawi, 20.
19. Floor, “Dutch Trade in Afsharid Persia,” 59.
20. Notably by Ann K. S. Lambton, “The Tribal Resurgence and the Decline of the Bureaucracy in the Eighteenth Century,” in Studies in Eighteenth-Century Islamic History (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1977). For this paragraph see also The Cambridge History of Iran, vol. 7, 506–541 (Richard Tapper); Richard Tapper, Frontier Nomads of Iran: A Political and Social History of the Shahsevan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 1–33; and Gellner.
21. Hasan-e Fasa’i, History of Persia Under Qajar Rule (New York: Columbia University Press 1972), 4.
22. Ibid., 52–54.
23. Malcolm, 125.
24. The Cambridge History of Iran, vol. 7, 125.
25. See Hamid Algar, “Shi‘ism and Iran in the Eighteenth Century,” in Studies in Eighteenth-Century Islamic History (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1977).
26. Mottahedeh, 233; a similar process took place in the later Roman Empire with the title of senator and other honorifics.
27. Momen, 238–244; Nikki R. Keddie (Ghaffary), Qajar Iran and the Rise of Reza Khan 1796–1925 (Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers, 1999), 94–96.
28. For example, Hasan-e Fasa’i, 101–102.
29. The Cambridge History of Iran, vol. 7, 142–143.
30. Malcolm, 217.
31. Denis Wright, The English Amongst the Persians: Imperial Lives in Nineteenth-Century Iran (London: I. B. Tauris, 1977), 4–5.
32. The Cambridge History of Iran, vol. 7, 331–333; Hasan-e Fasa’i, 111.
33. Ibid., 334; Keddie, Qajar Iran and the Rise of Reza Khan 1796–1925, 22.
A History of Iran Page 37