In attempting to attain some perspective on Iran in
history, I begin, as I think one must, with the Arab-Islamic conquests in
the seventh century-that series of epoch-making events following the
advent of Islam, the mission of the Prophet Muhammad and the carrying of
his message to vast areas east and west from Arabia, and the incorporation
of many lands, from the Atlantic and the Pyrenees to the borders of India
and China and beyond, into the new Arab-Islamic empire. These events have
been variously seen in Iran: by some as a blessing, the advent of the true
faith, the end of the age of ignorance and heathenism; by others as a
humiliating national defeat, the conquest and subjugation of the country
by foreign invaders. Both perceptions are of course valid, depending on
one's angle of vision.
What I would like first to bring to your
attention is a significant and indeed remarkable difference between what
happened in Iran and what happened in all the other countries of the
Middle East and North Africa that were conquered by the Arabs and
incorporated in the Islamic caliphate in the seventh and eighth centuries.
These other countries of ancient civilization,
Iraq, Syria, Egypt, North Africa, were Islamized and Arabized in a
remarkably short time. Their old religions were either abandoned entirely
or dwindled into small minorities; their old languages almost disappeared.
Some survived in scriptures and liturgies, some were still spoken in a few
remote villages, but in most places, among most people, the previous
languages were forgotten, the identities expressed in those languages were
replaced, and the ancient civilizations of Iraq, Syria, and Egypt gave way
to what we nowadays call the Arab world.
Iran was indeed Islamized, but it was not
Arabized. Persians remained Persians. And after an interval of silence,
Iran reemerged as a separate, different and distinctive element within
Islam, eventually adding a new element even to Islam itself. Culturally,
politically, and most remarkable of all even religiously, the Iranian
contribution to this new Islamic civilization is of immense importance.
The work of Iranians can be seen in every field of cultural endeavor,
including Arabic poetry, to which poets of Iranian origin composing their
poems in Arabic made a very significant contribution. In a sense, Iranian
Islam is a second advent of Islam itself, a new Islam sometimes referred
to as Islam-i Ajam. It was this Persian Islam, rather than the
original Arab Islam, that was brought to new areas and new peoples: to the
Turks, first in Central Asia and then in the Middle East in the country
which came to be called Turkey, and of course to India. The Ottoman Turks
brought a form of Iranian civilization to the walls of Vienna. A
seventeenth-century Turkish visitor who went to Vienna as part of an
Ottoman embassy, notes with curiosity that the language which they speak
in Vienna is a corrupt form of Persian. He had of course observed the
basic Indo-European kinship between Persian and German, and the fact that
the Germans say ist and the Persians say ast, almost the
same thing, for the verb "to be," present indicative
third-person singular.
By the time of the great Mongol invasions of the
thirteenth century, Iranian Islam had become not only an important
component; it had become a dominant element in Islam itself, and for
several centuries the main centers of Islamic power and civilization were
in countries that were, if not Iranian, at least marked by Iranian
civilization. For a while this supremacy was challenged by the last center
of power in the Arab world, the Mamluk Sultanate based in Egypt. But even
that last stronghold disappeared, after the contest between the Persians
and the Ottomans to decide which should conquer Egypt and the Ottoman
success in what might call the preliminary elimination bout. Arabian Islam
under Arab sovereignty survived only in Arabia and in remote outposts like
Morocco. The center of the Islamic world was under Turkish and Persian
states, both shaped by Iranian culture. The major centers of Islam in the
late medieval and early modern periods, the centers of both political and
cultural power, such as India, Central Asia, Iran, Turkey, were all part
of this Iranian civilization. Although much of it spoke various forms of
Turkish, as well as other local languages, their classical and cultural
language was Persian. Arabic was of course the language of scripture and
law, but Persian was the language of poetry and literature.
The Iranian Exception
Why this difference? Why is it that while the ancient
civilizations of Iraq, Syria, and Egypt, were submerged and forgotten,
that of Iran survived, and reemerged in a different form?
Various answers have been offered to this
question. One suggestion is that the difference is language. The peoples
of Iraq, Syria, Palestine, spoke various forms of Aramaic. Aramaic is a
Semitic language related to Arabic, and the transition from Aramaic to
Arabic was much easier than would have been the transition from Persian,
an Indo-European language, to Arabic. There is some force in that
argument. But then Coptic, the language of Egypt, was not a Semitic
language either, yet this did not impede the Arabization of Egypt. Coptic
survived for a while among the Christians, but eventually died even among
them, except as a liturgical language used in the rituals of the Coptic
Church.
Some have seen this difference as due to the
possession by the Persians of a superior culture. A higher culture absorbs
a lower culture. They quote as a parallel the famous Latin dictum:
"conquered Greece conquers its fierce conquerors"-in other words
the Romans adopt Greek culture. It is a tempting but not convincing
parallel. The Romans conquered and ruled Greece, as the Arabs conquered
and ruled Iran, but the Romans learned Greek, they admired Greek
civilization, they read, translated, imitated Greek books. The Arabs did
not learn Persian, the Persians learned Arabic. And the direct Persian
literary influence on Arabic is minimal and came only through Persian
converts.
Perhaps a closer parallel would be what happened
in England after 1066, the conquest of the Anglo-Saxons by the Normans,
and the transformation of the Anglo-Saxon language under the impact of
Norman French into what we now call English. There are interesting
parallels between the Norman conquest of England and the Arab conquest of
Iran-a new language, created by the breakdown and simplification of the
old language and the importation of an enormous vocabulary of words from
the language of the conquerors; the creation of a new and compound
identity, embracing both the conquerors and the conquered. I remember as a
small boy at school in England learning about the Norman conquest, and
being taught somehow to identify with both sides-with a new legitimacy
created by conquest, which in the case of Iran, though not of course of
England, was also buttressed by a new religion based on a new revelation.
Most of the other conquered peoples in Iraq, in
Syria, in Egypt, also had higher civilizations than that brought by the
nomadic invaders from the Arabian desert. Yet they were absorbed, as the
Persians were not. So we may have slightly modified or restated the
question; we haven't answered it. Another perhaps more plausible
explanation is the political difference, the elements of power and memory.
These other states conquered by the Arabs-Iraq, Syria, Palestine, Egypt
and the rest-were long-subjugated provinces of empires located elsewhere.
They had been conquered again and again; they had undergone military, then
political, then cultural, and then religious transformations, long before
the Arabs arrived there. In these places, the Arab-Islamic conquest meant
yet one more change of masters, yet one more change of teachers. This was
not the case in Iran. Iran too had been conquered by Alexander, and formed
part of the great Hellenistic Empire-but only briefly. Iran was never
conquered by Rome, and therefore the cultural impact of Hellenistic
civilization in Iran was much less than in the countries of the Levant,
Egypt and North Africa, where it was buttressed, sustained and in a sense
imposed through the agency of Roman imperial power. The Hellenistic impact
on Iran in the time of Alexander and his immediate successors was no doubt
considerable, but it was less deep and less enduring than in the
Mediterranean lands, and it was ended by a resurgence, at once national,
political and religious, and the rebirth of an Iranian polity under the
Parthians and then the Sasanids. A new empire arose in Iran which was the
peer and the rival of the empires of Rome and later of Byzantium.
This meant that at the time of the Arab conquest
and immediately after, the Persians, unlike their neighbors in the West,
were sustained by recent memories, one might even say current memories, of
power and glory. This sense of ancient glory, of pride in identity, comes
out very clearly in Persian writings of the Islamic period, written that
is to say in Islamic Persian in the Arabic script, with a large vocabulary
of Arabic words. We see the difference in a number of ways: in the
emergence of a kind of national epic poetry, which has no parallel in Iraq
or Syria or Egypt or any of these other places; and in the choice of
personal names. In the Fertile Crescent and westwards, the names that
parents gave their children were mostly names from the Qur'an or from
pagan Arabia-Ali, Muhammad, Ahmad, and the like. These names were also
used in Iran among Muslim Persians. But in addition, they used
distinctively Persian names: Khusraw, Shapur, Mehyar and other names
derived from a Persian past-a recent Persian past, that of the Sasanids,
but nevertheless Persian. We do not find Iraqis calling their sons
Nebuchadnezzar or Sennacherib, nor Egyptians calling their sons
Tutankhamen or Amenhotep. These civilizations were indeed dead and
forgotten. The Persian sense of pride did not rest on a history retained
and remembered, because their history too, except for the most recent
chapters, was lost and forgotten, no less than the ancient glories of
Egypt and Babylon. All that they had was myth and saga; a sketchy memory
of only the most recent chapters of the pre-Islamic history of Iran, none
at all of the earlier periods.
The Islamic view of history may serve as an
explanation of this-why does one bother to study history, what is the
importance of history? History is the record of the working out of God's
purpose for humanity, and from a Muslim, particularly a Sunni Muslim point
of view, it has a special importance as establishing the precedents of the
Prophet, the Companions and the early "rightly-guided" rulers of
Islam, who set the pattern of correct law and behavior. That means of
course that the only history that matters is Muslim history, and the
history of picturesque barbarians in remote places, even of picturesque
barbarians who may happen to be one's ancestors, has no moral or religious
value, and is therefore not worth retaining. By the time the Persians
recovered their voice, after the Islamic conquest, they had lost their
memory-though not, as we shall see, permanently.
The history of ancient Iran prior to the
Sasanids, the immediate predecessors of Islam, was obliterated by
successive changes. The ancient language was replaced by Muslim Persian,
the ancient scripts were forgotten and replaced by the Arabic script
modified to suit Persian phonetic needs. The old language and script
survived among the dwindling minority who remained faithful to the
Zoroastrian religion, but that was of little importance. Even the personal
names to which I alluded a moment ago were forgotten, except for the most
recent. Thus, for example, the name of Cyrus, in modern times acclaimed as
the greatest of the ancient Persian kings, was forgotten. The Persians
remembered the name of Alexander in the form Iskandar, but they did not
remember the name of Cyrus. Alexander was remembered better among the
Persians than were the Persian kings against whom he
fought.
Iran, Greeks and Jews
What little information survived about ancient Iran was
that which was recorded by two peoples, the Jews and the Greeks, the only
peoples active in the ancient Middle East who preserved their memories,
their voices and their languages. Both the Greeks and the Jews remembered
Cyrus; the Persians did not. The Greeks and the Jews alone provided such
information as existed about ancient Iran until comparatively modern
times, when the store of information was vastly increased by Orientalists,
that is to say European archeologists and philologists who found a way to
recover the ancient texts and decipher the ancient scripts.
Let me pause for a moment to look at the image of
Iran as preserved in the Bible and the Greek classics, that is to say, as
preserved by the Jews and the Greeks. The Greek view, as one would expect,
is dominated by the long struggles, beginning with the Persian invasion of
Greece and culminating in the great Greek counter-attack by Alexander.
This is a major theme in ancient Greek historiography; the contrast
between Greek democracy and Persian autocracy also forms an important
theme of Greek political writings. But despite the fact that the history
was mainly one of conflict, the tone of ancient Greek writing about Persia
is mostly respectful, and sometimes even compassionate, notably for
example in the play The Persians by Aeschylus, himself a veteran of
the Persian wars, who shows real compassion for the defeated Persian
enemy.
The Bible gives us a uniquely positive picture of
ancient Iran, in a literature which does not normally deal indulgently
with strangers, nor even with its own people. The earliest occurrences of
the name Persia, Paras, are in the Book of Ezekiel, where Paras
is listed along with other exotic and outlandish names to indicate the
outer limits of the known world. Paras has something like the
significance of ultima thule in modern usage. The name makes a more
dramatic appearance in the story of the writing on the wall at
Belshazzar's feast, where the inscription Mene mene, tekel upharsin informed
the hapless Babylonian monarch that he was weighed in the balances and
found wanting, and that his realms would be shared by the Medes and
Persians.
And then of course comes Cyrus, mentioned more
particularly in the later chapters of Isaiah, what the Bible critics call
Deutero-Isaiah, that part of the Book of Isaiah dating from after the
Babylonian captivity. The language used of Cyrus is little short of
astonishing. He is spoken of in the Hebrew text as God's anointed,
messiah, and he is accorded greater respect, not only than any other
non-Jewish ruler, but almost any Jewish ruler.
Inevitably the question arises-why? Why does the
Bible speak in such glowing terms of this heathen potentate? There is of
course one obvious answer, that Cyrus was, so to speak, the Balfour of his
day. He issued a declaration authorizing the Jews to return to their land
and restore their political existence. But that doesn't really answer the
question; it merely restates the question. Why did he do that? A series of
conquests had brought a multitude of ethnic groups, as we say nowadays,
under Persian rule, Why should Cyrus take such a step on behalf of one of
them? We only know the Jewish side of this, we don't know the Persian
side, and one can only venture a guess as to the reason. My suggestion is
that there was, shall we say, a perceived affinity, between those who
professed two spiritual, ethical religions, surrounded on all sides by
ignorant polytheists and idolaters. One can see this sense of affinity in
the latest books of the Old Testament, and also in subsequent Jewish
writings. One notes for example a number of Persian words, some already in
the Bible, many more in the post-Biblical Jewish literature.
This encounter between Iranian religion and
Jewish religion was of far-reaching significance in world history. We can
discern unmistakable traces of Persian influence, both intellectual and
material, on the development of post-exilic Jewry, and therefore also of
Christendom, and corresponding influence in the late Greco-Roman and
Byzantine world, and therefore ultimately in Europe.
Let me just take a few examples, first on the
practical side. The early Arabic sources tell us that the Persians
invented a new device for riding, a device called the stirrup, previously
unknown. We can easily see why this device, which revolutionized
transport, communications and also warfare, created so great an
impression. A mounted soldier in armor, on an armored horse, with a lance,
could launch a much more devastating charge with stirrups than without
them, when he was in imminent danger of being dismounted. We hear vivid
stories, specially from the Byzantine writers, of the advent of this new
and devastating instrument of warfare, the mounted, armored horseman, the
cataphract.
The stirrup also helped the Persians to develop
the postal system. Their system, described with admiration by the Greeks,
consisted of a network of couriers and relay stations all over the realm.
It was known in Arabic as barid, which comes of course from the
Persian verb burdan, meaning to carry. The post-horse was the paraveredos,
from which comes the German Pferd. Another innovation credited to
Iran, though the evidence here is conflicting, is the mill, the use of
wind and water to generate power. This was the first and for millennia the
only source of energy other than human and animal muscle.
In another area the Persians are accredited with
the invention of board games, particularly chess, which still uses a
Persian terminology- the Shah- and also the game which is variously known
as trik-trak, shich-besh, backgammon and other names.
We are on stronger ground in ascribing to
Persians- and here we come back to the theme of cultural history-the book,
that is the book in the form of a codex. The Greco-Roman world used
scrolls, and so did much of the ancient Middle East. The codex, stitched
and bound in the form which we now know as a book, seems to have
originated in Iran. The cultural impact of such an innovation was
obviously immense.
But let me turn to what is ultimately the more
important theme, and that is the influence of ideas. From Iran, from
Iranian religion, comes the concept of a cosmic struggle between almost
equal forces of good and evil. The Devil, as you know, was Iranian by
birth, although he is now given a local habitation and a name in the
Western Hemisphere. The idea of a power of evil, opposite and almost
equal, is characteristic of ancient Persian religion: Ahriman is the
predecessor of Satan, Mephistopheles, or whatever else we may choose to
call him. Linked with that was the idea of judgment and retribution, of
heaven and hell; and here I would remind you that paradise is also a
Persian word. The para is the same as the Greek peri; peridesos
in ancient Persian means walled enclosure.
Messianism too seems to have Persian antecedents,
in the doctrine that at the end of time a figure will arise from the
sacred seed of Zoroaster, who will establish all that is good on earth. It
is not without significance that the Messianic idea does not appear in the
Hebrew Bible until after the return from Babylon, that is to say after the
time when the Jews came under Persian influence. The importance of
messianism in the Judaeo-Christian tradition is obvious. Linked with this
is the idea and the practice of a religious establishment-a hierarchy of
priests with ranks, under the supreme authority of the chief priest, the Mobedhan
Mobedh, the Priest of Priests. And by the way, that form of title, the
Priest of Priests, the King of Kings, and the like, is characteristically
Iranian. It is used in many Iranian titles in antiquity; it was adopted
into Arabic: Amir al-Umara-the Amir of Amirs, Qadi al-Qudat-the
Qadi of Qadis. Perhaps even the title of the Pope in Rome: the Servant of
the Servants of God-Servus Servorum Dei-may be ascribed to indirect
Iranian influence. The whole idea of a church, not in the sense of a
building, a place of worship, but a hierarchy under a supreme head, may
well owe a good deal to Zoroastrian example.
The ancient religion of Iran survives.
Zoroastrianism is still the faith of small, dwindling, but not unimportant
minorities, in India, in Pakistan, and to some extent in Iran. They
preserved the ancient writings, in the ancient script, and a knowledge of
the ancient language, and it was these which enabled the first European
Orientalists to learn Middle Iranian and to use it to rediscover the still
more ancient languages of Iran.
Iran and Shi'ism
For at least a millennium, Iran has been associated
with Islam, and in the more recent centuries with Shi'ite Islam, which
some have seen as an expression, a reappearance of the Persian national
genius in an Islamic disguise. Some have gone even
further-nineteenth-century European writers like Gobineau claimed to see
the triumph of Shi'ism as the resurgence of the Aryanism of Iran against
the Semitism of Islam. Such ideas are rather discredited nowadays, though
they were popular at one time, and still have their adherents.
The difficulty about such theories is that
Shi'ism, like Islam itself, was brought to Iran by Arabs. The first
Shi'ites in Iran-and for a long time this remained so-were Arabs. The city
of Qomm, the stronghold and center of Iranian Shi'ism, was an Arab
foundation, and the first settlers in Qomm were Arabs. (I remember being
taken round Qomm by a Persian friend who pointed to the deserts that
surround it, and remarked: "Who but an Arab would build a town in a
place like this?") Shi'ism was reintroduced and imposed by the
Safavids many centuries later, and they, I would remind you, were Turks.
Until then Iran was a largely Sunni country. But no doubt that with the
establishment of the Shi'ite Safavid state a new era began, one of a
distinctively Iranian Shi'ite character.
The accession of the Safavids marks a new era in
Persian history and the establishment, for the first time in many
centuries, of a unified dynastic state. The Safavids brought certain
important new features. One I have already alluded to-unity. Under the
first Arab conquerors the whole of Iran was under one rule, that of the
Caliphs situated in Medina, then in Damascus, then in Baghdad. But with
the break-up of the Caliphate, Iran broke up into its various regions,
under local rulers of one kind or another. The Safavids for the first time
created a united realm of Iran, more or less within its present
frontiers-not just diverse regions, Pars and Khurasan and the rest of
them, but a single realm with a single ruler. It has remained so ever
since, in spite of the immense ethnic diversity which characterizes that
country to the present day. If you look, for example, round the periphery,
starting in the north-west, you have the Turkish-speaking Azarbaijanis. To
the south of them are Kurds, to the south of them are more Turks, the
Qashqais, to the south of them, in Khuzistan are Arabs, in the south-east
the Baluchis and then the Turkmen. These form a periphery, all around the
center, of peoples speaking different non-Persian languages. Nevertheless,
the culture of the Persian language and the distinctive Shi'ite version of
Islam helped to maintain the unity that was imposed by the Safavids and
maintained by their successors.
Shi'ism brought a second important feature, and
that is differentiation from all the neighbors: from the Ottomans in the
west, from the central Asian states in the north-east, from the
Indian-Muslim states in the south-east. Practically all of these were
Sunni states. True, Persian was used as a classical language, a literary
language and even at times a diplomatic language by all three neighbors,
the Ottomans, the Central Asians, and the Indians. But the crucial
difference between the Sunni and Shi'ite realms remained.
Another interesting development of the period,
particularly under the late Safavids and their successors, is the
emergence of the notion of Iran. I have been using the terms Persia and
Persians, to speak of the land and the people, as was customary in Western
languages until recently. The name Iran is ancient, but its current use is
modern. We first find the word in ancient Persian inscriptions. In the
inscription of Darius for example, in the ancient Persian language, he
describes himself as King of the Aryans. Iran is the same word as Aryan;
it means "noble" in the ancient languages of Iran and of India.
The King was the King Aryanum, which is a genitive plural, King of
the Aryans. It survives in the myths and sagas of the early medieval
period, in the Shahnama and related stories of the great struggle between
Iran and Turan; it reappears in the nineteenth century as the name of the
country in common rather than official usage. It did not become official
usage until much later, probably under the influence of the Third Reich.
The German government of the time, which needed various facilities and
help from Iran, went to some pains to assure the people of that country
that they were Iranians, which is the same as Aryans, that they were
therefore different from and superior to all their neighbors, and that the
Nuremberg Laws did not apply to them. It was at that time that the name of
the country, in foreign languages as well as in Persian, was officially
changed to Iran.
Let us look at another turning-point in history,
the Islamic Revolution, and its creation the Islamic Republic. This was
indeed a revolution. The word revolution has been much used in the Middle
East in modern times, to designate a whole series of coups d'état, palace
revolts, assassinations, civil wars and the like. What happened in Iran,
for better or for worse, was a real revolution, in the sense that the
French Revolution and the Russian Revolution were real revolutions. And
like them, the Iranian revolution had a tremendous impact in all those
countries with which it shares a common universe of discourse, in other
words in the Islamic world.
As with these earlier revolutions, there are
contrasting views of the Islamic revolution in Iran. In one of them, we
see actions and statements which have made the name of Iran, even the name
of Islam, stand for a regime of bloodthirsty bigots, maintained by tyranny
at home and by terror both at home and abroad. In the other, that which
they themselves prefer to present, we see an alternative diagnosis and an
alternative prescription for the ills and sufferings of the region, an
alternative, that is, to the alien and infidel ways that have long
prevailed, and a return to authenticity.
At the present time, with the ending of direct
outside rule and the rapid diminution even of outside influence, a
familiar pattern is beginning to reemerge in the Middle East. Today there
are again two major powers in the region, this time the Turkish Republic
and the Islamic Republic of Iran. In the sixteenth century, in the same
countries, two rival powers, the Ottoman Sultan and the Safavid Shah,
representing the Sunni and the Shi'ite versions of Islam, fought for the
headship of the Islamic world.
A thousand years earlier, in the sixth century,
in the same countries, two rivals, the Byzantine emperors and the Sasanids
of Iran, embodied rival civilizations and rival visions of the world. Both
Sasanids and Byzantines were conquered and overwhelmed by Islam. Both the
Ottoman Sultans and the Safavid Shahs were swept aside by new forces from
outside and also from inside their realms.
Today the rivals are two regimes, both
established by revolution, both embodying certain basic ideologies,
secular democracy in Turkey, Islamic theocracy in Iran. As in earlier
times, neither is impervious to the temptations of the other. In Turkey we
have seen a religious party win a fifth of the votes in a free election
and play an important role in national politics. We do not know how many
Iranians would prefer secular democracy, since in an Islamic theocracy
they are not permitted to express that preference. But from various
indications one may say that their number is not inconsiderable.
The struggle continues, within these two
countries and elsewhere, between two different versions of what was
originally a common civilization. The outcome remains far from certain.
Copyright © 2001 by Bernard Lewis |