Initial origins After the Arab Muslim conquest of Iran,
Pahlavi, the language of
Pre-Islamic Iran, continued to be widely used well into the second Islamic century (8th century) as a medium of administration in the eastern lands of the
Caliphate. Despite the
Islamization of public affairs, the Iranians retained much of their pre-Islamic outlook and way of life, adjusted to fit the demands of Islam. Towards the end of the 7th century, the population began resenting the cost of sustaining the Arab
caliphs, the
Umayyads, and in the 8th century, a general Iranian uprising—led by
Abu Muslim Khorrasani—brought another Arab family, the
Abbasids, to the Caliph's throne. Under the Abbasids, the capital shifted from
Syria to
Iraq, which had once been part of the
Sasanian Empire and was still considered to be part of the Iranian cultural domain. Persian culture, and the customs of the Persian
Barmakid viziers, became the style of the ruling elite. Politically, the Abbasids soon started losing their control over Iranians. The governors of
Khurasan, the
Tahirids, though appointed by the caliph, were effectively independent. When the Persian
Saffarids from
Sistan freed the eastern lands, the
Buyyids, the
Ziyarids and the
Samanids in Western Iran, Mazandaran and the north-east respectively, declared their independence. but the Samanids made Persian a language of learning and formal discourse. The language that appeared in the 9th and 10th centuries was a new form of Persian, derivative of the Middle-Persian of pre-Islamic times, but enriched by Arabic vocabulary and written in the Arabic script. The Persian language, according to
Marshall Hodgson in his
The Venture of Islam, was to form the chief model for the rise of still other languages to the literary level. Like
Turkish, most of the more local languages of high culture that later emerged among Muslims were heavily influenced by Persian (
Urdu being a prime example). One may call these traditions, carried in Persian or reflecting Persian inspiration, ‘Persianate’ by extension. This seems to be the origin of the term
Persianate. Persianate culture involved modes of consciousness, ethos, and religious practices that have persisted in the Iranian world against
hegemonic Arab Muslim (
Sunni) cultural constructs. This formed a calcified Persianate structure of thought and experience of the sacred, entrenched for generations, which later informed history, historical memory, and identity among
Alid loyalists and
heterodox groups labeled by
sharia-minded authorities as
ghulāt. In a way, along with investing the notion of
heteroglossia, Persianate culture embodies the Iranian past and ways in which this past blended with the Islamic present or became transmuted. The historical change was largely on the basis of a binary model: a struggle between the religious landscapes of late Iranian antiquity and a monotheist paradigm provided by the new religion, Islam. This duality is symbolically expressed in the
Shiite tradition that
Husayn ibn Ali, the third Shi'ite Imam, had married
Shahrbanu, daughter of
Yazdegerd III, the last Sasanian king of
Iran. This genealogy makes the later imams, descended from Husayn and Shahrbanu, the inheritors of both the Islamic Prophet Muhammad and of the pre-Islamic Sasanian kings.
West Asia Samanids , 1330s,
Bahram Gur killing a wolf,
Harvard University Art Museum The Iranian dynasty of the
Samanids began recording its court affairs in Persian as well as Arabic, and the earliest great poetry in New Persian was written for the Samanid court. The Samanids encouraged translation of religious works from Arabic into Persian. In addition, the learned authorities of Islam, the
ulama, began using the Persian
lingua franca in public. The crowning literary achievement in the early New Persian language was the
Shahnameh (Book of Kings), presented by its author
Ferdowsi to the court of
Mahmud of Ghazni (998–1030). This was a kind of Iranian nationalistic resurrection: Ferdowsi galvanized Persian nationalistic sentiment by invoking pre-Islamic Persian heroic imagery and enshrined in literary form the most treasured folk stories. The incorporation of the Turks into the main body of the Middle Eastern Islamic civilization, which was followed by the
Ghaznavids, thus began in Khorasan; "not only did the inhabitants of Khurasan not succumb to the language of the nomadic invaders, but they imposed their own tongue on them. The region could even assimilate the Turkic Ghaznavids and
Seljuks (11th and 12th centuries), the
Timurids (14th and 15th centuries), and the
Qajars (19th and 20th centuries).
Ghaznavids and Seljuqs The Ghaznavids, the rivals and future successors of the Samanids, ruled over the southeastern extremities of Samanid territories from the city of
Ghazni. Persian scholars and artists flocked to their court, and the Ghaznavids became patrons of Persianate culture. The Ghaznavids took with them Persianate culture as they subjugated Western and Southern Asia . Apart from Ferdowsi,
Rumi,
Abu Ali Sina,
Al-Biruni,
Unsuri Balkhi,
Farrukhi Sistani,
Sanayi Ghaznawi and Abu Sahl Testari were among the great Iranian scientists and poets of the period under Ghaznavid patronage. Persianate culture was carried by successive dynasties into Western and Southern Asia, particularly by the Persianized
Seljuqs (1040–1118) and their successor states, who presided over
Iran,
Syria, and
Anatolia until the 13th century, and by the Ghaznavids, who in the same period dominated Greater Khorasan and parts of
India. These two dynasties together drew the centers of the Islamic world eastward. The institutions stabilized Islamic society into a form that would persist, at least in
Western Asia, until the 20th century. and carried further in the 13th century. The Seljuqs won a decisive victory over the Ghaznavids and swept into Khorasan; they brought Persianate culture westward into western Persia, Iraq, Anatolia, and Syria. Iran proper along with
Central Asia became the heartland of Persian language and culture. As the Seljuqs came to dominate western Asia, their courts were Persianized as far west as the
Mediterranean Sea. Under their rule, many pre-Islamic Iranian traditional arts like Sasanian architecture were resurrected, and great Iranian scholars were patronized. At the same time, the Islamic religious institutions became more organized and
Sunni orthodoxy became more codified. The Persian jurist and theologian
Al-Ghazali was among the scholars at the Seljuq court who proposed a synthesis of
Sufism and
Sharia, which became the basis for a richer Islamic theology. Formulating the Sunni concept of division between temporal and religious authorities, he provided a theological basis for the existence of the
Sultanate, a temporal office alongside the
Caliphate, which at that time was merely a religious office. The main institutional means of establishing a consensus of the
ulama on these dogmatic issues were the
Nezamiyyas,
madrasas named after their founder
Nizam al-Mulk, a Persian vizier of the Seljuqs. These schools became the means of uniting Sunni
ulama, who legitimized the rule of the Sultans. The bureaucracies were staffed by graduates of the madrasas, so both the
ulama and the bureaucracies were under the influence of esteemed professors at the
madrasas. The Safavids, who were of mixed
Kurdish,
Turkic,
Georgian,
Circassian and
Pontic Greek ancestry, moved to the
Ardabil region in the 11th century. They re-asserted the Persian identity over many parts of West Asia and Central Asia, establishing an independent Persian state, and patronizing Persian culture The founder of the dynasty,
Shah Isma'il, adopted the title of Persian Emperor
Pādišah-ī Īrān, with its implicit notion of an Iranian state stretching from Afghanistan as far as the Euphrates and the North Caucasus, and from the Oxus to the southern territories of the Persian Gulf. The Safavids introduced Shiism into Persia to distinguish Persian society from the
Ottomans, their Sunni archrivals to the west. The Ottoman Empire's undeniable affiliation with the Persianate world during the first few decades of the sixteenth century are illustrated by the works of a scribe from the
Aq Qoyunlu court, Edris Bedlisi. One of the most renowned Persian poets in the Ottoman court was
Fethullah Arifi Çelebi, also a painter and historian, and the author of the
Süleymanname (or
Suleyman-nama), a biography of
Süleyman the Magnificent. At the end of the 17th century, they gave up Persian as the court and administrative language, using Turkish instead; a decision that shocked the highly Persianized Mughals in India. According to Hodgson: Toynbee's assessment of the role of the Persian language is worth quoting in more detail, from
A Study of History: E. J. W. Gibb is the author of the standard
A Literary History of Ottoman Poetry in six volumes, whose name has lived on in an important series of publications of Arabic, Persian, and Turkish texts, the
Gibb Memorial Series. Gibb classifies Ottoman poetry between the "Old School", from the 14th century to about the middle of the 19th century, during which time Persian influence was dominant; and the "Modern School", which came into being as a result of the Western impact. According to Gibb in the introduction (Volume I): The Saljuqs had, in the words of the same author:
South Asia In general, from its earliest days, Persian culture was brought into the
Indian Subcontinent (or South Asia) by various Persianised
Turkic and
Afghan dynasties. South Asian society was enriched by the influx of Persian-speaking and Islamic scholars, historians, architects, musicians, and other specialists of high Persianate culture who fled the Mongol devastation.
The sultans of Delhi, who were of Turko-Afghan origin, modeled their lifestyles after the Persian upper classes. They patronized Persian literature and music, but became especially notable for their architecture, because their builders drew from Irano-Islamic architecture, combining it with Indian traditions to produce a profusion of
mosques, palaces, and tombs unmatched in any other Islamic country. The
Mughals, who were of
Turco-Mongol descent, strengthened the
Indo-Persian culture, in South Asia. For centuries, Iranian scholar-officials had immigrated to the region where their expertise in Persianate culture and administration secured them honored service within the Mughal Empire. Networks of learned masters and madrasas taught generations of young South Asian men Persian language and literature in addition to Islamic values and sciences. Furthermore, educational institutions such as
Farangi Mahall and
Delhi College developed innovative and integrated curricula for modernizing Persian-speaking South Asians. A gift of a
Gulestān was made by Shah Jahan to
Jahanara Begum, an incident which is recorded by her with her signature. The court poets
Naziri,
'Orfi Shirazi,
Faizi,
Abdul Rahim Khan-i-Khanan,
Muhammad Zuhuri,
Sanai,
Qodsi Mashhadi,
Taleb Amoli and
Kalim Kashani were all masters imbued with a similar Sufi spirit, thus following the norms of any Persianate court. The tendency towards Sufi mysticism through Persianate culture in Mughal court circles is also testified by the inventory of books that were kept in Akbar's library, and are especially mentioned by his historian,
Abu'l Fazl, in the
Ā’in-ī Akbarī. Some of the books that were read out continually to the emperor include the
masnavis of Nizami, the works of
Amir Khusrow, Sharaf Manayri and Jami, the
Masnavi i-manavi of Rumi, the
Jām-i Jam of
Awhadi Maraghai, the
Hakika o Sanā’i, the
Qabusnameh of
Keikavus, Sa’di's
Gulestān and
Būstān, and the
diwans of
Khaqani and
Anvari. This intellectual symmetry continued until the end of the 19th century, when a Persian newspaper,
Miftah al-Zafar (1897), campaigned for the formation of Anjuman-i Ma’arif, an academy devoted to the strengthening of Persian language as a scientific language. ==Persianate cultural works==