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Persianate society

A Persianate society is a society that is based on or strongly influenced by the Persian language, culture, literature, art and/or identity.[1]: 6 

Persian miniature from the Shahnameh of Shah Tahmasp: Rustam asleep, while his horse Rakhsh slays a lion, fol. 118r.
Girl With Mirror. Qajar dynasty art.

The term "Persianate" is a neologism credited to Marshall Hodgson.[2] In his 1974 book, The Venture of Islam: The expansion of Islam in the Middle Periods, he defined it thus: "The rise of Persian had more than purely literary consequences: it served to carry a new overall cultural orientation within Islamdom.... Most of the more local languages of high culture that later emerged among Muslims... depended upon Persian wholly or in part for their prime literary inspiration. We may call all these cultural traditions, carried in Persian or reflecting Persian inspiration, 'Persianate' by extension."[3]: 293–94 [notes 1]

The term designates ethnic Persians but also societies that may not have been predominantly ethnically Persian but whose linguistic, material or artistic cultural activities were influenced by or based on Persianate culture. Examples of pre-19th-century Persianate societies were the Seljuq,[4][5][6] Timurid,[7][8] Mughal,[9][10] and Ottoman dynasties.[11][12][13][14]

List of historical Persianate (or Persian-speaking) states/dynasties

Based in the Iranian Plateau

Based in Asia Minor

Based in the Indian subcontinent

History

Persianate culture flourished for nearly fourteen centuries. It was a mixture of Persian and Islamic cultures that eventually underwent Persification and became the dominant culture of the ruling and elite classes of Greater Iran, Asia Minor, and South Asia.[16]

When the peoples of Greater Iran were conquered by Islamic forces in the 7th and 8th centuries, they became part of an empire much larger than any previous one under Persian rule.[16] While the Islamic conquest led to the Arabization of language and culture in the former Byzantine territories, this did not happen in Persia. Rather, the new Islamic culture evolving there was largely based on pre-Islamic Persian traditions of the area,[17] as well as on the Islamic customs that were introduced to the region by the Arab conquerors.[18]

Persianate culture, especially among the elite classes, spread across the Muslim territories in western, central, and south Asia, although populations across this vast region had conflicting allegiances (sectarian, local, tribal, and ethnic) and spoke many different languages. It was spread by poets, artists, architects, artisans, jurists, and scholars, who maintained relations among their peers in the far-flung cities of the Persianate world, from Anatolia to India.[3]

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,[19] daughter of Yazdegerd III, the last Sassanid 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 Sassanid kings.

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.[16] 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 Sassanid 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.[16]

The separation of the eastern territories from Baghdad was expressed in a distinctive Persianate culture that became dominant in west, central, and south Asia, and was the source of innovations elsewhere in the Islamic world. The Persianate culture was marked by the use of the New Persian language as a medium of administration and intellectual discourse, by the rise of Persianised-Turks to military control, by the new political importance of non-Arab ulama and by the development of an ethnically composite Islamic society.

Pahlavi was the lingua franca of the Sassanian Empire before the Arab invasion, but towards the end of the 7th and the beginning of the 8th century Arabic became a medium of literary expression. In the 9th century, a New Persian language emerged as the idiom of administration and literature. The Tahirid and Saffarid dynasties continued using Persian as an informal language, although for them Arabic was the "language for recording anything worthwhile, from poetry to science",[20] 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[clarification needed] the Middle-Persian of pre-Islamic times, but enriched amply by Arabic vocabulary and written in the Arabic script.

The Persian language, according[21] 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[22] to be the origin of the term Persianate.

Spread

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.[16]

Ferdowsi's Shahnameh enjoyed a special status in Iranian courtly culture as a historical narrative as well as a mythical one. The powerful effect that this text came to have on the poets of this period is partly due to the value that was attached to it as a legitimizing force, especially for new rulers in the Eastern Islamic world:

In the Persianate tradition the Shahnameh was viewed as more than literature. It was also a political treatise, as it addressed deeply rooted conceptions of honor, morality, and legitimacy. Illustrated versions of it were considered desirable as expressions of the aspirations and politics of ruling elites in the Iranian world.[23]

The Persianate culture that emerged under the Samanids in Greater Khorasan, in northeast Persia and the borderlands of Turkistan exposed the Turks to Persianate culture;[24] 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).[25]

The Ghaznavids, the rivals and future successors of the Samanids,[clarification needed] 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.[16]

The Ghaznavids moved their capital from Ghazni to Lahore in modern Pakistan, which they turned into another center of Islamic culture. Under their patronage, poets and scholars from Kashgar, Bukhara, Samarkand, Baghdad, Nishapur, Amol and Ghazni congregated in Lahore. Thus, the Persian language and Persianate culture was brought deep into India[26] 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 Sassanid architecture were resurrected, and great Iranian scholars were patronized.[clarification needed] At the same time, the Islamic religious institutions became more organized and Sunni orthodoxy became more codified.[citation needed]

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 was the Nezamiyeh, better known as the madrasas, named after its 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.[16]: 14 [20]: 224–30 

Shahnameh's impact and affirmation of Persianate culture

As the result of the impacts of Persian literature as well as to further political ambitions, it became a custom for rulers in the Persianate lands to not only commission a copy of the Shahnameh, but also to have his own epic, allowing court poets to attempt to reach the level of Ferdowsi:

Thus, as with any piece of historical writing, the Shahnameh can be evaluated as a historical source on two levels: firstly, for its contribution to the store of basic factual knowledge of a period, and secondly, for the light it sheds, intentionally or otherwise, on contemporary thought and politics.

— [27]

Iranian and Persianate poets received the Shahnameh and modeled themselves after it. Murtazavi formulates three categories of such works too: poets who took up material not covered in the epic, poets who eulogized their patrons and their ancestors in masnavi form for monetary reward, and poets who wrote poems for rulers who saw themselves as heroes in the Shahnameh,[28] echoing the earlier Samanid trend of patronizing the Shahnameh for legitimizing texts.[29]

First, Persian poets attempted to continue the chronology to a later period, such as the Zafarnamah of the Ilkhanid historian Hamdollah Mostowfi (d. 1334 or 1335), which deals with Iranian history from the Arab conquest to the Mongols and is longer than Ferdowsi's work.[30] The literary value of these works must be considered on an individual basis as Jan Rypka cautions: "all these numerous epics cannot be assessed very highly, to say nothing of those works that were substantially (or literally) copies of Ferdowsi. There are however exceptions, such as the Zafar-Nameh of Hamdu'llah Mustaufi a historically valuable continuation of the Shah-nama"[31] and the Shahanshahnamah (or Changiznamah) of Ahmad Tabrizi in 1337–38, which is a history of the Mongols written for Abu Sa'id.

Second, poets versified the history of a contemporary ruler for reward, such as the Ghazannameh written in 1361–62 by Nur al-Din ibn Shams al-Din. Third, heroes not treated in the Shahnameh and those having minor roles in it became the subjects of their own epics, such as the 11th-century Garshāspnāmeh by Asadi Tusi. This tradition, chiefly a Timurid one, resulted in the creation of Islamic epics of conquests as discussed by Marjan Molé.[32] Also see the classification employed by Z. Safa for epics: milli (national, those inspired by Ferdowsi's epic), tarikhi (historical, those written in imitation of Nizami's Iskandarnamah) and dini for religious works.[33] The other source of inspiration for Persianate culture was another Persian poet, Nizami, a most admired, illustrated and imitated writer of romantic masnavis.[34]

Along with Ferdowsi's and Nizami's works, Amir Khusraw Dehlavi's khamseh came to enjoy tremendous prestige, and multiple copies of it were produced at Persianized courts. Seyller has a useful catalog of all known copies of this text.[35]

Distinction

In the 16th century, Persianate culture became sharply distinct from the Arab world to the west, the dividing zone falling along the Euphrates. Socially the Persianate world was marked by a system of ethnologically defined elite statuses: the rulers and their soldiery were non-Iranians in origin, but the administrative cadres and literati were Iranians. Cultural affairs were marked by a characteristic pattern of language use: New Persian was the language of state affairs, scholarship and literature and Arabic the language of religion.[26]

Safavids and the resurrection of Iranianhood in West Asia

The Safavid dynasty ascended to predominance in Iran in the 16th century—the first native Iranian dynasty since the Buyyids.[36][37][38] 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,[39] and patronizing Persian culture [16] They made Iran the spiritual bastion of Shi’ism against the onslaughts of orthodox Sunni Islam, and a repository of Persian cultural traditions and self-awareness of Persian identity.[40]: 228 

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.[40]: 228  Shah Isma'il's successors went further and adopted the title of Shāhanshāh (king of kings). The Safavid kings considered themselves, like their predecessors the Sassanid Emperors, the khudāygān (the shadow of God on earth).[40]: 226  They revived Sassanid architecture,[40]: 226  build grand mosques and elegant charbagh gardens, collected books (one Safavid ruler had a library of 3,000 volumes), and patronized "Men of the Pen"[41]: 105  The Safavids introduced Shiism into Persia to distinguish Persian society from the Ottomans, their Sunni archrivals to the west.[3]

Ottomans

 
The Ottoman Süleymanname (The Book of Suleyman) manuscript of Celebi, in Shirazi style with Persian Texts

At the beginning of the 14th century, the Ottomans rose to predominance in Asia Minor. The Ottomans patronized Persian literature for five and a half centuries and attracted great numbers of writers and artists, especially in the 16th century.[42] 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.[43] 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.[41]: 159  The Ottoman Sultan Suleyman wrote an entire divan in Persian language.[44] According to Hodgson:

The rise of Persian (the language) had more than purely literary consequence: it served to carry a new overall cultural orientation within Islamdom. Henceforth while Arabic held its own as the primary language of the religious disciplines and even, largely, of natural science and philosophy, Persian became, in an increasingly part of Islamdom, the language of polite culture; it even invaded the realm of scholarship with increasing effects. It was to form the chief model of the rise of still other languages. Gradually a third "classical" tongue emerged, Turkish, whose literature was based on Persian tradition.

— [21]

Toynbee's assessment of the role of the Persian language is worth quoting in more detail, from A Study of History:

In the Iranian world, before it began to succumb to the process of Westernization, the New Persian language, which had been fashioned into literary form in mighty works of art...gained a currency as a lingua franca; and at its widest, about the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries of the Christian Era, its range in this role extended, without a break, across the face of South-Eastern Europe and South-Western Asia from the Ottoman pashalyq of Buda, which had been erected out of the wreckage of the Western Christian Kingdom of Hungary after the Ottoman victory at Mohacz in A.D. 1526, to the Muslim "successor-states" which had been carved, after the victory of the Deccanese Muslim princes at Talikota in A.D. 1565, out of the carcass of the slaughtered Hindu Empire of Vijayanagar. For this vast cultural empire the New Persian language was indebted to the arms of Turkish-speaking empire-builders, reared in the Iranian tradition and therefore captivated by the spell of the New Persian literature, whose military and political destiny it had been to provide one universal state for Orthodox Christendom in the shape of the Ottoman Empire and another for the Hindu World in the shape of the Timurid Mughal Raj. These two universal states of Iranian construction on Orthodox Christian and on Hindu ground were duly annexed, in accordance with their builders' own cultural affinities, to the original domain of the New Persian language in the homelands of the Iranian Civilization on the Iranian plateau and in the Basin of the Oxus and the Jaxartes; and in the heyday of the Mughal, Safawi, and Ottoman regimes New Persian was being patronized as the language of literae humaniores by the ruling element over the whole of this huge realm, while it was also being employed as the official language of administration in those two-thirds of its realm that lay within the Safawi and the Mughal frontiers.

— [45]

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.[46] 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 Turks very early appropriated the entire Persian literary system down to its minute detail, and that in the same unquestioning and wholehearted fashion in which they had already accepted Islam.

The Saljuqs had, in the words of the same author:

attained a very considerable degree of culture, thanks entirely to Persian tutorage. About the middle of the eleventh century they [that is, the Saljuqs] had overrun Persia, when, as so often happened, the Barbarian conquerors adopted the culture of their civilized subjects. Rapidly the Seljuq Turks pushed their conquest westward, ever carrying with them Persian culture...[s]o, when some hundred and fifty years later Sulayman's son [the leader of the Ottomans]... penetrated into Asia Minor, they [the Ottomans] found that although Seljuq Turkish was the everyday speech of the people, Persian was the language of the court, while Persian literature and Persian culture reigned supreme. It is to the Seljuqs with whom they were thus fused, that the Ottomans, strictly so called, owe their literary education; this therefore was of necessity Persian as the Seljuqs knew no other. The Turks were not content with learning from the Persians how to express thought; they went to them to learn what to think and in what way to think. In practical matters, in the affairs of everyday life and in the business of government, they preferred their own ideas; but in the sphere of science and literature they went to school with the Persian, intent not merely on acquiring his method, but on entering into his spirit, thinking his thought and feeling his feelings. And in this school they continued so long as there was a master to teach them; for the step thus taken at the outset developed into a practice; it became the rule with the Turkish poets to look ever Persia-ward for guidance and to follow whatever fashion might prevail there. Thus it comes about that for centuries Ottoman poetry continued to reflect as in a glass the several phases through which that of Persia passed...[s]o the first Ottoman poets, and their successors through many a generation, strove with all their strength to write what is little else than Persian poetry in Turkish words. But such was not consciously their aim; of national feeling in poetry they dreamed not; poetry was to them one and indivisible, the language in which it was written merely an unimportant accident.

Persianate culture of South Asia

In general, from its earliest days, Persian culture was brought into the Subcontinent (or South Asia) by various Persianised Turkic and Afghan dynasties.[47] 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.[26] The speculative thought of the times at the Mughal court, as in other Persianate courts, leaned towards the eclectic gnostic dimension of Sufi Islam, having similarities with Hindu Vedantism, indigenous Bhakti and popular theosophy.[48]

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.[citation needed][49]: 24–32  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.[49]: 33  They cultivated Persian art, enticing to their courts artists and architects from Bukhara, Tabriz, Herat, Shiraz, and other cities of Greater Iran. The Taj Mahal and its Charbagh were commissioned by the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan for his Iranian bride.

Iranian poets, such as Sa’di, Hafez, Rumi and Nizami, who were great masters of Sufi mysticism from the Persianate world, were the favorite poets of the Mughals.[citation needed] Their works were present in Mughal libraries and counted among the emperors’ prized possessions, which they gave to each other; Akbar and Jahangir often quoted from them, signifying that they had imbibed them to a great extent. An autographed note of both Jahangir and Shah Jahan on a copy of Sa’di's Gulestān states that it was their most precious possession.[50]: 101, cat. no. 36 a.c  A gift of a Gulestān was made by Shah Jahan to Jahanara Begum, an incident which is recorded by her with her signature.[50]: 332.38, Cat. no. 136a.f  Shah Jahan also considered the same work worthy enough to be sent as a gift to the king of England in 1628, which is presently in the Chester Beatty Library, Dublin. The emperor often took out auguries from a copy of the diwan of Hafez belonging to his grandfather, Humayun. One such incident is recorded in his own handwriting in the margins of a copy of the diwan, presently in the Khuda Bakhsh Oriental Library, Patna.[51] The court poets Naziri, ‘Urfi, Faizi, Khan-i Khanan, Zuhuri, Sanai, Qodsi, Talib-i Amuli and Abu Talib Kalim were all masters imbued with a similar Sufi spirit, thus following the norms of any Persianate court.[notes 2]

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.[52][53]

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.[48]

Media of Persianate culture

 
Illustration from Jami's Rose Garden of the Pious, dated 1553. The image blends Persian poetry and Persian miniature into one, as is the norm for many works of Persian literature.

Persian poetry (Sufi poetry)

From about the 12th century, Persian lyric poetry was enriched with a spirituality and devotional depth not to be found in earlier works. This development was due to the pervasive spread of mystical experience within Islam. Sufism developed in all Muslim lands, including the sphere of Persian cultural influence. As a counterpoise to the rigidity of formal Islamic theology and law, Islamic mysticism sought to approach the divine through acts of devotion and love rather than through mere rituals and observance. Love of God being the focus of the Sufis' religious sentiments, it was only natural for them to express it in lyrical terms, and Persian Sufis, often of exceptional sensibility and endowed with poetic verve, did not hesitate to do so. The famous 11th-century Sufi, Abu Sa'id of Mehna frequently used his own love quatrains (as well as others) to express his spiritual yearnings, and with mystic poets such as Attar and Iraqi, mysticism became a legitimate, even fashionable subject of lyric poems among the Persianate societies. Furthermore, as Sufi orders and centers (Khaneghah) spread throughout Persian societies, Persian mystic poetic thought gradually became so much a part of common culture that even poets who did not share Sufi experiences ventured to express mystical ideas and imagery in their work.[54]

Shi'ism

Persian music

Conclusion

As the broad cultural region remained politically divided, the sharp antagonisms between empires stimulated the appearance of variations of Persianate culture. After 1500, the Iranian culture developed distinct features of its own, with interposition of strong pre-Islamic and Shiite Islamic culture. Iran's ancient cultural relationship with Southern Iraq (Sumer/Babylonia) remained strong and endured in spite of the loss of Mesopotamia to the Ottomans. Its ancient cultural and historical relationship with the Caucasus endured until the loss of Azerbaijan, Armenia, eastern Georgia and parts of the North Caucasus to Imperial Russia following the Russo-Persian Wars in the course of the 19th century. The culture of peoples of the eastern Mediterranean in Anatolia, Syria, and Egypt developed somewhat independently; India developed a vibrant and completely distinct South Asian style with little to no remnants of the once patronized Indo-Persian culture by the Mughals.[55][56]

See also

Notes

  1. ^ "Out of the wreckage of the Persianate Samanid empire of Khurasan and Transoxiana..."[15]

References

  1. ^ Arjomand, Said Amir (2004). Studies on Persianate Societies. ISBN 978-81-7304-667-4.
  2. ^ Lawrence, Bruce B. (2009). "Islam in Afro-Eurasia: A Bridge Civilization". In Peter J. Katzenstein (ed.). Civilizations in World Politics: Plural and Pluralist Perspectives. Routledge. pp. 157–175. ISBN 978-0-203-87248-2. Persianate is a new term, first coined by Marshall Hodgson to offer a different explanation of Islam in the world system than that extrapolated from Wallerstein. While Persianate depicts a cultural force that is linked to Persian language and to self-identifying Persians, Persianate is more than either a language or a people; it highlights elements that Persians share with Indo-Aryan rulers who preceded Muslims to the subcontinent. Two elements are paramount: hierarchy ... (and) deference
  3. ^ a b c Hodgson, Marshall G. S. (1974). The Venture of Islam. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
  4. ^ Özgündenli, O. "Persian Manuscripts in Ottoman and Modern Turkish Libraries". Encyclopaedia Iranica (online ed.).
  5. ^ Luther, K.A. "Alp Arslān". Encyclopaedia Iranica (online ed.). Saljuq activity must always be viewed both in terms of the wishes of the sultan and his Khorasanian, Sunni advisors, especially Nezām-al-molk ...
  6. ^ "Seljuq". Encyclopædia Britannica (online ed.). Because the Turkish Seljuqs had no Islamic tradition or strong literary heritage of their own, they adopted the cultural language of their Persian instructors in Islam. Literary Persian thus spread to the whole of Iran, and the Arabic language disappeared in that country except in works of religious scholarship
  7. ^ . The Columbia Encyclopedia (Sixth ed.). New York City: Columbia University. Archived from the original on 2006-12-05. Retrieved 2006-11-08.
  8. ^ David J. Roxburgh. The Persian Album, 1400–1600: From Dispersal to Collection. Yale University Press, 2005. pg 130: "Persian literature, especially poetry, occupied a central role in the process of assimilation of Timurid elite to the Perso-Islamicate courtly culture, and so it is not surprising to find Baysanghur commissioned a new edition of Firdawsi's Shanameh"
  9. ^ Lehmann, F. . Encyclopaedia Iranica (Online ed.). New York City: Columbia University Center for Iranian (Persian) Studies. pp. 320–323. Archived from the original on 2007-10-13. Retrieved 2006-11-07. His origin, milieu, training, and culture were steeped in Persian culture and so Babor was largely responsible for the fostering of this culture by his descendants, the Mughals of India, and for the expansion of Persian cultural influence in the Indian subcontinent, with brilliant literary, artistic, and historiographical results
  10. ^ "Indo-Persian Literature Conference: SOAS: North Indian Literary Culture (1450–1650)". SOAS. Retrieved 28 November 2012.
  11. ^ Özgündenli, O. "Persian Manuscripts in Ottoman and Modern Turkish Libraries". Encyclopaedia Iranica (online ed.).
  12. ^ "Persian in service of the state: the role of Persophone historical writing in the development of an Ottoman imperial aesthetic", Studies on Persianate Societies, vol. 2, 2004, pp. 145–63
  13. ^ "Historiography. xi. Persian Historiography in the Ottoman Empire". Encyclopaedia Iranica. Vol. 12, fasc. 4. 2004. pp. 403–11.
  14. ^ Walter, F. "7. The Departure of Turkey from the 'Persianate' Musical Sphere". Music of the Ottoman court.
  15. ^ A.C.S. Peacock, The Great Seljuk Empire, (Edinburgh University Press, 2015),[1] 2022-12-05 at the Wayback Machine
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Notes

  1. ^ Hodgson says, "It could even be said that Islamicate civilization, historically, is divisible in the more central areas into an earlier 'caliphal' and a later 'Persianate' phase; with variants in the outlying regions—Maghrib, Sudanic lands, Southern Seas, India,... (p. 294)"
  2. ^ For the influence of Rumi's poetry on contemporary poetics, see Schimmel, The Triumphal Sun: 374.78; for Mughal poetry, see Ghani, A History of Persian Language and Literature; Rahman, Persian Literature; Hasan, Mughal Poetry; Abidi, .Tālib-I Āmulī; idem, .Qudsi Mashhadi.; Nabi Hadi, Talib-i Amuli; Browne, A Literary History, vol. IV: 241.67.

External links

  • Association for the Study of Persianate Societies (ASPS)

persianate, society, society, that, based, strongly, influenced, persian, language, culture, literature, identity, persian, miniature, from, shahnameh, shah, tahmasp, rustam, asleep, while, horse, rakhsh, slays, lion, 118r, girl, with, mirror, qajar, dynasty, . A Persianate society is a society that is based on or strongly influenced by the Persian language culture literature art and or identity 1 6 Persian miniature from the Shahnameh of Shah Tahmasp Rustam asleep while his horse Rakhsh slays a lion fol 118r Girl With Mirror Qajar dynasty art The term Persianate is a neologism credited to Marshall Hodgson 2 In his 1974 book The Venture of Islam The expansion of Islam in the Middle Periods he defined it thus The rise of Persian had more than purely literary consequences it served to carry a new overall cultural orientation within Islamdom Most of the more local languages of high culture that later emerged among Muslims depended upon Persian wholly or in part for their prime literary inspiration We may call all these cultural traditions carried in Persian or reflecting Persian inspiration Persianate by extension 3 293 94 notes 1 The term designates ethnic Persians but also societies that may not have been predominantly ethnically Persian but whose linguistic material or artistic cultural activities were influenced by or based on Persianate culture Examples of pre 19th century Persianate societies were the Seljuq 4 5 6 Timurid 7 8 Mughal 9 10 and Ottoman dynasties 11 12 13 14 Contents 1 List of historical Persianate or Persian speaking states dynasties 1 1 Based in the Iranian Plateau 1 2 Based in Asia Minor 1 3 Based in the Indian subcontinent 2 History 3 Origins 4 Spread 4 1 Shahnameh s impact and affirmation of Persianate culture 5 Distinction 6 Safavids and the resurrection of Iranianhood in West Asia 7 Ottomans 8 Persianate culture of South Asia 9 Media of Persianate culture 9 1 Persian poetry Sufi poetry 9 2 Shi ism 9 3 Persian music 10 Conclusion 11 See also 12 Notes 13 References 14 Notes 15 External linksList of historical Persianate or Persian speaking states dynasties EditBased in the Iranian Plateau Edit Ghaznavids Ghurid Empire Samanid Empire a Great Seljuq Empire Khwarazmian dynasty Ilkhanate Timurid Empire Buyid dynasty Aq Qoyunlu Kara Koyunlu Shirvanshah Safavid Empire Afsharid dynasty Zand dynasty Qajar dynastyBased in Asia Minor Edit Sultanate of Rum Seljuk Empire Ottoman EmpireBased in the Indian subcontinent Edit Delhi Sultanate Kashmir Sultanate Bengal Sultanate Gujarat Sultanate Jaunpur Sultanate Bahamani Sultanate Malwa Sultanate Khandesh Sultanate Bijapur Sultanate Ahmadnagar Sultanate Golconda Sultanate Bidar Sultanate Berar Sultanate Carnatic Sultanate Mughal Empire Sur Empire Sikh Empire Jammu and Kashmir Oudh Rohilkhand Rampur Tonk Banganapalle Malerkotla Pataudi Bahawalpur Bhopal Junagadh Hyderabad Bengal Subah History EditPersianate culture flourished for nearly fourteen centuries It was a mixture of Persian and Islamic cultures that eventually underwent Persification and became the dominant culture of the ruling and elite classes of Greater Iran Asia Minor and South Asia 16 When the peoples of Greater Iran were conquered by Islamic forces in the 7th and 8th centuries they became part of an empire much larger than any previous one under Persian rule 16 While the Islamic conquest led to the Arabization of language and culture in the former Byzantine territories this did not happen in Persia Rather the new Islamic culture evolving there was largely based on pre Islamic Persian traditions of the area 17 as well as on the Islamic customs that were introduced to the region by the Arab conquerors 18 Persianate culture especially among the elite classes spread across the Muslim territories in western central and south Asia although populations across this vast region had conflicting allegiances sectarian local tribal and ethnic and spoke many different languages It was spread by poets artists architects artisans jurists and scholars who maintained relations among their peers in the far flung cities of the Persianate world from Anatolia to India 3 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 ghulat 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 19 daughter of Yazdegerd III the last Sassanid 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 Sassanid kings Origins EditAfter 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 16 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 Sassanid 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 16 The separation of the eastern territories from Baghdad was expressed in a distinctive Persianate culture that became dominant in west central and south Asia and was the source of innovations elsewhere in the Islamic world The Persianate culture was marked by the use of the New Persian language as a medium of administration and intellectual discourse by the rise of Persianised Turks to military control by the new political importance of non Arab ulama and by the development of an ethnically composite Islamic society Pahlavi was the lingua franca of the Sassanian Empire before the Arab invasion but towards the end of the 7th and the beginning of the 8th century Arabic became a medium of literary expression In the 9th century a New Persian language emerged as the idiom of administration and literature The Tahirid and Saffarid dynasties continued using Persian as an informal language although for them Arabic was the language for recording anything worthwhile from poetry to science 20 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 clarification needed the Middle Persian of pre Islamic times but enriched amply by Arabic vocabulary and written in the Arabic script The Persian language according 21 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 22 to be the origin of the term Persianate Spread Edit Great Mongol Shahnameh 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 16 Ferdowsi s Shahnameh enjoyed a special status in Iranian courtly culture as a historical narrative as well as a mythical one The powerful effect that this text came to have on the poets of this period is partly due to the value that was attached to it as a legitimizing force especially for new rulers in the Eastern Islamic world In the Persianate tradition the Shahnameh was viewed as more than literature It was also a political treatise as it addressed deeply rooted conceptions of honor morality and legitimacy Illustrated versions of it were considered desirable as expressions of the aspirations and politics of ruling elites in the Iranian world 23 The Persianate culture that emerged under the Samanids in Greater Khorasan in northeast Persia and the borderlands of Turkistan exposed the Turks to Persianate culture 24 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 25 The Ghaznavids the rivals and future successors of the Samanids clarification needed 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 16 The Ghaznavids moved their capital from Ghazni to Lahore in modern Pakistan which they turned into another center of Islamic culture Under their patronage poets and scholars from Kashgar Bukhara Samarkand Baghdad Nishapur Amol and Ghazni congregated in Lahore Thus the Persian language and Persianate culture was brought deep into India 26 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 Sassanid architecture were resurrected and great Iranian scholars were patronized clarification needed At the same time the Islamic religious institutions became more organized and Sunni orthodoxy became more codified citation needed 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 was the Nezamiyeh better known as the madrasas named after its 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 16 14 20 224 30 Shahnameh s impact and affirmation of Persianate culture Edit As the result of the impacts of Persian literature as well as to further political ambitions it became a custom for rulers in the Persianate lands to not only commission a copy of the Shahnameh but also to have his own epic allowing court poets to attempt to reach the level of Ferdowsi Thus as with any piece of historical writing the Shahnameh can be evaluated as a historical source on two levels firstly for its contribution to the store of basic factual knowledge of a period and secondly for the light it sheds intentionally or otherwise on contemporary thought and politics 27 Iranian and Persianate poets received the Shahnameh and modeled themselves after it Murtazavi formulates three categories of such works too poets who took up material not covered in the epic poets who eulogized their patrons and their ancestors in masnavi form for monetary reward and poets who wrote poems for rulers who saw themselves as heroes in the Shahnameh 28 echoing the earlier Samanid trend of patronizing the Shahnameh for legitimizing texts 29 First Persian poets attempted to continue the chronology to a later period such as the Zafarnamah of the Ilkhanid historian Hamdollah Mostowfi d 1334 or 1335 which deals with Iranian history from the Arab conquest to the Mongols and is longer than Ferdowsi s work 30 The literary value of these works must be considered on an individual basis as Jan Rypka cautions all these numerous epics cannot be assessed very highly to say nothing of those works that were substantially or literally copies of Ferdowsi There are however exceptions such as the Zafar Nameh of Hamdu llah Mustaufi a historically valuable continuation of the Shah nama 31 and the Shahanshahnamah or Changiznamah of Ahmad Tabrizi in 1337 38 which is a history of the Mongols written for Abu Sa id Second poets versified the history of a contemporary ruler for reward such as the Ghazannameh written in 1361 62 by Nur al Din ibn Shams al Din Third heroes not treated in the Shahnameh and those having minor roles in it became the subjects of their own epics such as the 11th century Garshaspnameh by Asadi Tusi This tradition chiefly a Timurid one resulted in the creation of Islamic epics of conquests as discussed by Marjan Mole 32 Also see the classification employed by Z Safa for epics milli national those inspired by Ferdowsi s epic tarikhi historical those written in imitation of Nizami s Iskandarnamah and dini for religious works 33 The other source of inspiration for Persianate culture was another Persian poet Nizami a most admired illustrated and imitated writer of romantic masnavis 34 Along with Ferdowsi s and Nizami s works Amir Khusraw Dehlavi s khamseh came to enjoy tremendous prestige and multiple copies of it were produced at Persianized courts Seyller has a useful catalog of all known copies of this text 35 Distinction EditIn the 16th century Persianate culture became sharply distinct from the Arab world to the west the dividing zone falling along the Euphrates Socially the Persianate world was marked by a system of ethnologically defined elite statuses the rulers and their soldiery were non Iranians in origin but the administrative cadres and literati were Iranians Cultural affairs were marked by a characteristic pattern of language use New Persian was the language of state affairs scholarship and literature and Arabic the language of religion 26 Safavids and the resurrection of Iranianhood in West Asia EditThe Safavid dynasty ascended to predominance in Iran in the 16th century the first native Iranian dynasty since the Buyyids 36 37 38 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 39 and patronizing Persian culture 16 They made Iran the spiritual bastion of Shi ism against the onslaughts of orthodox Sunni Islam and a repository of Persian cultural traditions and self awareness of Persian identity 40 228 The founder of the dynasty Shah Isma il adopted the title of Persian Emperor Padisah i iran 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 40 228 Shah Isma il s successors went further and adopted the title of Shahanshah king of kings The Safavid kings considered themselves like their predecessors the Sassanid Emperors the khudaygan the shadow of God on earth 40 226 They revived Sassanid architecture 40 226 build grand mosques and elegant charbagh gardens collected books one Safavid ruler had a library of 3 000 volumes and patronized Men of the Pen 41 105 The Safavids introduced Shiism into Persia to distinguish Persian society from the Ottomans their Sunni archrivals to the west 3 Ottomans EditThis section contains too many or overly lengthy quotations for an encyclopedic entry Please help improve the article by presenting facts as a neutrally worded summary with appropriate citations Consider transferring direct quotations to Wikiquote or for entire works to Wikisource October 2008 The Ottoman Suleymanname The Book of Suleyman manuscript of Celebi in Shirazi style with Persian Texts At the beginning of the 14th century the Ottomans rose to predominance in Asia Minor The Ottomans patronized Persian literature for five and a half centuries and attracted great numbers of writers and artists especially in the 16th century 42 One of the most renowned Persian poets in the Ottoman court was Fethullah Arifi Celebi also a painter and historian and the author of the Suleymanname or Suleyman nama a biography of Suleyman the Magnificent 43 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 41 159 The Ottoman Sultan Suleyman wrote an entire divan in Persian language 44 According to Hodgson The rise of Persian the language had more than purely literary consequence it served to carry a new overall cultural orientation within Islamdom Henceforth while Arabic held its own as the primary language of the religious disciplines and even largely of natural science and philosophy Persian became in an increasingly part of Islamdom the language of polite culture it even invaded the realm of scholarship with increasing effects It was to form the chief model of the rise of still other languages Gradually a third classical tongue emerged Turkish whose literature was based on Persian tradition 21 Toynbee s assessment of the role of the Persian language is worth quoting in more detail from A Study of History In the Iranian world before it began to succumb to the process of Westernization the New Persian language which had been fashioned into literary form in mighty works of art gained a currency as a lingua franca and at its widest about the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries of the Christian Era its range in this role extended without a break across the face of South Eastern Europe and South Western Asia from the Ottoman pashalyq of Buda which had been erected out of the wreckage of the Western Christian Kingdom of Hungary after the Ottoman victory at Mohacz in A D 1526 to the Muslim successor states which had been carved after the victory of the Deccanese Muslim princes at Talikota in A D 1565 out of the carcass of the slaughtered Hindu Empire of Vijayanagar For this vast cultural empire the New Persian language was indebted to the arms of Turkish speaking empire builders reared in the Iranian tradition and therefore captivated by the spell of the New Persian literature whose military and political destiny it had been to provide one universal state for Orthodox Christendom in the shape of the Ottoman Empire and another for the Hindu World in the shape of the Timurid Mughal Raj These two universal states of Iranian construction on Orthodox Christian and on Hindu ground were duly annexed in accordance with their builders own cultural affinities to the original domain of the New Persian language in the homelands of the Iranian Civilization on the Iranian plateau and in the Basin of the Oxus and the Jaxartes and in the heyday of the Mughal Safawi and Ottoman regimes New Persian was being patronized as the language of literae humaniores by the ruling element over the whole of this huge realm while it was also being employed as the official language of administration in those two thirds of its realm that lay within the Safawi and the Mughal frontiers 45 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 46 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 Turks very early appropriated the entire Persian literary system down to its minute detail and that in the same unquestioning and wholehearted fashion in which they had already accepted Islam The Saljuqs had in the words of the same author attained a very considerable degree of culture thanks entirely to Persian tutorage About the middle of the eleventh century they that is the Saljuqs had overrun Persia when as so often happened the Barbarian conquerors adopted the culture of their civilized subjects Rapidly the Seljuq Turks pushed their conquest westward ever carrying with them Persian culture s o when some hundred and fifty years later Sulayman s son the leader of the Ottomans penetrated into Asia Minor they the Ottomans found that although Seljuq Turkish was the everyday speech of the people Persian was the language of the court while Persian literature and Persian culture reigned supreme It is to the Seljuqs with whom they were thus fused that the Ottomans strictly so called owe their literary education this therefore was of necessity Persian as the Seljuqs knew no other The Turks were not content with learning from the Persians how to express thought they went to them to learn what to think and in what way to think In practical matters in the affairs of everyday life and in the business of government they preferred their own ideas but in the sphere of science and literature they went to school with the Persian intent not merely on acquiring his method but on entering into his spirit thinking his thought and feeling his feelings And in this school they continued so long as there was a master to teach them for the step thus taken at the outset developed into a practice it became the rule with the Turkish poets to look ever Persia ward for guidance and to follow whatever fashion might prevail there Thus it comes about that for centuries Ottoman poetry continued to reflect as in a glass the several phases through which that of Persia passed s o the first Ottoman poets and their successors through many a generation strove with all their strength to write what is little else than Persian poetry in Turkish words But such was not consciously their aim of national feeling in poetry they dreamed not poetry was to them one and indivisible the language in which it was written merely an unimportant accident Persianate culture of South Asia EditMain article Indo Persian culture In general from its earliest days Persian culture was brought into the Subcontinent or South Asia by various Persianised Turkic and Afghan dynasties 47 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 26 The speculative thought of the times at the Mughal court as in other Persianate courts leaned towards the eclectic gnostic dimension of Sufi Islam having similarities with Hindu Vedantism indigenous Bhakti and popular theosophy 48 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 citation needed 49 24 32 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 49 33 They cultivated Persian art enticing to their courts artists and architects from Bukhara Tabriz Herat Shiraz and other cities of Greater Iran The Taj Mahal and its Charbagh were commissioned by the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan for his Iranian bride Iranian poets such as Sa di Hafez Rumi and Nizami who were great masters of Sufi mysticism from the Persianate world were the favorite poets of the Mughals citation needed Their works were present in Mughal libraries and counted among the emperors prized possessions which they gave to each other Akbar and Jahangir often quoted from them signifying that they had imbibed them to a great extent An autographed note of both Jahangir and Shah Jahan on a copy of Sa di s Gulestan states that it was their most precious possession 50 101 cat no 36 a c A gift of a Gulestan was made by Shah Jahan to Jahanara Begum an incident which is recorded by her with her signature 50 332 38 Cat no 136a f Shah Jahan also considered the same work worthy enough to be sent as a gift to the king of England in 1628 which is presently in the Chester Beatty Library Dublin The emperor often took out auguries from a copy of the diwan of Hafez belonging to his grandfather Humayun One such incident is recorded in his own handwriting in the margins of a copy of the diwan presently in the Khuda Bakhsh Oriental Library Patna 51 The court poets Naziri Urfi Faizi Khan i Khanan Zuhuri Sanai Qodsi Talib i Amuli and Abu Talib Kalim were all masters imbued with a similar Sufi spirit thus following the norms of any Persianate court notes 2 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 A in i Akbari 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 Jam i Jam of Awhadi Maraghai the Hakika o Sana i the Qabusnameh of Keikavus Sa di s Gulestan and Bustan and the diwans of Khaqani and Anvari 52 53 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 48 Media of Persianate culture Edit Illustration from Jami s Rose Garden of the Pious dated 1553 The image blends Persian poetry and Persian miniature into one as is the norm for many works of Persian literature Persian poetry Sufi poetry Edit Main article Persian poetry From about the 12th century Persian lyric poetry was enriched with a spirituality and devotional depth not to be found in earlier works This development was due to the pervasive spread of mystical experience within Islam Sufism developed in all Muslim lands including the sphere of Persian cultural influence As a counterpoise to the rigidity of formal Islamic theology and law Islamic mysticism sought to approach the divine through acts of devotion and love rather than through mere rituals and observance Love of God being the focus of the Sufis religious sentiments it was only natural for them to express it in lyrical terms and Persian Sufis often of exceptional sensibility and endowed with poetic verve did not hesitate to do so The famous 11th century Sufi Abu Sa id of Mehna frequently used his own love quatrains as well as others to express his spiritual yearnings and with mystic poets such as Attar and Iraqi mysticism became a legitimate even fashionable subject of lyric poems among the Persianate societies Furthermore as Sufi orders and centers Khaneghah spread throughout Persian societies Persian mystic poetic thought gradually became so much a part of common culture that even poets who did not share Sufi experiences ventured to express mystical ideas and imagery in their work 54 Shi ism Edit Main article Shia Islam Persian music Edit Main articles Music of Iran and Persian traditional musicConclusion EditAs the broad cultural region remained politically divided the sharp antagonisms between empires stimulated the appearance of variations of Persianate culture After 1500 the Iranian culture developed distinct features of its own with interposition of strong pre Islamic and Shiite Islamic culture Iran s ancient cultural relationship with Southern Iraq Sumer Babylonia remained strong and endured in spite of the loss of Mesopotamia to the Ottomans Its ancient cultural and historical relationship with the Caucasus endured until the loss of Azerbaijan Armenia eastern Georgia and parts of the North Caucasus to Imperial Russia following the Russo Persian Wars in the course of the 19th century The culture of peoples of the eastern Mediterranean in Anatolia Syria and Egypt developed somewhat independently India developed a vibrant and completely distinct South Asian style with little to no remnants of the once patronized Indo Persian culture by the Mughals 55 56 See also EditPersianization Turco Persian traditionNotes Edit Out of the wreckage of the Persianate Samanid empire of Khurasan and Transoxiana 15 References Edit Arjomand Said Amir 2004 Studies on Persianate Societies ISBN 978 81 7304 667 4 Lawrence Bruce B 2009 Islam in Afro Eurasia A Bridge Civilization In Peter J Katzenstein ed Civilizations in World Politics Plural and Pluralist Perspectives Routledge pp 157 175 ISBN 978 0 203 87248 2 Persianate is a new term first coined by Marshall Hodgson to offer a different explanation of Islam in the world system than that extrapolated from Wallerstein While Persianate depicts a cultural force that is linked to Persian language and to self identifying Persians Persianate is more than either a language or a people it highlights elements that Persians share with Indo Aryan rulers who preceded Muslims to the subcontinent Two elements are paramount hierarchy and deference a b c Hodgson Marshall G S 1974 The Venture of Islam Chicago University of Chicago Press Ozgundenli O Persian Manuscripts in Ottoman and Modern Turkish Libraries Encyclopaedia Iranica online ed Luther K A Alp Arslan Encyclopaedia Iranica online ed Saljuq activity must always be viewed both in terms of the wishes of the sultan and his Khorasanian Sunni advisors especially Nezam al molk Seljuq Encyclopaedia Britannica online ed Because the Turkish Seljuqs had no Islamic tradition or strong literary heritage of their own they adopted the cultural language of their Persian instructors in Islam Literary Persian thus spread to the whole of Iran and the Arabic language disappeared in that country except in works of religious scholarship Timurids The Columbia Encyclopedia Sixth ed New York City Columbia University Archived from the original on 2006 12 05 Retrieved 2006 11 08 David J Roxburgh The Persian Album 1400 1600 From Dispersal to Collection Yale University Press 2005 pg 130 Persian literature especially poetry occupied a central role in the process of assimilation of Timurid elite to the Perso Islamicate courtly culture and so it is not surprising to find Baysanghur commissioned a new edition of Firdawsi s Shanameh Lehmann F Zaher ud Din Babor Founder of Mughal empire Encyclopaedia Iranica Online ed New York City Columbia University Center for Iranian Persian Studies pp 320 323 Archived from the original on 2007 10 13 Retrieved 2006 11 07 His origin milieu training and culture were steeped in Persian culture and so Babor was largely responsible for the fostering of this culture by his descendants the Mughals of India and for the expansion of Persian cultural influence in the Indian subcontinent with brilliant literary artistic and historiographical results Indo Persian Literature Conference SOAS North Indian Literary Culture 1450 1650 SOAS Retrieved 28 November 2012 Ozgundenli O Persian Manuscripts in Ottoman and Modern Turkish Libraries Encyclopaedia Iranica online ed Persian in service of the state the role of Persophone historical writing in the development of an Ottoman imperial aesthetic Studies on Persianate Societies vol 2 2004 pp 145 63 Historiography xi Persian Historiography in the Ottoman Empire Encyclopaedia Iranica Vol 12 fasc 4 2004 pp 403 11 Walter F 7 The Departure of Turkey from the Persianate Musical Sphere Music of the Ottoman court A C S Peacock The Great Seljuk Empire Edinburgh University Press 2015 1 Archived 2022 12 05 at the Wayback Machine a b c d e f g h Canfield Robert 1991 Turko Persia in historical perspective Cambridge University Press Shahbazi A Shapur 2006 Sassanian Dynasty Encyclopaedia Iranica online ed Archived from the original on 2010 01 09 Boyce Mary 1967 Bibi Shahrbanu and the Lady of Pars BSOAS p 30 Boyce Mary December 1989 Bibi Sahrbanu Encyclopaedia Iranica Retrieved 10 October 2013 a b Frye R N 1975 The Golden Age of Persia The Arabs in the East London and New York Weidenfeld and Nicolson a b Hodgson Marshall G S 1974 The Expansion of Islam in the Middle Periods The Venture of Islam Vol 2 Chicago USA p 293 Arjomand Said Amir 2008 From the Editor Defining Persianate Studies Journal of Persianate Studies 1 4 2 Lentz T W Lowry G D 1989 Timur and the Princely Vision Persian Art and Culture in the Fifteenth Century Washington DC USA Smithsonian Press p 126 Chambers R L 2000 The Ottoman Empire a Chronological Outline University of Chicago Daftary F Sectarian and National Movements in Iran Khorasan and Trasoxania during Umayyad and Early Abbasid Times In M S Asimov C E Bosworth eds History of Civilizations of Central Asia Vol 4 1 UNESCO Publishing Institute of Ismaili Studies a b c Ikram S M 1964 Muslim Civilization in India New York USA Columbia University Press Woodhead C 1983 An Experiment in Official Historiography The Post of Sehnameci in the Ottoman Empire c 1555 1605 Wiener Zeitschrift fur die Kunde des Morgenlandes 75 174 Murtazavi Manuchihr Muqallidan i Shahnamah dar dawrah yi Mughul va Timuri Masa il i asr i Ilkhanan Tabriz Mu assasah i Tarikh va Farhang i Iran SH 1358 pp 554 555 Meisami Julie S 1999 Persian Historiography to the End of the Twelfth Century Edinburgh UK Edinburgh University Press p 37 aksi az ru yi nuskhah i khatti i muvarrakh i AH 807 dar Kitabkhanah i Biritaniya Or 2833 Zafarnamah i Hamd Allah Mustawfi bi inzimam i Shahnamah i Abu al Qasim Firdawsi bih tashih i Hamd Allah Mustawfi Tehran Iran Markaz i Nashr i Danishgahi i Iran Vin Akadimi i Ulum i Utrish 1999 Rypka Jan History of Iranian Literature p 165 Mole Marjan 1953 L epopee iranienne apres Firdosi La Nouvelle Clio 5 pp 377 393 Safa Z 1990 Hamasahsarayi dar Iran Tehran Iran Amir Kabir Quint D 1993 Epic and Empire Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton Princeton Princeton University Press p 15 Seyller John 2001 Pearls of the Parrot of India The Walters Art Museum Khamsa of Amir Khusraw of Delhi Baltimore USA Walters Art Museum pp 143 58 Savory Roger M 2005 Safawids Encyclopaedia of Islam online ed Savory Roger M 1965 The consolidation of Safawid power in Persia Isl Persien Geschichte des neupersischen Reichs Meyers Konversations Lexikon in German Vol XII p 873 Savory R M 1980 Iran under the Safavids Cambridge UK Cambridge University Press p 3 a b c d Hillenbrand R 1999 Islamic art and Architecture London UK ISBN 978 0 500 20305 7 a b Titley Norah M 1983 Persian Miniature Painting and its Influence on the Art of Turkey and India Austin USA University of Texas Yarshater Ehsan 1988 The development of Iranian literatures In Ehsan Yarshater ed Persian Literature Columbia Lectures on Iranian Studies Vol 3 37 Albany USA Bibliotheca Persica and State University of New York p 15 Yazici Tahsin Celebi Encyclopaedia Iranica Archived from the original on November 18 2007 Retrieved February 10 2007 Halman Talat S Suleyman the Magnificent Poet permanent dead link Toynbee Arnold J A Study of History Vol V pp 514 15 GIBB MEMORIAL SERIES Encyclopaedia Iranica www iranicaonline org Retrieved 2020 01 27 Sigfried J de Laet History of Humanity From the seventh to the sixteenth century Archived 2022 12 05 at the Wayback Machine UNESCO 1994 ISBN 978 9231028137 p 734 a b Rizvi S 1993 Chapter 1 Muslim Revivalist Movements in Northern India in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries New Delhi India a b Fisher M H 2001 Persian Professor in Britain Mirza Muhammad Ibrahim at the East India Company s College 1826 44 Comparative Studies of South Asia Africa and the Middle East Duke University Press 21 1 2 24 32 doi 10 1215 1089201X 21 1 2 24 a b Soudavar Art of the Persian Courts Prince Khurram s Shahjahan own specimen of calligraphic verses of Hafiz is in the Rampur Raza Library Rampur hereafter RL Siddiqi Rampur Raza Library pl 24 Browne E G 1951 A Literary History of Persia Vol II and III Cambridge Arberry A J 1958 Classical Persian Literature London The Development of Persian Poetry Iransaga Shamil S 2004 The City of Beauties in Indo Persian Poetic Landscape Comparative Studies of South Asia Africa and the Middle East Duke University Press 24 Delvoye F 1996 Music in the Indo Persian Courts of India 14th 18th century Studies in Artistic Patronage The International Institute for Asian Studies IIAS Notes Edit Hodgson says It could even be said that Islamicate civilization historically is divisible in the more central areas into an earlier caliphal and a later Persianate phase with variants in the outlying regions Maghrib Sudanic lands Southern Seas India p 294 For the influence of Rumi s poetry on contemporary poetics see Schimmel The Triumphal Sun 374 78 for Mughal poetry see Ghani A History of Persian Language and Literature Rahman Persian Literature Hasan Mughal Poetry Abidi Talib I Amuli idem Qudsi Mashhadi Nabi Hadi Talib i Amuli Browne A Literary History vol IV 241 67 External links EditAssociation for the Study of Persianate Societies ASPS Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title Persianate society amp oldid 1125681215, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,

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