The History Of The Turko-Persian tradition

• published: 01 May 2015
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The composite Turko-Persian tradition was a variant of Islamic culture. It was Persianate in that it was centered on a lettered tradition of Iranian origin; it was Turkic insofar as it was founded by and for many generations patronized by rulers of Turkic origin; it was Islamic in that Islamic notions of virtue, permanence, and excellence infused discourse about public issues as well as the religious affairs of the Muslims, who were the presiding elite. After the Arab Muslim conquest of Persia, Middle Persian, the language of Sassanids, continued in wide use well into the second Islamic century (eighth century) as a medium of administration in the eastern lands of the Caliphate. Despite Arabization of public affairs, the peoples retained much of their pre-Islamic outlook and way of life, adjusted to fit the demands of the Islamic religion. Towards the end of the first Islamic century, population began resenting the cost of sustaining the Arab Caliphs, the Umayyads - who become oppressive and corrupt, and in the second Islamic century (eighth century AD), a generally Persian-led uprising - led by the Iranian national hero Abu Muslim Khorasani - brought another Arab clan, the Abbasids, to the Caliphal throne. Under the Abbasids, the Persianate customs of their Barmakid viziers became the style of the ruling elite. Politically, the Abbasids soon started losing their control, causing two major and lasting consequences. First, the Abbasid Caliph al-Mutasim (833-842) greatly increased the presence of Turkic mercenaries and Mamluk slaves in the Caliphate, and they eventually displaced Arabs and Persians from the military, and therefore from the political hegemony, starting an era of Turko-Persian symbiosis. Second, the governors in Khurasan, Tahirids, were factually independent; then the Saffarids from Sistan freed the eastern lands, but were replaced by independent Samanids, although they showed perfunctory deference to the Caliph. Separation of the eastern lands from Caliphate was expressed in a distinctive Persianate culture that became a dominant culture in West, Central and South Asia, and the source of innovations elsewhere in the Islamicate world. This culture would persist, at least in the modified form of the Ottoman Empire, into the twentieth century. The Persianate culture was marked by the use of the new Persian language as a medium of administration and literature, by the rise of Persianized Turks to military control, by new political importance of non-Arab ulama, and by development of ethnically composite Islamicate society. Middle Persian was a lingua franca of the region before the Arab invasion, but afterwards Arabic became a preferred medium of literary expression. Instrumental in the spread of the Persian language as a common language along the Silk Road between China and Parthia in the second century BCE, that lasted well into the sixteenth century, were many Bukharian Jews who flocked to Bukhara in the Central Asia and as a merchant class played a great role in the operation of the Silk Road. In the ninth century emerged a new Persian language as the idiom of administration and literature. Tahirids and Saffarids continued using Persian as an informal language, although for them Arabic was the "only proper language for recording anything worthwhile, from poetry to science", but the Samanids made Persian a language of learning and formal discourse. The language that appeared in the ninth and tenth centuries was a new form of Persian, based on the Middle Persian of pre-Islamic times, but enriched by ample Arabic vocabulary and written in Arabic script. The Samanids began recording their court affairs in Arabic and in this language, and they used it as the main public idiom. The earliest great poetry in New Persian was written for the Samanid court. Samanids encouraged translation of religious works from Arabic into Persian. Even the learned authorities of Islam, the ulama, began using the Persian lingua franca in public, although they still used Arabic as a medium of scholarship. The crowning literary achievement in the early New Persian language, The Persian "Book of Kings" of Firdowsi, presented to the court of Mahmud of Ghazni (998-1030), was more than a literary achievement; it was a kind of Iranian nationalistic memoir, Firdowsi galvanized Persian nationalistic sentiments by invoking pre-Islamic Persian heroic imagery. Firdowsi enshrined in literary form the most treasured stories of popular folk-memory