Persians Nevertheless: Why Iranians Never Became Arabs

Why this difference? Why is it that while the ancient civilizations of Iraq, Syria, and Egypt, were submerged and forgotten, that of Iran survived, and reemerged in a different form?

Various answers have been offered to this question. One suggestion is that the difference is language. The peoples of Iraq, Syria, Palestine, spoke various forms of Aramaic. Aramaic is a Semitic language related to Arabic, and the transition from Aramaic to Arabic was much easier than would have been the transition from Persian, an Indo-European language, to Arabic.

There is some force in that argument. But then Coptic, the language of Egypt, was not a Semitic language either, yet this did not impede the Arabization of Egypt. Coptic survived for a while among the Christians, but eventually died even among them, except as a liturgical language used in the rituals of the Coptic Church.

Some have seen this difference as due to the possession by the Persians of a superior culture. A higher culture absorbs a lower culture. They quote as a parallel the famous Latin dictum: "conquered Greece conquers its fierce conquerors"-in other words the Romans adopt Greek culture.

It is a tempting but not convincing parallel. The Romans conquered and ruled Greece, as the Arabs conquered and ruled Iran, but the Romans learned Greek, they admired Greek civilization, they read, translated, imitated Greek books. The Arabs did not learn Persian, the Persians learned Arabic. And the direct Persian literary influence on Arabic is minimal and came only through Persian converts.

Perhaps a closer parallel would be what happened in England after 1066, the conquest of the Anglo-Saxons by the Normans, and the transformation of the Anglo-Saxon language under the impact of Norman French into what we now call English.

There are interesting parallels between the Norman conquest of England and the Arab conquest of Iran-a new language, created by the breakdown and simplification of the old language and the importation of an enormous vocabulary of words from the language of the conquerors; the creation of a new and compound identity, embracing both the conquerors and the conquered.

I remember as a small boy at school in England learning about the Norman conquest, and being taught somehow to identify with both sides-with a new legitimacy created by conquest, which in the case of Iran, though not of course of England, was also buttressed by a new religion based on a new revelation. Most of the other conquered peoples in Iraq, in Syria, in Egypt, also had higher civilizations than that brought by the nomadic invaders from the Arabian desert. Yet they were absorbed, as the Persians were not. So we may have slightly modified or restated the question; we haven't answered it.

Another perhaps more plausible explanation is the political difference, the elements of power and memory. These other states conquered by the Arabs-Iraq, Syria, Palestine, Egypt and the rest-were long-subjugated provinces of empires located elsewhere. They had been conquered again and again; they had undergone military, then political, then cultural, and then religious transformations, long before the Arabs arrived there. In these places, the Arab-Islamic conquest meant yet one more change of masters, yet one more change of teachers.

This was not the case in Iran. Iran too had been conquered by Alexander, and formed part of the great Hellenistic Empire-but only briefly. Iran was never conquered by Rome, and therefore the cultural impact of Hellenistic civilization in Iran was much less than in the countries of the Levant, Egypt and North Africa, where it was buttressed, sustained and in a sense imposed through the agency of Roman imperial power.

The Hellenistic impact on Iran in the time of Alexander and his immediate successors was no doubt considerable, but it was less deep and less enduring than in the Mediterranean lands, and it was ended by a resurgence, at once national, political and religious, and the rebirth of an Iranian polity under the Parthians and then the Sasanids. A new empire arose in Iran which was the peer and the rival of the empires of Rome and later of Byzantium.

This meant that at the time of the Arab conquest and immediately after, the Persians, unlike their neighbors in the West, were sustained by recent memories, one might even say current memories, of power and glory. This sense of ancient glory, of pride in identity, comes out very clearly in Persian writings of the Islamic period, written that is to say in Islamic Persian in the Arabic script, with a large vocabulary of Arabic words.

We see the difference in a number of ways: in the emergence of a kind of national epic poetry, which has no parallel in Iraq or Syria or Egypt or any of these other places; and in the choice of personal names. In the Fertile Crescent and westwards, the names that parents gave their children were mostly names from the Qur'an or from pagan Arabia-Ali, Muhammad, Ahmad, and the like. These names were also used in Iran among Muslim Persians.

But in addition, they used distinctively Persian names: Khusraw, Shapur, Mehyar and other names derived from a Persian past-a recent Persian past, that of the Sasanids, but nevertheless Persian. We do not find Iraqis calling their sons Nebuchadnezzar or Sennacherib, nor Egyptians calling their sons Tutankhamen or Amenhotep. These civilizations were indeed dead and forgotten.

The Persian sense of pride did not rest on a history retained and remembered, because their history too, except for the most recent chapters, was lost and forgotten, no less than the ancient glories of Egypt and Babylon. All that they had was myth and saga; a sketchy memory of only the most recent chapters of the pre-Islamic history of Iran, none at all of the earlier periods.

The Islamic view of history may serve as an explanation of this-why does one bother to study history, what is the importance of history? History is the record of the working out of God's purpose for humanity, and from a Muslim, particularly a Sunni Muslim point of view, it has a special importance as establishing the precedents of the Prophet, the Companions and the early "rightly-guided" rulers of Islam, who set the pattern of correct law and behavior.

That means of course that the only history that matters is Muslim history, and the history of picturesque barbarians in remote places, even of picturesque barbarians who may happen to be one's ancestors, has no moral or religious value, and is therefore not worth retaining. By the time the Persians recovered their voice, after the Islamic conquest, they had lost their memory-though not, as we shall see, permanently.

The history of ancient Iran prior to the Sasanids, the immediate predecessors of Islam, was obliterated by successive changes. The ancient language was replaced by Muslim Persian, the ancient scripts were forgotten and replaced by the Arabic script modified to suit Persian phonetic needs. The old language and script survived among the dwindling minority who remained faithful to the Zoroastrian religion, but that was of little importance.

Even the personal names to which I alluded a moment ago were forgotten, except for the most recent. Thus, for example, the name of Cyrus, in modern times acclaimed as the greatest of the ancient Persian kings, was forgotten. The Persians remembered the name of Alexander in the form Iskandar, but they did not remember the name of Cyrus. Alexander was remembered better among the Persians than were the Persian kings against whom he fought.

Iran, Greeks and Jews What little information survived about ancient Iran was that which was recorded by two peoples, the Jews and the Greeks, the only peoples active in the ancient Middle East who preserved their memories, their voices and their languages. Both the Greeks and the Jews remembered Cyrus; the Persians did not. The Greeks and the Jews alone provided such information as existed about ancient Iran until comparatively modern times, when the store of information was vastly increased by Orientalists, that is to say European archeologists and philologists who found a way to recover the ancient texts and decipher the ancient scripts.

Let me pause for a moment to look at the image of Iran as preserved in the Bible and the Greek classics, that is to say, as preserved by the Jews and the Greeks. The Greek view, as one would expect, is dominated by the long struggles, beginning with the Persian invasion of Greece and culminating in the great Greek counter-attack by Alexander. This is a major theme in ancient Greek historiography; the contrast between Greek democracy and Persian autocracy also forms an important theme of Greek political writings.

But despite the fact that the history was mainly one of conflict, the tone of ancient Greek writing about Persia is mostly respectful, and sometimes even compassionate, notably for example in the play The Persians by Aeschylus, himself a veteran of the Persian wars, who shows real compassion for the defeated Persian enemy.

The Bible gives us a uniquely positive picture of ancient Iran, in a literature which does not normally deal indulgently with strangers, nor even with its own people. The earliest occurrences of the name Persia, Paras, are in the Book of Ezekiel, where Paras is listed along with other exotic and outlandish names to indicate the outer limits of the known world.

Paras has something like the significance of ultima thule in modern usage. The name makes a more dramatic appearance in the story of the writing on the wall at Belshazzar's feast, where the inscription Mene mene, tekel upharsin informed the hapless Babylonian monarch that he was weighed in the balances and found wanting, and that his realms would be shared by the Medes and Persians.

And then of course comes Cyrus, mentioned more particularly in the later chapters of Isaiah, what the Bible critics call Deutero-Isaiah, that part of the Book of Isaiah dating from after the Babylonian captivity. The language used of Cyrus is little short of astonishing. He is spoken of in the Hebrew text as God's anointed, messiah, and he is accorded greater respect, not only than any other non-Jewish ruler, but almost any Jewish ruler.

Inevitably the question arises-why? Why does the Bible speak in such glowing terms of this heathen potentate? There is of course one obvious answer, that Cyrus was, so to speak, the Balfour of his day. He issued a declaration authorizing the Jews to return to their land and restore their political existence. But that doesn't really answer the question; it merely restates the question. Why did he do that?

A series of conquests had brought a multitude of ethnic groups, as we say nowadays, under Persian rule, Why should Cyrus take such a step on behalf of one of them? We only know the Jewish side of this, we don't know the Persian side, and one can only venture a guess as to the reason.

My suggestion is that there was, shall we say, a perceived affinity, between those who professed two spiritual, ethical religions, surrounded on all sides by ignorant polytheists and idolaters. One can see this sense of affinity in the latest books of the Old Testament, and also in subsequent Jewish writings. One notes for example a number of Persian words, some already in the Bible, many more in the post-Biblical Jewish literature.

This encounter between Iranian religion and Jewish religion was of far-reaching significance in world history. We can discern unmistakable traces of Persian influence, both intellectual and material, on the development of post-exilic Jewry, and therefore also of Christendom, and corresponding influence in the late Greco-Roman and Byzantine world, and therefore ultimately in Europe.

Let me just take a few examples, first on the practical side. The early Arabic sources tell us that the Persians invented a new device for riding, a device called the stirrup, previously unknown. We can easily see why this device, which revolutionized transport, communications and also warfare, created so great an impression. A mounted soldier in armor, on an armored horse, with a lance, could launch a much more devastating charge with stirrups than without them, when he was in imminent danger of being dismounted. We hear vivid stories, specially from the Byzantine writers, of the advent of this new and devastating instrument of warfare, the mounted, armored horseman, the cataphract.

The stirrup also helped the Persians to develop the postal system. Their system, described with admiration by the Greeks, consisted of a network of couriers and relay stations all over the realm. It was known in Arabic as barid, which comes of course from the Persian verb burdan, meaning to carry. The post-horse was the paraveredos, from which comes the German Pferd.

Another innovation credited to Iran, though the evidence here is conflicting, is the mill, the use of wind and water to generate power. This was the first and for millennia the only source of energy other than human and animal muscle. In another area the Persians are accredited with the invention of board games, particularly chess, which still uses a Persian terminology - the Shah - and also the game which is variously known as trik-trak, shich-besh, backgammon and other names.

We are on stronger ground in ascribing to Persians- and here we come back to the theme of cultural history-the book, that is the book in the form of a codex. The Greco-Roman world used scrolls, and so did much of the ancient Middle East. The codex, stitched and bound in the form which we now know as a book, seems to have originated in Iran. The cultural impact of such an innovation was obviously immense.

But let me turn to what is ultimately the more important theme, and that is the influence of ideas. From Iran, from Iranian religion, comes the concept of a cosmic struggle between almost equal forces of good and evil. The Devil, as you know, was Iranian by birth, although he is now given a local habitation and a name in the Western Hemisphere.

The idea of a power of evil, opposite and almost equal, is characteristic of ancient Persian religion: Ahriman is the predecessor of Satan, Mephistopheles, or whatever else we may choose to call him. Linked with that was the idea of judgment and retribution, of heaven and hell; and here I would remind you that paradise is also a Persian word. The para is the same as the Greek peri; peridesos in ancient Persian means walled enclosure.

Messianism too seems to have Persian antecedents, in the doctrine that at the end of time a figure will arise from the sacred seed of Zoroaster, who will establish all that is good on earth. It is not without significance that the Messianic idea does not appear in the Hebrew Bible until after the return from Babylon, that is to say after the time when the Jews came under Persian influence.

The importance of messianism in the Judaeo-Christian tradition is obvious. Linked with this is the idea and the practice of a religious establishment-a hierarchy of priests with ranks, under the supreme authority of the chief priest, the Mobedh Mobedhan, the Priest of Priests. And by the way, that form of title, the Priest of Priests, the King of Kings, and the like, is characteristically Iranian. It is used in many Iranian titles in antiquity; it was adopted into Arabic: Amir al-Umara-the Amir of Amirs, Qadi al-Qudat-the Qadi of Qadis.

Perhaps even the title of the Pope in Rome: the Servant of the Servants of God-Servus Servorum Dei-may be ascribed to indirect Iranian influence. The whole idea of a church, not in the sense of a building, a place of worship, but a hierarchy under a supreme head, may well owe a good deal to Zoroastrian example.

The ancient religion of Iran survives. Zoroastrianism is still the faith of small, dwindling, but not unimportant minorities, in India, in Pakistan, and to some extent in Iran. They preserved the ancient writings, in the ancient script, and a knowledge of the ancient language, and it was these which enabled the first European Orientalists to learn Middle Iranian and to use it to rediscover the still more ancient languages of Iran.

To the Arabs, the Persians invented the stirrup.

Reality: The stirrup was invented in Korea in the 5th Century. It may have come to the Arabs from the Persians.

There was a crisis in Islam caused by its internal conflicts. A corrupt Caliph was murdered. If you were then opposed to his murder you supported corruption. If you did not support the Caliph, then you were in league with a murderer.

That conflict echoes down to the dispute between the Shi'ite and the Sunni even today.

The conflict: A Caliph who claims the backing of a perfect, powerful, and just G-d must himself be perfect, powerful, and just. If he ever is found to be less than perfect, then that is evidence that Allah is either less than perfect, less than all powerful, or else has withdrawn his favor.

There is no answer. If Osama proved the power of Allah on 9/11, then his loss of his base in Afghanistan has proved the withdrawal of Allah's favor.

The Ostrogoths and Turks were brought into the Roman Empire as foederati, as allied tribes owing military service to the Empire. The Ostrogoths took over Italy. The Turks took over Asia Minor.

Rather more than just the Persians, no?

"Messianism too seems to have Persian antecedents, in the doctrine that at the end of time a figure will arise from the sacred seed of Zoroaster, who will establish all that is good on earth. It is not without significance that the Messianic idea does not appear in the Hebrew Bible until after the return from Babylon, that is to say after the time when the Jews came under Persian influence."

The Psalms are full of messianic refernces, and were written hendreds of years before the Babylonian captivity.

Yes. I'd say about 95% of the time I can tell the difference between an ethnic Persian and an ethnic Arab. Iranians who're Ethnic Persian or ethnic Azari tend to have a mixture of European and Mid-Eastern features and they make up close to 80% of Iran's populace, but you have darker featured or more semitic looking Iranians on the border of Iraq and Pakistan those are minority Baluchis 7% of the populace and even Iranian Arabs who are 2% of the populace on the border with Iraq.

The Turks were certainly not brought into the Byzantine Empire as foederati. The Seljuk Turks conquered the Caucasus in 1064, then proceeded to invade Anatolia in 1068, and defeated the Byzantine legions at the Battle of Manzikert in 1071, one of the greatest disasters to ever befall the West. They proceeded to viciously plunder Anatolia with impunity before the consolidated their hold over the depopulated heartland in the Sultanate of Rûm that lasted in some form from 1077 to 1307.

After 1243 the Sultanate effectively became a vassal tributary of the Mongol Khanates with intermittent rule by the Mamluks until the 1307 dissolution into petty emirates. Meanwhile, the Ottoman Turks had been migrating into Seljuk Anatolia since the 12th Century and the territories under the suzerainty of Osman I declared sovereignty in 1299. They immediately embarked on a campaign of expansion that ultimately subjugated and assimilated the competing Turks of Anatolia during the 14th Century, and the remnants of Byzantium in the 15th Century.

PS. I should clarify that there were Turks that were recruited as mercenaries by the Byzantines since before Manzikert, but they were not the Seljuk Turks that ultimately conquered Anatolia nor the Ottoman Turks that ultimately sacked Constantinople.

Perhaps even the title of the Pope in Rome: the Servant of the Servants of God... The whole idea of a church, not in the sense of a building, a place of worship, but a hierarchy under a supreme head, may well owe a good deal to Zoroastrian example.

Don't buy that idea. The religion was founded by Zarathushtra (Zoroaster in Greek; Zarthosht in India and Persia). Conservative Zoroastrians assign a date of 6000 BCE to the founding of the religion; other followers estimate 600 BCE. Historians and religious scholars generally date his life sometime between 1500 and 1000 BCE on the basis of his style of writing.

I would look more to the Davidic kingdom for that. The papacy was set up as a monarchy with Christ the head. The office of the bishop of Rome would correspond with the job of a prime minister of that monarchy and the cardinal's being the others ministers. Matthew 16 corresponds to the bad prime minister Shebna being replaced with Eliakim, under the Davidic King Hezekiah in Isaiah 22:21-22. But then again I could just be full of baloney.

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