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.

Sovereignty and Identity in the Byzantine Eokoimene

The Byzantines were a deeply spiritual people. In their worldview the imperium romanorum or eokoimene was the centre of a Cosmic Empire, eternal and indivisible. The Empires fortunes rose or fell upon the will of God; God chose to chastise the Byzantine with wars and defeats or crown them with victories according to His will. This cosmology allowed the Byzantines to constantly adjust their worldview to accommodate the loss or reacquisition of territory. Control of territory was therefore less important than the recognition of the emperor’s place in the Divine order. In the Byzantine universe the emperor was God’s vice regent on Earth and protector of the eokoimene, or civilised world. Those outside the eokoimene, were either barbarians or rebels against the Divine order. So, while the Seljuks may have defeated the Byzantines in battle and seized their territories in Anatolia, Suleyman’s recognition of the emperor’s authority allowed Byzantines to incorporate the Seljuks within the eokoimene, or at least maintain the fiction that Anatolia had been restored to the Romans. The fact of the Seljuks incorporation into the Empire is highlighted by the descriptive clarification appended to Suleyman’s title of Sultan.

Ethnicity was irrelevant in the multi-ethnic Empire that was Byzantium. Anna Comnena might call the Turks barbarians, but it was a term she also used to describe the Normans, Italians and Franks. To be considered a Byzantine one needed accept Orthodox Christianity and have an appreciation for civilised culture, that is, classical literature, order, rule of law and other such amenities of civilisation. Accepting the Turks as foederati was the first step in a longer process aimed at transforming them from barbarians into Byzantines, much as the Byzantines had transformed the pagan Slavs, Bulgarians and Russians before them.[78] Even the Turks’ Islamic faith was not considered an insurmountable obstacle to their hoped for integration as the Turks in the eleventh century did not distinguish greatly between Islam and Christianity. The Rum Seljuks placed no restrictions on the Christians within their territories. This was significant as many Byzantine officials occupied key posts at Seljuk court. Some, such as Philaretos’ son converted to Islam, but this was not a requirement. Many Byzantines stayed true to their Christian faith and this does not seem to have hindered their career. Indeed, the Rum Seljuks recognised the right of the Patriarchate of Constantinople to exercise full ecclesiastic authority over the Orthodox Christians within their territories, despite having a rival Patriarchate under their control at Antioch.[79]

The mythologizing of Manzikert

History is rarely about what actually happened but more about how events are interpreted. For Michael Attaleiates and the Armenian cleric Vardapet, Manzikert was a disaster and they described it as such. For Michael Psellus, Manzikert was a convenient misfortune and he described it as such.[82] By the time Anna Comnena wrote her history in 1148AD, Manzikert was recognized as an important key historical event, but it had not become the disaster of later legend.[83] The Byzantines themselves seemed not to have imbued Manzikert with any great significance. For them their defeat and decline were simply God’s punishment for their sins. It was later, with the rise of modern secular history that people began searching for an identifiable event that would mark the beginning of the decline. Thanks to Michael Attaleiates mythologising of Romanus and his ‘doomed’ campaign and the triumphalism of later Arab historians, Manzikert had taken on the necessary romantic qualities to become ‘that terrible day.’ None of this was necessarily true. The real causes of the loss of Anatolia were far more diverse and had little to do with battles and conquests, although these did occur and were in their own way significant.

The political and ethnic transformation of Anatolia was a much more complex process and can be summarised as follows:

· Byzantium’s military success during the tenth century eroded both the internal and external defences of the empire. Allowing the decline of the thematic armies and city fortifications was permissible if the Empire was able to maintain the offensive capabilities of the Byzantine army, but this was neither economically nor politically possible in the long term;

· The decision to conquer and directly administer territories in Armenia, Mesopotamia and Syria was a strategic error that removed natural buffer states and over-extended the military resources of the Empire. Given that the central government was demonstrably unable to control the magnates on its own territory, the incorporation of large, non-assimilated populations into the Empire created significant problems of policing and governance that the Byzantines were ill equipped to cope with at that time;

· Basil II’s failure to adequately plan for the succession invited political disorder after his death, resulting in two key developments detrimental to the state. Firstly, the Anatolian magnates, who Basil had antagonised during his lifetime, either withdrew entirely from the political process, or else used their influence to restore and extend their privileges. Secondly, the general political instability of the period encouraged the growth of a strong, but generally corrupt and self-serving civil administration. None of Basil’s immediate successors had either the strength, the ability or the legitimacy to prevent these developments;

· As the central government’s authority disintegrated during the 1060’s and 70’s it was forced to dramatically reduce its expenditure. As the largest single expense in the Byzantine budget, the military bore the brunt of the budget cuts. These cuts proved untenable given the extended borders the military had to police and defend. And, as the central government proved increasingly unable to secure the interests of the provinces or protect them from raiding, the provinces broke down in rebellion and separatism;

· Romanus’ Manzikert campaign was tactically sound if he was aiming to strike a blow against the Great Seljuks of Iran, but it completely failed to solve the problem of Turcoman raiding, which could only have been addressed by providing additional resources to the local garrisons. Nevertheless, having chosen to attack the wrong enemy, Romanus’ fought a textbook action at Manzikert and was only defeated by poor intelligence and treachery. The majority of the Byzantine army escaped intact however and Romanus managed to secure an equitable peace treaty from the Seljuks;

· After Manzikert, Byzantine separatism was allowed to run its destructive course. Had the Empire been better run and the civil war not occurred a coordinated defence against Turkish raiding may have diverted the Seljuk’s back towards Fatimid Egypt;

· For a variety of reasons the Byzantines did not recognized the Turks as a long-term threat. The Seljuks who conquered Anatolia had little or no centralized political structure and were undisciplined and fractious, likely as not to attack each other as the Byzantines. Nor were the Seljuks an unstoppable military force. After the Manzikert the Georgians expanded their territory at the Seljuks expense, as did many of the Armenian principalities of Cilicia. The Byzantines, however, were more interesting in fighting challengers to their throne than repelling the Seljuks;

· As Anatolia broke apart in disorder the Turks began to exercise an increasingly important role in Byzantine politics. Sultan Suleyman variously assisted the Byzantine central government or rebellious magnates to his advantage and by the time Alexius Comnenus secured the Byzantine throne the Seljuks occupied the entire Anatolian plateau;

· From the central government’s perspective the economic loss of the Anatolian plateau was not as significant as it might appear, given the amount of territory lost, as it had long ago lost control of those territories. It was therefore sensible policy to concentrate the government’s limited resources on the defence of western Anatolia and Rumelia;

· The repopulation of Anatolia and the subsequent revival of several deserted Byzantine cities under the Rum Seljuk provided a stimulus to the Byzantine economy, at least in the short term;

· Cut off from its traditional Armenian recruiting grounds, the Byzantine army was quick to utilise the Turks as an abundant supply of available military manpower. By the eleventh century the Byzantine army was completely dependent on Turkish manpower and would remain so until the fourteenth century;

· To a great extent, the Sultanate of Rum owed its existence to the Byzantines. Byzantines occupied positions in the Rum court and help guide and structure its administration, at least in the early decades. The Byzantines conferred legitimacy on its rulers and recognised the states borders and possessions. Sultan Suleyman enjoyed good relations with Michael Ducas, Nicephorus Botaniates, Nicephorus Melissenus and Alexius Comnenus and was generally a good ally to the Byzantines throughout his life. If Suleyman’s successors were less reliable vassals this was simply because they were in a position put Seljuk interests ahead of their relationship with the Byzantines;

· Despite occasional conflicts, Byzantium and the Rum Sultanate enjoyed unusually close relations throughout their existence. There was a constant exchange of personnel and personalities between their respective societies, and, surprisingly considering their religious differences, regular intermarriage. Both states provided sanctuary and employment for the others exiles and adventurers, such as the future Emperor Michael Palaeologos, who commanded a Byzantine contingent in Sultan Kay Kuwas’ army in the twelfth century.[84] This constant exchange of personnel and culture between Byzantium and Seljuk Rum ensured that the interests of their respective elites were, if not always aligned, at least understood. Nevertheless, Byzantine endeavours to acculturalise the Rum Seljuks, who in the eleventh century at least were only vaguely Islamic, were half hearted and hampered by religious and political arrogance. The Byzantine’s failure to impress their culture on the Rum Seljuks made it inevitable that they would eventually realign with the Islamic world;

· Finally, the Seljuks use of Byzantine coinage, while important symbolically, permanently disrupted the Empire’s carefully balanced economic cycle. The Byzantines had very limited gold reserves and so carefully regulated the circulation of gold nomisma within their economy. All taxes had to be paid in currency, which guaranteed that most coinage circulated through the economy but ultimately returned to the treasury.[85] Unless politically sanctioned, gold exports were strictly prohibited. The Seljuk court however became a significant consumer of coinage, which over time eroded Byzantium’s gold reserve.[86] This significance of this cannot be overstated and over time was probably more damaging to Byzantium’s long-term viability than any loss of territory.

http://www.deremilitari.org/resources/articles/markham.htm

With regard to the second point, your author seems to regard "an equitable peace treaty from the Seljuks" as less than a disaster. I don't. The author goes on to touch on all the reasons why the defeat at Manzikert - or, more precisely, the failure to deflect the Seljuks to Egypt or Iran or wherever - catalyzed the inexorable decline of the Byzantine Empire that culminated with the Ottoman Turks at the gates of Vienna. Had the Byzantines prevailed at Manzikert and ejected the Turks from Anatolia, not only would they have preserved a vastly superior strategic posture for Byzantium, but they would have remained in a position to project power and security to the Crusader States in the Holy Land. We don't know what twists and turns history may have taken, but it's not much of a leap from there to a Christian reconquest of Egypt as well, which was the public intent of the 4th Crusade.

In my view, a 'non-disaster' is the sequence of events that results in the dissolution of the Islamic sphere, rather than the actual sequence of events that 'equitably' expanded the Islamic sphere...

As for the foederati question, we seem to have a bit of a chicken/egg semantic disagreement. With regard to the Visigoths, they were given permission to enter the Roman Empire in 376, mainly due to a spectacular misjudgment on the part of Emperor Valens, who thereby met his doom at Adrianople. Similarly, the Ostrogoths were permitted to settle Pannonia after 454 as a buffer between Rome and Constantinople. By contrast, the Seljuks invaded Anatolia, defeated the supremely incompetent Romanus at Manzikert, and then Constantinople merely acknowledged a fait accompli. The difference being that 4th and 5th Century Rome could have chosen an alternative course whereas the Byzantine diplomatic fictions of the 11th and 12th Century were of no meaningful consequence to the actual sequence of events.

The Seljuks shattered the Theme system, drove an insurmountable wedge between Constantinople and Jerusalem, utterly failed to assimilate into the Christianized Greco-Roman West, and displaced the Romanized Hellenists with an influx of Turkic Muslims. I will grant that Manzikert didn't rise to Yarmuk disaster proportions, but that's not saying much when Yarmuk was far and away the greatest disaster to befall not just the West but the entire world, IMHO.

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