The World of Persian Literary Humanism

Hamid Dabashi

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780674070615
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern Literary
• Index: Literature

What does it mean to be human? Humanism has mostly considered this question from a Western perspective. Through a detailed examination of a vast literary tradition, Hamid Dabashi asks that question anew, from a non-European point of view. The answers are fresh, provocative, and deeply transformative. This groundbreaking study of Persian humanism presents the unfolding of a tradition as the creative and subversive subconscious of Islamic civilization.Exploring how 1, 400 years of Persian literature have taken up the question of what it means to be human, Dabashi proposes that the literary subconscious of a civilization may also be the undoing of its repressive measures. This could account for the masculinist hostility of the early Arab conquest that accused Persian culture of effeminate delicacy and sexual misconduct, and later of scientific and philosophical inaccuracy. As the designated feminine subconscious of a decidedly masculinist civilization, Persian literary humanism speaks from a hidden and defiant vantage point-and this is what inclines it toward creative subversion.Arising neither despite nor because of Islam, Persian literary humanism was the artistic manifestation of a cosmopolitan urbanism that emerged in the aftermath of the seventh-century Muslim conquest. Removed from the language of scripture and scholasticism, Persian literary humanism occupies a distinct universe of moral obligations in which "a judicious lie, " as the thirteenth-century poet Sheykh Mosleh al-Din Sa'di writes, "is better than a seditious truth."

1

The Dawn of an Iranian World in an Islamic Universe

The Rise of Persian Language and Literature (632–750)

THE TRAUMATIC BIRTH of Persian language and literature in the violent aftermath of the Muslim conquest of Iran was predicated on the aggressive transmutation of the more sedentary social and economic conditions of the Sassanid empire into the far more aggressive supremacy of the nascent Islamic triumphalism that was soon consolidated in the Umayyad caliphate (661–750) and then the Abbasid empire (750–1258). The Sassanid empire (224–651), extending from central Asia to the Mediterranean, was vastly urbanized and sedentary; the Islamic triumphalism that invaded and conquered it was lightweight, agile, and initially divided along patrimonial communalism. The Sassanid imperial haughtiness lost; the nascent Muslim agility won. The conquering Muslims had Islam as their deriving moral momentum (God had promised them victory), and before long the emerging Islamic scholasticism in general, and Sunni jurisprudence (fiqh) in particular began to consolidate, justify, codify, and systematize the ideological foregrounding of their conquest—almost at the same time that Persian language and literary humanism emerged as the site and citation of moral and imaginative resistance to that total and absolute domination. As Islamic scholasticism consolidated the Arab conquest, and Arabic literary humanism beautified and smoothed its rough edges, Persian literary humanism emerged as a site of cultural resistance and literary opposition to the Arab conquest—if by nothing else then at least by being in the language of the vanquished against the will of the victorious. As Islamic scholasticism helped the conquering Arabs rule “in the Name of Allah, the Merciful, the Compassionate,” and Arabic literary humanism, to which Iranians contributed immensely, globalized that domination, Persian literary humanism allowed Iranians as a people to resist that rule in the humble name of humanity, the fragile, the forgetful. This is not to suggest that Iranians had ceased to be Muslims at the gate of their literary creativity—on the contrary, Persian language and literature became the vessel of the selfsame faith to navigate uncharted territories. But nevertheless, even as Muslims, Iranians were now the liberated architects of a whole new vantage point on the worldly fragility of being merely human.

Before long, and against all odds, as successive dynasties and empires in eastern Muslim lands began adopting Persian as their courtly language, Persian literary humanism emerged as the vanguard and the vista of a rising cosmopolitan worldliness in the farthest reaches of Islamic civilization as the creative imagining of a new world, crafted by poetry and politics alike, to make life habitable for a whole new familiarity with it. This was the prose of a renewed historicality, the poetry of defiance, and thus the traumatic birth of a literary humanism in which was embedded (always already) a deferred and differed defiance. As both Islamic scholasticism and Arabic literary humanism sustained the course of Arab imperial conquest of both the Umayyad and the Abbasid dynasties, Persian literary humanism emerged as the lingua franca of either Iranian or Persianized Turkic dynasties—at once serving and promoting a different brand of imperialism, and yet subverting it via this deferred and differed defiance. This paradoxical disposition of Persian literary humanism, rooted in its traumatic birth as the defiant language of a defeated people that in turn becomes triumphant in rival courts, stayed the course with it until the advent of European colonial modernity, when it finally exited the royal court and faced a vastly different horizon of cosmopolitan worldliness.

The Trauma of an Imperial Defeat

The Sassanid empire came crumbling down like a house of cards—as if all that it needed was a snap. All that remained was dust—as if it never were.1

The vast Sassanid empire, which lasted for over 400 years and stretched from the Mediterranean to the Himalayas, was already deeply weakened by a quarter-century-long war with the eastern Roman Empire. Their days of might and glory far behind them, between 603 and 628 the Sassanids were barely holding their own against the advancing Byzantines.2 The two aging empires were at it, weakening each other, entirely oblivious to a gathering storm to their south. The deeply corrosive wars on both sides ended with the victory of the emperor of the eastern Roman Empire Heraclius (r. 610–641) and the defeat and subsequent murder of Khusraw II, the twenty-second Sassanid king (r. 590–628). After this fateful defeat, for some 4 years (628–632) the Sassanid court collapsed into absolute chaos and anarchy until it fell into the equally incompetent hands of Yazdegerd III (r. 632–651), the twenty-ninth and last king of the dynasty, the emperor during whose reign the Sassanid empire finally buckled under the advancing Arab armies—a bizarre and undignified end to an imperial adventure that to this day traumatizes Iranian nationalists and baffles historians.3

The successive battles that ultimately ended the Sassanid empire in defeat and disgrace came in relentless waves and with whipping force. The Prophet of Islam, Muhammad ibn Abdullah (570–632), had just died, having barely unified Arabia. Invading vast and prosperous northern territories was the principal way out of internal strife in the aftermath of the Prophet’s death and the problem of succession that the nascent Muslim community faced. The Sassanid empire, whatever was left of it in will and wherewithal, was caught by surprise. Battles followed, one ignominy after another: the Battle of al-Qadisiyyah (636), the Battle of Jalula (637), the Battle of Nahavand, also known to Muslims as Fath al-Futuh, or Victory of Victories (642), are all indelibly marked on the historical memory of Iranians as the undecipherable signs of a seismic change in world history and in their grasp of their place in the world.4 The prolonged wars between the Sassanids and the Byzantines, the deeply fractious Sassanid dynasty, divided along class conflicts and aristocratic privileges, religious conflicts between Zoroastrianism and its contenders, facing the ferocity of a zealous army winning small but effective battles that gnawed at a great empire until it brought it down—these are some of the enduring explanations that historians provide as to how and why was it that the mighty Sassanids collapsed and the Arabs succeeded in bringing their new faith into a vast empire. There remained some pockets of aristocratic resistances here and there to save the empire, but the last princes of the Sassanids escaped to China and for years lived as refugees in the Chinese royal courts of Emperor Gaozong of Tang (r. 649–683). The Sassanid empire was no more.5

What about the people who were at the mercy of one defeated empire and now the subjects of a new and triumphant one? Subjected to a colonial conquest and imperial occupation by a military might that was aided by a solid religious triumphalism, a period of massive and forced acculturation commenced in the former Sassanid realm—a period that later historians would dub “two centuries of silence.”6 The trauma of defeat was to remain with the land for generations to come—a trauma underlined by excessive brutality and widespread violence. The name and reputation of al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf al-Thaqafi (661–714), an Arab warlord, is synonymous for historians of early Islamic Iran with brutish treatment of Iranians by the reigning Umayyad caliphate. Al-Hajjaj’s reputation as a murderous conqueror is accentuated by the report that he evidently detested Persian language. Not just al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf, but all conquering Arab generals treated Iranians (as indeed all non-Arabs) “with undisguised contempt.”7 Iranian historians still remember and record with horror8 the manner in which Arab conquerors (bringing along the message of Islamic brotherhood of mankind) would put a heavy metal yoke around the neck of an Iranian peasant, recording on it the amount of tax he had paid, what village he was from, and how much he still owed the Arab warlords in charge of those villages.

To be sure, it was also at the very same time that the conversion of conquered people to Islam began gradually to forge a transregional Muslim identity that glossed over these racialized hostilities between the Arab conquerors and their non-Arab subjects. But what also remains paramount is the defeat of one massive empire (the Sassanids), the rise of successive Arab empires (the Umayyads and the Abbasids), and the gradual rise of Persian as the lingua franca of eastern provinces and later dynasties against the imperial imposition of Arabic as both a sacred language and the language of a conquering culture. As Muslims, Iranians were now among the most active participants in the making of the triumphalist Islamic culture—in both scholastic and literary terms. But at the very same time, Persian language, and eventually literary humanism, were carving an emotive and soon imperial space for themselves—a force and phenomenon that would mark their own history.

With the surviving Sassanid princes running away to China, the new generation of Iranian elite soon joined their conquerors and found a defining (and even lucrative) presence in the emerging Islamic empire in both political and intellectual domains. Politically they were instrumental in transforming the tribal leadership of the Umayyad dynasty into the cosmopolitan imperialism of the Abbasids.9 Intellectually, the Iranian elite soon mastered the Arabic language and began contributing voluminously to the ideological foregrounding of the Islamic empire in both Islamic scholasticism and Arabic literary humanism.10 The emerging Islamic civilization was in a considerable part their handiwork. “The most eminent of the early grammarians,” observed the great historian Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406) generations later, “traditionalists, and scholastic theologians as well as those learned in the principles of Law and in the interpretation of the Koran, were Persian by race or education and the saying of the Prophet was verified—‘If Knowledge were attached to the end of the sky, some amongst the Persians would have reached it.’ ”11 In both scholastic and humanist terms, the recently converted Iranian scholars and literati were instrumental in consolidating the ideological foregrounding of their Arab/Muslim conquerors. These achievements notwithstanding, they still faced unabated racialization, because of which many of them “provided themselves with fictitious pedigree, on the strength of which they passed for Arabs.”12 These luminary Iranians, having in effect given birth and momentum to not just Islamic scholasticism but also Arabic literary humanism, became the signposts of a cosmopolitan worldliness beyond any racialized distinction. For such towering figures as Bashar ibn Burd, Abu Nuwas, Ibn Qutaybah, al-Tabari, al-Ghazali, “and hundreds of others”13 were in fact Iranian by birth and upbringing.

Such racialized binaries, however, ultimately dissolved themselves in the material and moral expansion of successive Islamic empires, for the intellectual feat was accompanied by emerging political power to produce a transnational cosmopolitanism. The rise of the Barmecide family of viziers to power and prominence during the early Abbasid period is the political hallmark of this renewed prominence for the Iranian elite. The Barmecide were a noble Persian family that became exceedingly powerful during the reign of the Abbasids. Yahya the Barmecide was the vizier to the legendary Harun al-Rashid (r. 786–809) and a key force in transforming the administrative apparatus of the Abbasids from tribal patrimonialism to a cosmopolitan empire. While the Iranian intellectual elite and Persian vizierate were instrumental in transforming the Umayyad tribalism into the Abbasid cosmopolitan imperialism and in contributing massively to both Islamic scholasticism and Arabic literary humanism, the weight of the imperial acculturation was so massive that there was still plenty of defiant energy left in both political and intellectual terms.

Resisting the New Empire

Not all leading Iranian intellectuals joined forces with their conquerors, or even converted to Islam, or if they did abandoned their autonomous moral and intellectual aspirations, or faked Arab credentials for themselves. There were crucial and consequential exceptions to those who did. One of the most significant cultural aspects of the emergent intellectual elite was their resistance to both Umayyad tribalism and even Abbasid patrimonialism, perhaps best expressed in the rise of the Shuʾubiyyah movement—a cultural, literary, and poetic uprising principally initiated by Iranians late in the Umayyad period and well into the Abbasid period, which subsequently extended as far east as Andalusia in later centuries.14 In direct response to the racialized Arab domination, the Shuʾubiyyah movement received its name from its proponents’ favorite Qurʾanic passage (49:13) about equality of nations and peoples. They even went so far as fabricating prophetic traditions to buttress their call for equality among Arabs and non-Arabs. “He that speaks Arabic,” they believed the Prophet had said, “is thereby an Arab.” “Whoever of the people of Persia accepts Islam,” they believed another Prophetic tradition had said, “is [as much an Arab as] one of Quraysh.”15 Because of their insistence on the equality of all Muslims regardless of being Arabs or non-Arabs, the Shuʾubiyyah were also known as the Levelers (Ahl al-Taswiyah).16 In response to the racialized discriminations they faced, such early representatives of the Shuʾubiyyah sentiments as Bashar ibn Burd (714–784) and Ibn al-Muqaffaʾ (d. 756) openly flaunted their Persian heritage and boasted of their noble origins. The unabashed racialized prejudices of the prominent Arab literary figure al-Jahiz (781–869) resulted in reverse racism among some of the Shuʾubiyyah poets too. The Shuʾubiyyah movement was the most significant early sign that within Islamic empires were voices of cultural and revolutionary dissent—that all was not well with the states of Islam and that the Prophet’s message of equality and brotherhood of all Muslims had failed to register with the overriding imperial racism of the conquerors. The presence of Iranian cultural elite in the Shuʾubiyyah movement was perhaps the most significant sign of a rising and resounding site of resistance against the new imperialism that had supplanted the Sassanids.

The Iranian reaction to the Arab conquest was not limited to cultural terms in one way or another. The heavy-handed tribalism of the Umayyads generated widespread popular revolts by the urban poor and the abused peasantry of the conquered territories. These popular dissents were initially expressed in sectarian uprisings under the banner of such Islamic movements as those of the Kharijites and the Shiʾis. The generic class of the Mawali (the Clients) became a derogatory designation for non-Arab...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Epigraph
• Introduction
• 1. The Dawn of an Iranian World in an Islamic Universe
• 2. The Persian Presence in the Early Islamic Empires
• 3. The Prose and Poetry of the World
• 4. The Triumph of the Word
• 5. The Lure and Lyrics of a Literature
• 6. The Contours of a Literary Cosmopolitanism
• 7. The Dawn of New Empires
• 8. The Final Frontiers
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index