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Kalila and Dimna
animal fables and the
Thousand and One
Nights
, as well as the Sasanian
Book of Lords
(
Khwaday-namag
) which
became the principal source for Ferdowsi’s
Book of Kings
.
With literary production limited to Arabic, written Persian largely
disappeared for nearly two centuries. From this period only a few
scraps of written Persian have survived, including some commercial
documents in Judeo-Persian (Persian written in the Hebrew alphabet)
discovered in China—evidence of Jewish-Iranian businessmen active
along the Silk Road. By the ninth century, however, local Iranian gov-
ernors in the east had begun to assert their independence, first by re-
fusing to send provincial taxes to Baghdad, then more symbolically by
restoring Persian as the official language at court. Yaqub ibn Layth, an
uneducated coppersmith by trade who founded the Saffarid dynasty
in eastern Iran, reprimanded a sycophantic poet for eulogizing him in
Arabic, saying “Why do you recite for me something I can’t under-
stand?”
8
Henceforth Yaqub’s court poets wrote in Persian.
To the north, the Bukhara-based Samanid dynasty (819–999) went
even further in reviving the Persian language. They commissioned
A statue of the tenth-century poet Rudaki, one of the first major figures of New
Persian literature, stands in Dushanbe, Tajikistan. Rudaki was a court poet for
the Bukhara-based Samanid dynasty, who restored Persian as the official state
language after more than two centuries of Arabic dominance. In Tajikistan today
Rudaki is considered the father of Tajik literature.
Photo by author
I r a n i n Wo r l d H i s t o r y
58
Persian translations of Abu Ja‘far Tabari’s monumental history and
Qur’an commentary—the two major works of one of the most respected
scholars of his age—since, in the words of the chief translator assigned
to the project, “Here, in this region, the language is Persian, and the
kings of this realm are Persian kings.”
9
The finest early poets of the newly resurfaced literary Persian, Ja‘far
ibn Muhammad Rudaki and Abu Mansur Daghighi, enjoyed Samanid
patronage. Rudaki’s best-known line evokes the homesickness of the sol-
dier on campaign: “Ever comes the scent of the Molian [a stream near
Bukhara]/ Ever comes the memory of our beloved friends.”
10
It is said
that on hearing these lines, the Samanid ruler was so overcome with nos-
talgia that he immediately turned his army back to Bukhara. Daghighi,
for his part, initiated the colossal task (later completed by Ferdowsi) of
rendering the now lost Middle Persian
Book of Kings
into New Persian,
and many of his lines remain embedded in Ferdowsi’s final version of the
epic poem.
Yet the original language of the Samanid lands was not Persian but
Sogdian, a related but distinct east Iranian tongue. Even as Arabic was
being used for official purposes, the general population of Central Asia
was becoming not only Muslim but also linguistically Persian, presum-
ably because the Islamic culture they adopted was transmitted to them by
Persian-speaking rather than Arabic-speaking Muslims. Thus, Sogdian-
and Bactrian-speakers in Central Asia over several generations abandoned
their local dialects in favor of Persian, just as Egyptians and Syrians gave
up their native idioms for Arabic during the same period.
“New Persian,” which is the successor language to the Middle
Persian of the Sasanians, is written in a modified Arabic alphabet and
contains a large number of Arabic loanwords. The case is similar to
English after the Norman conquest in 1066: French became England’s
administrative language for two centuries, as a result of which a new
form of English emerged that was richly impregnated with French.
Arabic words in New Persian are pronounced in the Persian fashion,
and their meanings often differ significantly from their connotations
in Arabic. As Islam spread across Asia among the Turks, Indians, and
others, languages such as Turkish and Hindustani (which was split into
the Urdu and Hindi dialects for political reasons in the nineteenth cen-
tury) likewise absorbed huge Perso-Arabic vocabularies as well as the
Persian script.
Thanks to the importance of Persian literature as a cultural marker
from the time of Rudaki onward, the Persian language has remained
stable enough that Iranians today can read works from a thousand years
Th e I r a n i z a t i o n o f I s l a m
59
ago with little difficulty. The greatest literary monument of the New
Persian language is Ferdowsi’s
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