Iran in World History

Canon of Medicine
was taught in 
Europe’s medical schools into the eighteenth century, was likewise a 
nonbeliever— although when he died his friends, wishing him to receive 
an Islamic burial, insisted that he had made a deathbed repentance.
Other Iranian scholars took their Islam quite seriously, however. 
For devout Sunni Muslims, possibly the single most influential figure 
in history (apart from the Prophet Muhammad himself) is Mohammad 
Ghazali, whose forty-volume 
Ihya’ ‘ulum al-din
(Vivification of the 
Religious Sciences) has remained hugely popular over the centuries as 
a source of religious guidance. Early in his career he gained renown 
as a professor of theology at the Nezamiyya seminary (
madrasa
) of 
Baghdad. But after having mastered Hellenistic philosophy only in 
order to refute it, Ghazali experienced a spiritual crisis in his thirties 
and retired from public life. “I examined my motive in my work of 
teaching,” Ghazali later wrote in his memoirs, “and realized that it was 
not a pure desire for the things of God, but that the impulse moving 
[me] was the desire for an influential position and public recognition.”
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After resigning from his professorship, Ghazali spent a decade in Syria 
studying under a Sufi master. Eventually he made his way back to his 
hometown of Tus in Khorasan, where he spent the remainder of his life 
writing books and teaching a small circle of select students.
Sufism, which is the term for Islamic mysticism, came into being 
with the first Muslim mystics in the eighth century. (Some even consider 
the Prophet Muhammad to have been the first Sufi, although the term 
did not exist at the time.) Hasan of Basra, the son of a freed Persian 
slave, is considered one of the founding figures of Sufism. According 

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This highly accurate illustration of human arteries and viscera was 
included in a medieval manuscript copy of the Canon of Medicine by the 
eleventh-century Iranian physician-philosopher Abu Ali Sina, known in 
the West as Avicenna. Avicenna’s textbook was translated into Latin and 
used in the medical schools of Europe well into the early modern period. 
Wellcome Institute, London, Or Arabic MS 155

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Th e I r a n i z a t i o n o f I s l a m
55
to popular legend he spent an inordinate amount of time crying; when 
asked why, he is said to have replied, “For fear that Allah might throw 
me in the Fire and care less about me.”
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While some early Sufis were clearly influenced by the asceticism 
of Christian monks living the deserts of Syria and Egypt, Sufism as a 
movement took hold farther east under the guidance of Iranian spiritual 
masters. Bayazid of Bistam is associated with the practice of going into 
ecstatic trances (
sukr
, or “intoxication”) as a means to achieve union 
with the divine. His teacher was a native of India, and Bayazid’s notion 
of “obliteration in the Ultimate Reality” (
fana’
) bears some similarities 
to Indian thought. On the other hand, Abo’l-Qasem Jonayd of Baghdad 
promoted a more “sober” Sufism, based on living in conscious accor-
dance with the divine law.
The most celebrated of all the ecstatic or “intoxicated” Sufis was 
Mansur Hallaj, an erstwhile student of Jonayd who garnered attention 
by dancing about in the streets of Baghdad shouting “I am the Divine 
Truth!” Executed for blasphemy, Hallaj is considered by many Sufis to 
be the paradigmatic “martyr of love,” who willingly suffered death as 
the price of union with his divine beloved.
Since attraction to Sufi masters usually centered on their personal 
charisma, they could exercise enormous influence over their followers. 
Some went so far as to dismiss the Sharia as being an elementary, 
superficial form of religiosity that could be dispensed with by those 
who were more spiritually advanced. Such claims put Sufis into direct 
conflict with the Ulama, who saw themselves as the sole rightful custo-
dians of Islamic spiritual authority. The resulting tensions threatened to 
pull the developing Muslim society apart, until Ghazali, who was him-
self both a trained jurist and a practicing Sufi, demonstrated through 
his work that the two approaches could be reconciled. Essentially, 
Ghazali argued that the only reliable path to spiritual advancement 
was not esoteric techniques but merely following the Sharia; simply 
being a good Muslim would bring one into the direct presence of God.
Scholars of the early Islamic centuries wrote in Arabic because it 
was the language of scholarship—to refer to all Classical Islamic think-
ers as “Arabs” merely because they wrote in Arabic is as inaccurate as 
calling medieval European scholars “Romans” because they wrote in 
Latin. These non-Arab scholars deliberately shaped the language to 
fit their needs, first establishing the rules of Arabic grammar so that 
they could learn it properly, and then inventing vocabulary to express 
scientific and abstract concepts the Arabs’ desert culture lacked. It is 
no accident that the most important grammarians of Arabic—notably 

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I r a n i n Wo r l d H i s t o r y
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Sibawayh of Hamadan—were non-Arabs, since after all it was they 
who needed to study it as a foreign language.
Most scribes and bureaucrats of the Abbasid administration, as 
well as high-ranking officials including many prime ministers, were 
Iranians. During the formative eighth century the Barmak family (the 
Barmecides), who had originally been Buddhist priests from Balkh, exer-
cised virtual control over the Abbasid government and supported much 
Iranian cultural activity at court and beyond. Still, because Arabic was 
the formal language of state, among the elite classes bilingualism was 
the norm. Since the early caliphs often took Iranian wives, their descen-
dants acquired more Iranian blood with each generation—and given that 
Muslim children spent most of their early years in the women’s quarters, 
they would have absorbed a fair amount of their mothers’ culture as well.
With the shift of gravity toward the Iranian world brought about by 
the Abbasids, the Iranian scribal class responded to Arab chauvinism by 
translating literary works from Middle Persian into Arabic so as to ensure 
their dissemination throughout the whole of the caliphate and demon-
strate the superiority of the Persian tradition. Some of these scribes, most 
notably Ruzbeh “ibn Muqaffa‘” (Son of the Shriveled Handed One), 
were suspected of being not only anti-Arab but anti-Islam as well. (Ibn 
Muqaffa‘ was executed as a heretic.) Nevertheless, it is thanks to them 
that some of the most important works of the Sasanian period survived, 
their original Persian versions being lost. These literary masterpieces 
include the