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
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.”
7
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
I r a n i n Wo r l d H i s t o r y
56
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
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