One door closes, another opens: the Persian Empire’s end and the rise of the Persianate world
The diverse cultural threads of modern Iran
Related: Iran through the ages: civilization's eternal crossroads, Pre-Persian Iran: from the invention of agriculture to the Aryan onslaught and We are all Zoroastrians: how Persian empires of the mind touched all humanity.
The last millennium has witnessed Iran’s integration into an Islamic world that stretches from China’s wild western edge to the African savanna. This has brought newcomers into the heart of Aryan domains; speakers of Ferdowsi’s language often have a lineage that wends back to frigid Mongolia or torrid Sudan. But meanwhile they are heirs to a high culture that paradoxically crested in influence and expanse a millennium after peak Sasanian glory, a millennium after Persia’s armies overran Egypt and marched west to the edge of Europe, even setting up camp across the straits from Constantinople, which remained safely shielded by the Byzantine navy. Iran’s true engagement with the wider world began only after it succumbed to Arab conquest, not during Persia’s age of empire. In the process of being subjugated by Arabs and then Turks, a resilient new identity evolved fusing ethnic self-consciousness with pride in both the Persian language and sectarian Shi'ism, creating a new self-conception of what it meant to be Iranian.
In the 1989 Iranian film, Bashu, the Little Stranger, a dark-skinned boy from Khuzestan, just north of the Persian Gulf, flees the chaos of the Iran-Iraq war that has engulfed his village. Hitching a ride on a truck, eight-year-old Bashu travels to northern Iran, eventually arriving in an alien province, on the Caspian Sea. There he finds an adoptive mother, but she speaks neither Persian nor his native Arabic. The villagers speak Gilaki, a language far closer to Kurdish and Balochi than Persian. A patriotic theme emerges over the course of the story, of unity as a nation in the face of war, despite racial and linguistic differences. The film also illustrates two dynamics at the heart of modern Iran’s diversity. First, the persistence of languages like Gilaki, Kurdish, Mazandarani, Luri and Balochi in the face of Persian’s demographic and cultural prestige is a testament to the robustness of local identity in Iran, despite the homogenizing power of elite Persian culture. Even after 2,500 years of cultural hegemony, Persians remain only 50-60% of Iran's population. Second, there has been substantial migration into Iran since Islam's rise 1,400 years ago. People of African, Indian and Turkic backgrounds, whether coerced as slaves or of their own free will, have percolated in from the north, east and south. Bashu never explicitly addresses his racial heritage, but his very dark skin and the fact that he is an Arabic speaker from the Persian Gulf telegraphs to Iranian audiences that he is Afro-Iranian.
Though Indians and Africans were present in the Persian Gulf during classical antiquity (and even earlier; Sumerian texts mention traders from the Indus Valley over 4,000 years ago), their arrival in large numbers occurred mostly after the Islamic conquest of Persia, which ushered in Iran’s integration into a vast political and economic zone stretching from the Atlantic Ocean in the west to India in the east and Nubia in the south. Large numbers of African slaves began arriving in the Persian Gulf in the seventh century, while the ninth century AD saw the influx of Turkic slaves, and in the tenth century Turkic slave-army raids on India drove the capture and transport of massive numbers of Indian slaves to eastern Iran. The Caliphate was transformed by the arrival of these slaves, especially the Turks, who were prized for their martial skills.
In 833 AD, the caliph al-Mu’tasim succeeded al-Ma’mun, who had an Iranian mother from Khorasan. During al-Ma’mun’s reign, Khorasanis dominated the caliphate, and al-Mu’tasim’s ascension would signal a diversification of power bases. Like al-Ma’mun, the new caliph had a mother who was from the northeastern edge of the Islamic world, but this time, a Turk. Al-Mu’tasim immediately began to preferentially promote Turkic slave soldiers, whose authority and standing came solely through the caliph himself, in order to counterbalance the Khorasanis. This choice transformed the Islamic way of war; al-Mu’tasim’s recourse to slave soldiers loyal to him alone set a precedent that would hold for a millennium, right through to the Ottoman Janissaries and Egyptian Mamelukes. But the effects were also massive in the short term. Established interests in Baghdad saw the Turks’ rise as threatening, and when the caliph al-Mutawakkil heeded the traditionalists’ warnings about the Turks’ inordinate power and began to curtail their influence, the latter revolted. Al-Mu’tasim’s Turkic soldiers assassinated him in 861 AD, and ten years of civil war ensued.
Even given the risks of arming enslaved people, unlike human chattel in the Greco-Roman or Christian world, unfree soldiers could transcend their origins in the Dar-al-Islam. Romans may have regularly freed their slaves, but those “freedman” suffered strong social stigma and restrictions on legal rights. In the Muslim world, the same did not apply. Though the tenth century saw the revival of Iranian culture and political power, with the Buyid dynasty of Shia Iranians dominant in Mesopotamia and western Iran, and the Samanid dynasty of Sunni Iranians dominant in Central Asia and eastern Iran, the collapse of the Abbasid peace brought a massive increase in the number and power of Turkic soldiers in the Islamic heartland. Ferdowsi, the father of the Persian literary revival and author of the Shahnameh began his work under the patronage of the Iranian Samanids. But in 999 AD this ended because the Samanids were overthrown by a Turkic faction that coalesced in the slave barracks. In the early tenth century, Ferdowsi finally sent the completed copies of the Shahnameh to Mahmud of Ghazni, his new patron, himself the son of a slave who had overthrown what would be the last great Iranian dynasty of Iran until the 1700’s.
The hegemony of the Turks was so total that when Reza Pahlavi came to the throne in December 1925 and was proclaimed shah, he founded just the second native Iranian ruling dynasty in Persia in over 1,000 years. After the fall of the Ghaznavids in 1186, hegemony passed first to the Seljuks (Central Asian Turks), then the Khwarezmians (Central Asian Turks), Mongols, Timurids (Central Asian Turco-Mongols), White Sheep Turkomans, Safavids (Azeri Turks), Afsharids (Turkomans again), and finally in 1751 the Zand, who were Iranian nomads (Kurds or Lurs). But in 1794, the Zand were overthrown by another Turkic dynasty, the Qajars, who reigned into the early 20th century until their overthrow and replacement by the Pahlavi.
And yet the long Turkic interlude did not diminish the influence of Persian literature and culture. On the contrary, while Iranian hard power faded into memory, Iranian soft power rose in stature, a civilizational beacon whose light bathed every nook and cranny of the Islamic world. As under the Abbasids prior, now under Turkic rulers Persian-speakers still dominated the public civil administration and private cultural production. Rumi, the most famous Persian poet, was born in Balkh, but his family fled the Mongols to Turkish Seljuk Konya in Central Anatolia, where he became the Persian luminary we remember today. Turks may have ruled the Iranian world for 1,000 years, but their largesse always flowed to Persian civilization. They never stinted on promoting the ancient and refined culture of the people whom they conquered. In the 11th century, the poet, scientist and mathematician Omar Khayyam was supported in his learning by the Turkic Karakhanid dynasty, and then the Seljuk Sultan Malik-Shah. Two centuries later, the Anatolian Seljuk Turks granted Rumi a sinecure, allowing him to devote his leisure to poetry and mysticism. In the 1300’s, the bloodthirsty Turco-Mongol conqueror Timur supported the Shirazi poet Hafez. A century and a half later, in 1526, the last of Timur’s descendants conquered India. These became the Mughals, Central Asian conquerors who spoke Chagatai Turk amongst themselves, but promoted Persian as the official language of their empire, providing employment for tens of thousands of Iranians who served in civil capacities across India. Even after the decline of the Mughals, Persian was so widely spoken by Indian elites that officials of the British East India company had to learn the language and used it in their official correspondence.
This multiethnic Iranian world ruled by Turkic sword was not static; culturally and genetically the movement of peoples and the change of regimes were transformative. Most of the ancestry of modern Anatolian Turks and Iranians does not derive from the Turkic tribes that migrated in from Central Asia nearly 1,000 years ago, whose arrival shocked the Islamic world as they set to wresting power from Arabs and Iranians. But neither were the peoples of the Near East they subjugated left unchanged. Combined with the centuries-long Islamic slave trade, the genetic base of ancient West Asian heritage was modified and diversified by the Arab conquest of Iran.