18 - ARABIC LITERATURE IN IRAN

Summary

THE UMAYYAD AGE IN IRAN

Although Arabic literature in Iran can be traced from the 1st/7th century onwards, it is nevertheless true that for the first two centuries or so the sources available are scanty and widely dispersed in later works. But this is a problem affecting all Arabic literature in the early period of Islam. Another obstacle is that at the outset little attention was paid to the Iranian part of the Muslim world, for the centre of the stage was held by the pace-setters in the Hijāz at first, then later in Damascus and Baghdad. This was due in large part to the origins of Islam in the Hijāz and to the subsequent displacements of its capital and the consequent downgrading of cultural centres elsewhere in Iran to the east or in Africa and Spain to the west.

As for Iran in particular, the rôle of Persians in Arabic literature could hardly be over-emphasized. Arabic literature ceased to be the exclusive property of the Arabs after the 1st/7th century, and it is most unjust and hardly objective to compile histories of Arabic literature that give the impression that somehow all the great authors were Arabs; but this is precisely the case ever since modernist Arab nationalists have taken to composing histories of Arabic literature, not to mention their histories of Islamic civilization.

If the Persians played more than just a passive rôlo in Arabic literature, and even in the greater formulation of Islamic traditional culture, this is in great measure because the entire extent, and not merely a part, of the ancient Sāsāian empire, with all of its institutions and cultural traditions, fell to the lot of the Arab conquerors.