Conclusion

Summary

In the course of this thesis a number of sensitive issues have been raised as we advanced the “esoteric” and “alternate” view of Persia — a past summarily unveiled to us through the mystical poetry of the Sufis. Persian Sufism tells us of a great indigenous wisdom tradition of Khorasan, celebrated as hekmat-e khosravani. This is “the flowing wisdom” that for Persia was supposed to be initiated in pre-Zarathushtrian times by the mythic king Kay Khosrow. Such is the basic image of Persianate Sufi myth-history or “mythological macrohistory”. Partly in response to it, we have presented our own “hidden” history of Persia, and concurrently with the Sufi paradigm we have critically explored relevant aspects of a number of traditions in Iranian religious history, namely Zoroastrianism, Mithraism, Mazdakism and Islam, up until Sufism itself. Certainly Sufism has also come to be placed among past “fixtures” because of the establishment of fraternities and “chains” of spiritual authority that locate different schools in their own special relation to the Khorasan tradition. Thus, it has been a key intention of this work to present a case for a “re-thinking” of the history of Sufism, partly by understanding the narration of the Sufi “myth-history” in detail, yet above all by taking its lead to reconstruct the “esoteric current” of Persia's spiritual heritage in the manner of a critical historiography, including the history of ideas.