Persia

Extract

The Persians are the “race-lumière” of the East, just as France is the torch-bearer of the West; Persian ideas, Persian philosophy, Persian poetry and mysticism have tinged and penetrated all religious thought in the Near and in the Middle East. The charm of the roses of Shiráz, of dervishes and Sufis and the Rubáiyát, has not failed to reach even these remote, misty fastnesses of the work-a-day West. Some Fate seems to have been at work, pushing the Persians into the foreground of the world’s thought, ever since—shall we say the Babylonian captivity?— at any rate since the day when those three royal magicians followed the star, and, in its limelight stood around the manger-throne of the Child Jesus in Bethlehem.

It is not within the scope of this slight paper to do more than hint at the religious history of Persia. Its ancient borders on the west were the Araxes, one of the four rivers of the Earthly Paradise, and the Tigris and Euphrates, from whose banks Abram set out, at the call of God, for a strange land in the West. The tradition of the four streams of Paradise lived on in the primitive religion of Irán, and with it, no doubt, no inconsiderable share of the early wisdom of our race. The captivity of the Jews in Babylon and the residence of the prophet Daniel at the court of the Persian Emperor must certainly have had their influence on Jewish thought. In fact the books of Daniel and of Tobias—to mention only two—are full of the traces of this influence, linguistic or metaphysical.