Events | Number 4, March 2004 | The Influence of Early Islam Upon Persian Art

The Influence of Early Islam
Upon Persian Art

By Sir E Denison Ross,
from “A Survey of Persian Art”, edited by AU Pope and P Ackerman

It is curious to speculate on what lines art and letters would have developed had not Persia, in the seventh century, been overwhelmed physically and mentally by Islam. For although throughout her long history Persia has excelled in the fine arts, it was only after her conversion to Islam and her absorption of Arab culture that
she attained the zenith of her literary fame, and, taking a new lease of artistic life, developed branches of the fine arts in which she was to surpass all other nations. If we are to understand the debt of the Persians to the
Arabs for the national revival that led to the birth of modern Persian poetry, which in turn exercised so powerful an influence on the character of her painting, we must try to visualize the state of artistic culture and of learning in Persia at the beginning of the seventh century under the last of the Sasanians.

We naturally know far more about the art of Persia in this period than we do about her literature, if only because so much more of the former has been preserved. In many branches of the arts she had attained a high degree
of excellence, notably in architecture, plastic ornament, figural reliefs, metalwork, and textiles. Of the painting of the period we know very little, unless we may regard the mural paintings and the book illustrations of the Manichaeans in Turkistan as representing a style still Persian in inspiration, though executed by the Soghdians and Uighurs, many centuries after Manichaeism and its artists had been turned out of Persia.

While the Sasanian arts had reached this high plane and maintained it for centuries, the inevitable degeneracy had set in well before the end of the dynasty, although under Khusraw I, Anushirvan (531-79) Persia enjoyed a Renaissance during which she reached again a very high place among the civilized races of the world, only to fall once more into a fatal decline.

In Sasanian times a certain number of Pahlavi works were produced, yet we must presume that literature both in output and popularity, lagged very far behind the fine arts, and if we examine the list of these works we shall see how limited was its range. Up to this time the legends and pseudohistory have remarkably little connexion with historical fact.

The only contemporary chronicles in existence were the cuneiform inscriptions of the Achaemenids, which in
Sasanian times probably no one could read, and apparently no tradition of real history had survived further back than the later kings of the Ashkani (the Parthian Arsacids), the Medes and Achaemenids having been quite forgotten, apart from a few names, while Alexander the Great had become elaborately legendary and unreal, and with him was associated Darius, in the form Dara. Of the Parthians, too, nothing but a few names were preserved. Reliable historical records, do not occur until Yazdijird I (399-420), but even these are smothered
in rhetoric and legend. There was very little before Islam that would be classed as popular literature, and, except for a few Soghdian fragments, of the Sasanian period, no poetry at all.

To this relative inferiority in the literature, probably two factors contributed. In the first place, the innate artistic genius of Persia had been stimulated and furthered in other media by her intercourse with the Egyptians, the Greeks, and the Romans; for while she rarely copied foreign models, and always preserved a definite national individuality, she did adopt new ideas from these outside sources.

In literature, however, she borrowed nothing from her contemporaries, despite their rich literary stores, not even from the Greeks, who actually ruled over her for nearly two hundred years. Probably the restriction of her interest to her own religious books, the Zend Avesta and the Gathas during Achaemenid and Parthian times,
and to the Pahlavi books of the Sasanian period, was due to religious fanaticism or fear of propaganda.

This reluctance to exploit other nations in letters as the Sasanians had exploited them in the fine arts would, however, only partially explain the Sasanian limitations in literature. The more fundamental and more serious cause of this backwardness lay in the nature of the language itself.

The Persians, prior to their acceptance of Islam, seem to have preferred to use a difficult system of writing for their language. It is true that the alphabetic cuneiform script invented by the Persians was simplicity itself compared with the syllabic scripts of the Sumerians, Elamites, and Babylonians, but it was never a convenient
medium. Side by side with the puzzling Pahlavi, we find a similar system, also based on the Aramaic alphabet, employed in northeastern Iran for Soghdian Persian. The Turks, on the other hand, when they took to writing, whether in the Runic of the Orkhon and other inscriptions, or in the alphabet they borrowed later from oghdians, did not intentionally mystify the reader.

The unpractical character of Pahlavi and the Soghdian scripts goes to show that literature as such was not popular among the Iranians. Had there been any demand for popular literature, it seems obvious that some
simpler system of writing would have been devised.

The penetration of the Middle East by the newly converted Arabs brought about in Persia a revolution in letters no less complete and epoch making than her change of faith; and this was mainly due to the almost miraculous influence exercised by the Quran over all converts to Islam. As this book was held to contain the verbal message of God as revealed to mankind through the Prophet Muhammad, its actual diction was revered as much as its contents, and to accept Islam was to accept the Arabic language.

All non-Arabs who became Muslims must consequently have regarded Arabic as a language superior to their
own, if only by reason of its sacredness.

As soon as Arabic literature was disseminated in Persia, the number of literates in that country was in a very
short time increased a thousandfold. Moreover, wherever the Arabs carried their victorious arms, they imposed their language on all who would be accounted good Muslims or be admitted to government employ; and the quick-witted Persians were indeed not long in taking for themselves a first place among writers of Arabic prose
and verse.

It was notably the Persians who laid down the laws of Arabic grammar in a fixed form, basing their theories on
a close study of the Quran and of the classical poets of the desert. It was the Quran even more than the poetry of the Bedouins which fixed the rigid forms of Arabic once and for all, and the introduction of countless Arabic words by the Persians into their new written language had a stabilizing effect on its orthography.

When, in the tenth century, Persian authors began to employ extensively their new language, which, strongly
impregnated with Arabic, had sprung up on the foundation of their old vernaculars, the Quran and its language
continued to play an allimportant role, and every writer felt it incumbent on him to introduce verses from the
Holy Book or quotations from the Arabic poets.

It is indeed impossible to exaggerate the effect which the study of Arabic had on the intelligentsia of the Middle East and India. The acquisition of this language, at first an act of piety, soon became the secular ambition of every man of learning, who delighted in nothing more than in displaying his complete mastery of this very difficult idiom, with its vast and varied vocabulary and its mathematically precise grammar. To the Turks, the Persians, and the Indian, Arabic meant much more than Latin meant to men of letters in Europe in the Middle Ages, for though Latin was the universal medium for sacred and scientific writing, there was no particular merit outside good scholarship attaching to a knowledge of this language.

Long before the Classical revival, poetry had been composed and sung by half the peoples of Europe, and several new languages had already assumed definite and distinct shape. The sudden appearance of poets among the Persians and later among the Turks, and their ready adaptation of the Arabic metres and verse forms, are not easy to explain; we can only presume that the spirit of poetry had long been lying dormant among the Persians, and indeed certain fragments which have been recovered of poetic writings in Pahlavi and Soghdian seem point to the existence of poetry in pre- Islamic times. When at last the medium and the opportunity were offered, the whole aesthetic outlook of the people was changed and imagination was given full play for the first time.

As for the new religion we may take it that Magianism had but little inner meaning for the subjects of the Sasanian monarchs; that its practice was almost confined to the priesthood; and that the language of the scripture, Pahlavi, was intelligible only to the clergy and the government officials.

In these circumstances we can picture to ourselves the direct appeal which the simple tenets of Islam made to the Persians, not to mention the wonder aroused in them by a holy book which was written in the actual language spoken by the men who brought it.

Islam, then, while apparently and ostensibly destroying the ancient religion and supplanting for purposes of letters the ancient language of Iran, by substituting for all that was Aryan a Semitic religion and language, actually gave Persia a new treasure house of legend and a new written medium.

We must not, of course, forget that mysticism, which plays so large a part in modern Persian literature, owes much to Greek thought, though in the garb of Sufism it reached Persia through the Arabs. We cannot, however,
presume that the Neoplatonists who found asylum at the court of Anushirvan had any direct influence on contemporary Persian letters.

In the meantime, the artists too were starting a kind of race which ended in a dead heat between poetry and the
miniature in the middle of the fifteenth century, for at the court of Husayn Bayqara in Herat we find that both arts had reached a similar level of excellence.

Islam being a revolt against Arab fetichism, and being based on Jewish and Christian monotheism, set its face
sternly against religious art; and since its monotheism has remained unchallenged, it has never countenanced religious art, except in architect and the resultant development of ornament.

The Jews have been more strict than the Muslims, for even their buildings have always remained simple and sombre, though we must not forget the splendors of the Temple of Solomon. Christianity perhaps began to
favor religious art only after the polytheistic tendencies of the Trinity and saint worship had been established: thus the Iconoclastic movement was a revolt against a fashion which was younger than the religion itself. So it was that in Persia the representative arts were under a definite handicap and were chiefly practised far the delectation of broad minded kings and nobles, and, for the most part, on a somewhat restricted scale. These
circumstances contributed to the development of miniature painting which was primarily a court and luxury art.

Painting had been practised already in Sasanian times, but was mainly confined to frescoes. The examples
which have survived of such painting, though they possess a conventional beauty of design, are limited in range and highly stylized.

Many of the conventional subjects represented were based on popular legends which afterwards formed themes for the poets. Portrait painting was also known as early as the middle of the eleventh century. The Persian genius for painting was only to come into its own when the artists had for inspiration the national poetry of Islamic Persia. Persian poetry, when it first came to be written, had no tradition behind it beyond Arabic meters, and the popular legends of the Persians and the religious legends of the Quran.

Persian miniature painting, on the other hand, which owed so much to Persian poetry, had behind it a long tradition, and yet it may be claimed that this ancient art of the painter became the servant of the new art of the poet. In other words, painting became the adjunct of literature, and the revolution brought about by Islam in the
life and letters of Persia also gave birth to the new art of the miniature.

Until the Persians began to write historical and romantic epics there was little scope for the book illustrator. Let us consider what he had at his disposal. There were the Biblical legends which suited the taste of both
Muslim and Christian; there were the Fables of Bidpai; and there were the translations from the Greek of works on natural science and mechanics. Of poetry there was nothing that lent itself to illustration before the appearance of the Shah- Nama in the eleventh century. The Quran eventually came to be richly illustrated, not, of course, in its own pages, but in the histories and poems which retold the narratives and legends it contained.

To the fact that the Quran itself could not be illustrated we owe the marvelous workmanship and skill that calligraphers and illuminators devoted to making beautiful copies.

Calligraphy was now of primary importance, for side by side with the pride inspired by a knowledge of the Arabic
language, especially in non- Arabs, was the delight in beautiful writing. Whether in large letters on the outside of buildings, or engraved on tombs, painted on pottery, or written in books, calligraphy gives the average Muslim as much aesthetic pleasure as any picture.

The adaptability of the Arabic alphabet, and the endless variety of forms that it was capable of assuming, influenced the whole scheme of decoration, while the grace and charm of the simpler styles, with their tapering alifs and lams, no doubt had a great influence on the development of rhythmic pattern and pure design. The numerous variations of the Arabic script which were in course of time evolved were, in spite of the scope they seem to give for fantasy, all subject to the most rigid rules of order and design.