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304 Pages
The New Muslims of Post-Conquest Iran Tradition, Memory, and Conversion
How do converts to a religion come to feel an attachment to it? The New Muslims of Post-Conquest Iran answers this important question for Iran by focusing on the role of memory and its revision and erasure in the ninth to eleventh centuries CE. During this period, the descendants of the Persian imperial, religious, and historiographical traditions not only wrote themselves into starkly different early Arabic and Islamic accounts of the past but also systematically suppressed much knowledge about pre-Islamic history. The result was both a new “Persian” ethnic identity and the pairing of Islam with other loyalties and affiliations, including family, locale, and sect. This pioneering study examines revisions to memory in a wide range of cases, from Iran’s imperial and administrative heritage to the Prophet Muhammad’s stalwart Persian companion, Salman al-Farisi, and to memory of Iranian scholars, soldiers, and rulers in the mid-seventh century. Through these renegotiations, Iranians developed a sense of Islam as an authentically Iranian religion, as they simultaneously shaped the broader historiographic tradition in Arabic and Persian.
Sarah Bowen Savant is a historian of religion and an Associate Professor at the Aga Khan University, Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations in London. Her publications include Genealogy and Knowledge in Muslim Societies: Understanding the Past (2013), co-edited with Helena de Felipe, as well as book chapters and journal articles treating early Islamic history and historiography.
Preface
For the period of this study, the primary language of our written sources is Arabic. I follow the International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies’ (IJMES) transliteration system for Arabic; accordingly, I do not indicate final ta’ marbuta or distinguish between alif mamdida and alif maqsura. Technical terms and place names used in English appear without transliteration (e.g., vizier, Baghdad), as do Anglicized derivatives of Arabic words and dynasties (e.g., ‘Ajam, ‘Abbasid). From the fourth/tenth century onward, a few, albeit culturally significant, Persian sources enter circulation, with more in the centuries that follow. My transliteration of Persian texts generally reflects that of ITMES, but where Persian words appear in Arabic texts, I give priority to Arabic transliteration. I hope I will be forgiven for this choice by Persianists, and by all for any inconsistencies.
For the Qur’an, I draw primarily on the English translation by Alan Jones (Cambridge: Gibb Memorial Trust, 2007).
For dates, I generally use those in the Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed.; Encyclopaedia Iranica; and Tarif Khalidi, Arabic Historical Thought in the Classical Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 235-42.
Acknowledgments
Although this book is not a revision of my Ph.D. dissertation (which I now see as heavily circumscribed by time and circumstance), the seeds for it were first planted while I was a Ph.D. student, so I would like to start by acknowledging with gratitude the insights and guidance of Roy Mottahedeh at Harvard, without whom this study would never have been conceived. At Harvard, I also benefited from the advice of William Graham, Wolfhart Heinrichs, and Charles Hallisey, among other members of the faculty, and the fruitful companionship of fellow students who remain important interlocutors and among whom I would single out Kristen Stilt, Raquel Ukeles, Joseph Saleh, Greg White, Christian Lange, Kambiz GhaneaBassiri, and Bruce Fudge. At an early stage, I also profited from reading courses with Ahmad Mahdavi-Damghani. Harvard, the Fulbright-Hays Commission, and the Social Science Research Council funded work on the Arabic sources in Egypt with two extraordinarily helpful teachers from Cairo University, Rida al-‘ Arabi and ‘Abd al-Hamid Madkour.
The University of California, Berkeley, was a second home to me for much of the dissertation-writing process as well as afterward, when I was a Sultan post-doctoral Fellow at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies. John Hayes, Emily Gottreich, Nezar AlSayyad, Wali Ahmadi, James Monroe, and Fred Astren welcomed me and offered key expertise and friendship. It was at Berkeley that this book began to take shape. The more recent environment in which it developed was London, and its progress was helped by the opportunities I have had since joining the faculty of the newly established Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations of the Aga Khan University. Abdou Filali-Ansary, the Institute’s founding director, and Farouk Topan, its director since 2009, deserve special mention, as do now five cohorts of our students from across the globe who have sensitized me to the ways in which early Islamic history can today be interpreted in different Muslim-majority contexts.
At an early and critical stage, I benefited from stimulating conversations with colleagues, including Stefan Weber, now of the Pergamonmuseum in Berlin. Rebecca Williamson aided me with research for an important year, which freed me to read widely and to think. Fasih Khan has throughout provided unstinting support in all matters technical, and likewise, in our library, Waseem Farooq, Jessica Lindner, Walid Ghali, and Shah Hussain. The U.K. has generally proved an exciting environment for work on historiography. I have particularly benefited from collaboration with Konrad Hirschler and James McDougall in a now annual workshop on “Arabic Pasts: Histories and Historiography.” Hugh Kennedy, an early supporter of “Arabic Pasts,” has been a generous friend and commentator on my work.
Several parts of this study have been presented in public talks and at conferences, and I would like to thank these audiences. Comparative Islamic Studies has kindly permitted me to reproduce in Chapter One material from my 2006 article, “Isaac as the Persians’ Ishmael: Pride and the Pre-Islamic Past in Ninth and Tenth-Century Islam,” Comparative Islamic Studies 2, no. 1 (2006): 5-25, © Equinox Publishing Ltd 2006. I would like to thank Annales Islamologiques for permission to use in the Introduction a few paragraphs from my article “‘Persians’ in Early Islam,” Annales Islamologiques 42 (2008): 73-91, in which I explored ideas relating to Persians, memory, and forgetting.
Many friends read drafts at various stages of the project. Dealing with a significant variety of fields, genres, and languages was a risky endeavor requiring some familiarity with a wide range of specialist scholarship. I have often drawn on the expertise and guidance of others, who should not, however, be held responsible for the book’s shortcomings. I would like to thank in particular Zayde Gordon Antrim, Fred Astren, Patricia Crone, Touraj Daryaee, Robert Gleave, Mohammadreza Hashemitaba, John Hayes, Stefan Heidemann, Karim Javan, Wadad Kadi, Aptin Khanbaghi, Majid Montazer Mahdi, Raffaele Mauriello, Christopher Melchert, John Nawas, Farid Panjwani, Richard Payne, Parvaneh Pourshariati, Kathryn Spellman Poots, Khodadad Rezakhani, Andrew Rippin, Fatemeh Shams-Esmaeli, Maria Subtelny, and Raquel Ukeles. Antoine Borrut, Peter Webb, Philip Wood, and Travis Zadeh have especially enriched this study through fruitful discussions about Arabs, Persians, memory, narrative, and historiography and through their insightful feedback on the entirety of the manuscript.
Marigold Acland of Cambridge University Press supported this project at an early stage and throughout. I also thank William Hammell, Joy Mizan, Sarika Narula, and the editorial staff at Cambridge. John Tallmadge provided critical early advice on writing, and Hanna Siurua helped me to shape the manuscript into its final form. Joe LeMonnier created the maps. Cambridge’s anonymous reviewers offered encouragement and constructive criticism, which I have accepted gratefully.
Finally, I would like to thank my family: my parents, William and Susan Bowen, and sister, Julia Bowen, and numerous in-laws and “outlaws,” especially John Joseph Savant and Stephanie Murphy. Above all, I thank John Paul, Johnny, Leila, and Julian, who have provided important perspective on life as on work; to them I gratefully dedicate this study.
Introduction
Amid the alluvial flatlands east of the Tigris River in Iraq stands a great hulk of a ruin known as the Arch of Khusraw, or to Iranians today as the Taq-i Kisra. When Robert Mignan, in the service of the East India Company, came upon the “Tauk Kesra” in 1827, he described “a magnificent monument of antiquity, surprising the spectator with the perfect state of its preservation, after having braved the warring elements for so many ages; without an emblem to throw any light upon its history; without proof, or character to be traced on any brick or wall.” Mignan noted that “the natives of this country assert” that “the ruins are of the age of Nimrod,” a conclusion that he seems to have found credible.* In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, European travelers who came upon the mysterious site assumed the majestic arch and the large columned structure flanking it to be a temple of the sun, or else the work of a Roman emperor.’ But while the Taq-i Kisra was built on the remnants of past civilizations, the history of the site was much more recent, belonging to the Sasanian period and the environs of Ctesiphon, when, within the residential district of Asbanbar, it had served as the throne hall of a palace possibly built by Khusraw Anishirvan (r. 531-79 CE).*
The Arab invasion of Iraq in the 630s initiated a new phase in the area’s history, ultimately resulting in the fall of the Sasanian dynasty and the conquest of Iran, and so Ctesiphon and its monuments were eclipsed. The entire area straddling the Tigris became an Arab-Muslim settlement, which the Arabs called al-Mada in (Arabic for “the cities”). In the centuries that followed, they dismantled its buildings in order to construct new ones in Kufa and Baghdad. But even as they removed vestiges of the Sasanian architecture, they began the long process of memorializing the site. On the night of the Prophet Muhammad’s birth, according to one report, the battlements of the Taq-i Kisra shook so hard that fourteen of them collapsed. At the same moment, for the first time in a thousand years, the Zoroastrians’ sacred fire in Fars (Istakhr) died out. According to another account, when the Arabs’ conquering hero, Sa‘d b. Abi Waqqas, entered the Taq-i Kisra he performed the special “prayer of conquest” (salat alfath) that Muhammad had performed on entering Mecca.° Afterward, al-Mada’in was governed by Salman al-Farisi (Salman “the Persian”), a companion of Muhammad. There were also tales of spoils so magnificent that antiquities dealers today still hunt for treasures from Ctesiphon.
The Line of Enquiry
The story of Islam’s spread beyond Arabia is central to every general history of the faith and of Muslim civilizations, and to understanding the shape of the Muslim world today. Whereas the early community was based on a small, tribal, Arabian elite, Islam quickly spread beyond this narrow group and was woven into the fabric of innumerable local contexts. Today, although adherents still acknowledge the importance of the Arabian origins of their religion, IsLam commands the loyalty of people of virtually every nationality and is the dominant religion in some of the world’s most culturally and socially dynamic regions. About 98 percent of Iran’s nearly seventy million people are Muslim; Zoroastrianism, the Sasanian state religion, claims adherents only in the tens of thousands.
One of the most important questions relating to the success of Islam worldwide is how loyalty has been fostered among the newly converted. In particular, how have they come to feel a sense of belonging to a Muslim community? This study addresses questions of loyalty and belonging in relation to Iran’s Persians of the third/ninth to fifth/eleventh centuries, who represented the first large group of non-Arab converts to Islam. It does so by showing how the post-conquest descendants of the Persian imperial, religious, and historiographical traditions wrote themselves into starkly different early Arabic and Islamic accounts of the past. Although they soon developed a sense that Islam was as much an Iranian religion as it was an Arab one, nothing guaranteed that Islam would succeed among them, especially in the ways that it did.
The book addresses the issue of loyalty and belonging from the twin angles of tradition and memory. For groups, as for individuals, loyalty and a sense of belonging depend on how they make sense of the past, including their origins, their ancestry, and the achievements of previous generations. The past helps inform and stabilize group identity, particularly during times of political, cultural, or social change. Conversion to Islam led Iranians to recall their past in new ways and to accumulate new memories about their history. Despite the complexity of this process, one can trace its broad outlines by examining the deep currents of Arabic texts that circulated in the third/ninth to fifth/eleventh centuries, including not only works of local, regional, and universal history, but also biographical dictionaries, geographies, works of belles-lettres (adab), and “religious” texts such as Qur’an commentaries, collections of and commentaries on Prophetic Hadith, and works of jurisprudence. These Arabic works represented only the first phase in Iran’s rewriting of its past, a process that continued with the subsequent development of Persian letters from the fourth/tenth century onward.
The terms “tradition” and “memory” are central to the book and enable it to draw on a broad body of work that has developed largely outside Arabic, Islamic, and Iranian Studies and that treats memory as integral to processes of cultural and social change. By “tradition” I mean reports handed down about the past in whatever form, including but not limited to the conventional Prophetic traditions and historical reports known as Hadith and akhbar (sing. khabar). I treat transmission as evidence of the fostering of shared memories. Traditions, like objects, patterns of action, and ways of thinking, are reproduced and disseminated, and they frequently exhibit differences that suggest adaptation and therefore interpretation. I label those who transmit them “traditionists,” whatever other affiliations they may have had.° The concept of memory, on the other hand, draws attention to the power of traditions to affect individuals and collectivities. As a tradition accumulates weight and authority, it shapes collective agreements about the past, thereby creating memories. These collective agreements are deeply held by groups and the individuals within them, but they can also be opposed, changed, and otherwise subjected to negotiation, especially by the people who consider them to represent “their” past: the descendants of the actors in the story, the residents of the country where the events took place, and the present-day believers.
The period under principal consideration here witnessed great creativity in the fashioning and circulation of traditions about the founding moments of Islam in Iran. This was when Iran’s urban elite classes likely converted to Islam, as Richard Bulliet observed more than thirty years ago. Bulliet based his conclusions for Iran chiefly on biographical dictionaries composed for Isfahan and Nishapir, thriving cities in central and northeastern Iran.’ In adopting a quantitative methodology for the study of conversion across the Middle East (with prominent attention to Iran), he noted: The great conversion experience that fundamentally changed world history by uniting the peoples of the Middle East in a new religion has had few modern chroniclers, the reason being that conversion plays so slight a role in the narratives of medieval chroniclers. Without data it is difficult to write history, and medieval Islam produced no missionaries, bishops, baptismal rites, or other indicators of conversion that could be conveniently recorded by the Muslim chronicler.®
What has not been duly appreciated, however, is that in writing about history — including their history before the conquests — Muslims were engaged in an effort to make sense of Islam in the changing and multireligious communities in which they lived. Conversion is more than a background context for traditions; it is often a point of concern. This is the case even though, as a whole, narrators of traditions generally refer only obliquely to conversion itself and represent themselves as speaking exclusively to other committed Muslims.
Iran in the First Centuries of Islam
In terms of historical background, the following summary will be useful for readers new to Islamic or Iranian history. It represents something of a standard narrative and chronology of the first centuries of Islam, though readers should also be aware that some of its points have been subject to vigorous debates and skepticism among historians.’ It is commonly thought that Muhammad was born in or about 570 CE in the town of Mecca in the western Arabian region of the Hijaz. From around 610, Muhammad developed a conviction that he had been specially selected by God and began to gather a small group of followers.!°
At intervals, he recited passages that, he said, were a revelation from God and formed a corpus called the Qur’an, and which gave confidence and guidance to his followers. Facing opposition in Mecca, in 622 Muhammad formed a new community in Medina - the moment that traditionally marks the beginning of the Islamic (hijri) calendar. Over the second half of the 620s, he gained the support of many Arab tribal groups as he consolidated his authority in Medina and then fixed his attention on Mecca, which he conquered about two and a half years before his death in 11 AH/632 CE. His followers were known collectively as companions (sahaba) and were divided into two groups: the Muhajiriin (emigrants from Mecca) and the Ansar (helpers), those Medinans who supported him. After Muhammad’s death the Muslims engaged in military campaigns so extensive that, within twenty years, they had brought down the Sasanian Empire, which stretched from Iraq to Marw in modern Turkmenistan.
Arabs settled in cities such as Hamadhan, Rayy, and Nishapiar, building their own quarters with palaces, mosques, and gardens. Several former villages, such as Qum, became cities as a result of such settlement, but many territories, protected by mountains and deserts, remained beyond the reach of the Arabs’ armies.'! The Byzantine Empire, meanwhile, had controlled the eastern remnants of the Roman Empire, but Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and North Africa fell quickly to the Arabs, with the net result that the Arabs acquired control over approximately half of the former territory of Byzantium.
In the emerging empire, after the first four successors to Muhammad rule passed down along dynastic lines, first among the Umayyads in Syria (r. 41-132/661-750), and after 132/750, among the Iraq-based ‘Abbasids, who descended from the Prophet’s uncle, ‘Abbas. The early ‘Abbasid period is often depicted as a golden age (as in the stories from the Arabian Nights), when caliphs ruled with the assistance of their able Persian viziers. Yet for all its strengths, by the second half of the third/ninth century, the ‘Abbasid state had begun to show weakness. In Baghdad, the caliphs subsequently fell under the control of Buyid (r. 334-447/945—1055) and Seljuk (447-547/1055-1152) amirs and sultans, the Buyids hailing from the Caspian region of Daylam and the Seljuks from the steppes north of the Caspian and Aral seas.
While the caliphs retained nominal sovereignty, Iran and the central and eastern stretches of the empire came under the rule of these de facto rulers, as well as of other dynasties who at various times controlled portions of the ‘Abbasid realm: the Samanids (204-395/819-1005), the Saffarids (247-393/861-1003), and the Ghaznavids (366-582/977-1186), to name but three.!* While our earliest extant narrative sources were written in ‘Abbasid Iraq at the height of its glory through the first half of the third/ninth century, a real literary outpouring took place later, often exhibiting different perspectives, when the caliphs were weak and Iranian and Central Asian rulers patronized scholarship and learning. Throughout the period, Arabic functioned as the language of elites much as Latin did in the premodern West. Even local Iranian histories of the fourth/tenth and fifth/eleventh centuries, for example, tended to be written in Arabic (though in some cases they were later translated into Persian).
Coins give a sense of the cultural confidence and political will of Iranians from the mid-fourth/tenth century onward. The Caliph ‘Abd alMalik (r. 65—86/685-705) and his successors had made sure that Arabic epigraphy distinguished the caliphate’s gold and silver coins from those of its predecessors and current neighbors. However, semi-independent or autonomous governors, such as the Buyids, struck coins with their personal names, which were often of ancient Persian derivation.'!? When Ahmad b. Buwayh (d. 355/967) became commander of the caliph’s armies in 334/945, he quickly usurped the caliph’s authority: he and his Buyid successors adopted lofty titles, including shahan-shab (“king of kings”); had their names read out in the sermon (khutba) of the weekly communal prayer, traditionally a caliphal prerogative; and inscribed their names on coins. The Buyids drew on the iconography of earlier days and reemployed the Pahlavi script in coins minted and presented to dignitaries on special occasions across their domains.'* The ‘Abbasids could do little as pre-Islamic symbols such as Sasanian winged crowns entered the larger currency system, although there were protests. The great jurist and caliphal adviser al-Mawardi (d. 450/1058), for example, reportedly once declared a legal opinion (fatwa) against the Buyid ruler Jalal alDawla, who in 429/1037-8 demanded from the reigning caliph, al-Qa’im (r. 422-67/1031-75), the right to the Arabic title malik al-mulik (“king of kings”).!°
The term “Persia” was used in Achaemenid (559-330 BCE) and Sasanian (224-651 CE) times to refer both to the ethnic homeland of a “Persian” ethnic group in southwestern Iran and to the vast lands under the imperial control and cultural influence of this people following its dispersal.'° Scholars have traced the ambiguous usage of the geographical term “Persia” in early Islam to this prior, pre-Islamic ambiguity.!” In early Arabic sources, one can thus find the term Fars/Faris applied both in the narrow sense to a specific province, particularly by geographers, and in wider senses to refer to a territory that includes the province but exceeds it. Likewise, the term ahl Fars/Faris (or sometimes just Faris) may denote either a “Persian” people sharing a culture and a sense of historical community, in general, or the people of the province of Persia in particular, whereas the much more common term al-Furs most often refers to a people not limited to a province.'*® By contrast, the idea of Iran (Middle Persian, Era) has quite a different sense and history, and the term “Iran” had only limited usage in the period of this study. In the late 1980s, Gherardo Gnoli initiated reconsideration of this term and its associations with the argument that a notion of Iran reached a point of clarity only at the beginning of the Sasanian period, when it was part of a program that included among its elements an appeal to Achaemenid origins.'’ Accordingly, the Sasanians introduced the Middle Persian title of shaban-shah Eran and invented the idea of Erdn-shahr, the “domain of the Iranians,” to refer to their realm; the term was subsequently used as part of state propaganda.~° Sasanian titles made extensive use of the name Eran, and it was also used as part of personal names.*! Since Gnoli (and, indeed, before him as well), many scholars both inside and outside of Iran have undertaken studies that consider the meaning and significance of “Iran” as a focus of “national” loyalties from Sasanian on through to modern times. As with many studies of other, modern nationalities, opinions are deeply divided, with some scholars viewing identification with Iran as reaching back into the distant primordial Avestan, Achaemenid, or Sasanian past, while others argue for the modernity of Iranian national sentiment.**
In contrast to the Sasanian period, and at variance with the situation today, we find early Islam to be the era of Persia and Persians.”> Muslims continued to use the terms Ivan and Iran-shahr (as transliterated from Arabic and New Persian, versus Middle Persian Erdn-shahr), although they do not appear to have been attuned to the terms’ potential. Geographers, in their entries, treat Iran-shahr and Fars, the province, separately. Likewise, Muslims refer to Iran-shahr in contexts in which Iran’s pre-Islamic past, especially its “national” tradition, is mentioned.** But otherwise the term “Persia” is generally preferred, often even in discussions of geography and of the national past.2> Muhammad himself is remembered to have spoken of Persia but not of Iran-shahr. At the same time, other ethnic identities were submerged. For example, a notion of “Pahlav” as an ethnicon may have lingered, but in the early Muslim sources the term fahlaw has nothing of the currency of the terms al-Furs or Banu Faris.
In what follows, I will use the term Iran to refer to a territory centered on a plateau, and in recognition of shared linguistic and cultural patterns that do have antique origins; likewise, the term “Iranians” will refer to its inhabitants and is useful for encompassing a variety of groups. But in the period under consideration, regional identities were far stronger than pan-Iranian ones. The major identity that cut across regions was a“Persian” one, and this imperfectly, in different ways at different times.*° As for all times and locales, it is also important to bear in mind the extent to which identity was intersubjective and contextual. During the first century and a half of Islam, tribes from throughout the Arabian peninsula, Syria, Palestine, southern Iraq, and as far away as Khurasan came to see themselves as sharing in a larger “Arab” identity as part of a process in which many other, non-“Arab” groups began to recognize their own distinctiveness in new ways. So a man might identify himself as a Persian relative to other ethnic groups and in recognition of shared customs, language, homeland, history, and descent, but consider himself a Kirmani (a native of the province of Kirman) when traveling in Khurasan or a partisan of the Shi‘a or of the legal school of al-Shafi‘l when sectarian or juristic affiliations mattered. Like other Muslims of their day, the inhabitants of Iran tended to affiliate themselves with many different groups based on bonds of ethnicity as well as of language, lineage, locality, and profession. Regarding sectarian loyalties, in the first centuries, the family of ‘Ali also won the affection of some Iranians, although it was centuries before Shi‘i sectarianism won the loyalty of Iranians as a whole.*’ For understanding the loyalties and affiliations of Iranians after the Muslim conquest, therefore, a number of possibilities must be considered, of which Persian ethnicity is an important but not the sole or overriding one.
Tradition
In Islamic Studies, the term “tradition” is often used in a limited sense to refer to the Hadith of the Prophet or to reports about him and the early community (akhbdr) that circulated in “historical” texts, such as Prophetic biographies. In this book, the term is used in a more general sense to emphasize not only the common characteristics of reports about the past but also the ways in which these reports participate in larger patterns of culture. The definition itself is silent on questions of soundness, authenticity, and truth. A bowl may be faulty for a variety of reasons but still be traditional, insofar as it follows past patterns, and likewise, a historical proposition may rise or fall depending on “rational and empirical evidence,” but in either case, it can justifiably be called traditional.**
For a student of history, a key opportunity presents itself in the way in which our Arabic sources tend to return to a common pool of memories about locales, events, institutions, and persons, but with different methods of selecting and manipulating the record. These divergent methods can often suggest something about the hermeneutics of individual traditionists. One can compare texts so as to decipher novelties, discern goals, and understand the social and cultural stakes involved in remembering the past in one particular way as opposed to another. Ctesiphon, for example, was made into an expressive relic by reporters who made much of the spoils, including a massive carpet, the gitf, known in Persian as the Bahar-i Khusraw (“the king’s spring”); this was divided up with a large piece given to ‘Ali, perhaps suggesting the metaphorical transfer of a portion of the kingdom of Kisra (the Sasanian ruler) to his later partisans.”? A different memory is encapsulated in the gasida of al-Buhturi, cited at the beginning of this introduction, which was composed during the reign of Caliph al-Muntasir (r. 247-8/861-2) and which has its own perspective on the site. The poet dwells on and even exaggerates the ruin of the monuments at al-Mada’in as he connects the past majesty of the monuments to that of their unnamed builder. As Richard Serrano has argued, he is attentive to their present state and, most importantly, to their affective power, but for him, the ruins are positive reminders of a great though vanished empire with which he identifies as the descendant of a people that was once allied to it. Al-Buhturi stresses the resilience of Kisra’s ivan (throne hall) against all attempts to plunder it and refers specifically to its carpets: It was not disgraced by the robbery of carpets Of silk brocade, or plunder of curtains of raw silk; Lofty, its battlements soar, Raised on the summits of Radwa and Quds; Clothed in white, so that You see of them but cotton robes. It isn’t known if it’s the workmanship of men for jinn Who inhabit it, or the work of jinn for men, Yet I see it gives witness that The builder is not the least of kings.*°
Al-Buhturi profited from the patronage of several ‘Abbasid caliphs, but he appears to have composed his gasida in a moment of upset. Through the motif of an abandoned site, he has made al-Mada’in and its monuments, including the ivan, into a subject that shows the finitude of empires in general, insinuating, perhaps, the same fate for his ‘Abbasid patrons. He has also, as Serrano has proposed, imagined himself in the place of Khusraw Antshirvan, served by the king’s boon companion al-Balahbadh; his praises are for himself, not for his patrons, who we are led to believe have failed him.?!
Wherever possible, I employ a comparative method to discern what makes a particular author’s perspective distinctive. This method requires consideration for a traditionist’s own particular, historical circumstances, as well as some attention to those of the genre within which he worked, since a historian of the conquests, for example, will tend to provide a perspective that differs from that of a Qur’an commentator, though they both reflect on the same, seminal events. This method is greatly facilitated by modern technology and databases of Arabic texts, but it does have some limitations. For example, it gives little consideration to earlier, lost sources and their particular perspectives, and it leaves open the question of how much fifteenth-century Persian translations or reworkings of tenthcentury Arabic texts can tell us about tenth-century views. Sometimes such views do become fossilized in later sources, with traditionists passing on reports indifferently. Historians often drew on past layers of history writing. As is frequently noted, Arabic historiography is a cumulative endeavor. Still, I believe that scholars have too often overlooked creative possibilities in their quest to uncover the origins of ideas or to establish the boundaries of genres. I prefer, then, the risk of overstating the plasticity of our sources for the benefit of querying them.
Remembering
The expansion of Islam and the birth of Islamic historiography occurred within a late antique world where techniques of memory played an important role in the transmission of knowledge. The Qur’an was recited and transmitted orally in support of ritualized prayer, but also Hadith, akhbar, all manner of historical lore, and poetry were passed down in oral form. Children often learned the Qur’an at a young age so as to prepare themselves for later studies (not to mention the social cachet that went with such knowledge), and they also memorized Hadith and other reports, the authenticity of which depended on continuous transmission. Those who cited the Prophet’s warning against the writing down of tradition sought to combat the use of the pen and, they feared, the consequent erosion of memory.** As they juxtapose written and oral transmission, Muslim sources from the first centuries often depict this debate as an inquest, including questions posed and information gathered, with a high degree of anxiety about the loss of connections and information. Long after the place of written transmission was secured, the values of an oral culture, and a focus on memory, continued.*> Throughout the first four centuries of Islamic history, the ideal of the perfectibility of memory is widely in evidence, most conspicuously in works that provide ratings on the reliability of Hadith transmitters. Such individuals are linked to each other but also backward in time, as communities in which a perfectible, if not perfect, memory inheres.**
Historians of Islam have long recognized the importance of memory to the work that they do, though until recently typically without considering its social or cultural dimensions. By contrast, a recent and expansive study by Antoine Borrut considered the formation of a “vulgate historiographique” at different phases, particularly in ‘Abbasid times, that filtered and reshaped memory about the Umayyad dynasty and the early ‘Abbasids, about the Syrian landscape, and about the eras’ heroes and rebels, institutions, and monuments.* Like the Umayyad and early ‘Abbasid eras, the first century of Islam also has been treated as a subject of remembrance, as have other phases in Islamic history.°° Several studies of narrative have pursued similar goals, that is, to examine a textual tradition, its agents (or “authors”), and its plasticity and meaningfulness.*’ Consideration has also been given to memory in studies on books and book cultures.** As for Iran, despite work on a variety of topics, especially the transmission of pre-Islamic texts and ideas into Arabic and Persian (particularly relating to the Shab-namah and courtly tradition),*’ and modern memories of the pre-Islamic past, so far there have been few works treating historical consciousness among Iranian Muslims in the period of conversion, and no study dedicated to the issue of their shared memories.*”
Readers familiar with Jan Assmann’s work on the representations of Moses in European history will find echoes of his methodology in my own. What Assmann calls “mnemohistory” concerns itself with the past as it is remembered: he lifts out memory from history writing, connects it to social and cultural contexts, and returns it as an object of inquiry. Memory is not opposed to history, but part of it. If scholars generally seek to distinguish history from myth, mnemohistory seeks to identify a representation in its Sitz im Leben. It does not ask, “Was Moses really trained in all the wisdom of the Egyptians?” Instead, it considers “why such a statement did not appear in the book of Exodus, but only appeared in Acts (7:22), and why the Moses discourse in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries almost exclusively based its image of Moses not on Moses’ elaborate biography in the Pentateuch, but on this single verse in the New Testament.”*!
As one reviewer noted, Assmann gave a gratifyingly precise name to what many historians were already seeking to do.** In terms of method, Assmann’s approach rests on bringing together different accounts for the purpose of noting similarities and dissimilarities, and it assigns importance to narratives as repositories of memory. Comparison of narratives can uncover the layering of memory, taking the form of stratigraphy, to borrow a term from geology, but it equally requires distinguishing a variety of perspectives: that of someone living on the frontier versus in Baghdad; that of a partisan of the Shi'a versus that of a Sunni traditionist; that of a courtier with “skin in the game” versus that of a political outsider; that of a descendant of the conquerors versus that of the conquered.
From my perspective, the significance of mnemohistory as a method lies in its attentiveness to meaning and in the light it can shed on the renegotiation of identities and their associated loyalties. This way of reading the sources suggests something quite profound about Persians of the third/ninth to fifth/eleventh centuries that has not been noted previously, and this is the occurrence of not one but two conversions: one to Persianness, and the other to Islam. One involved a particular ethnic group, the other a religion of nonparticular, universal membership. As part of this dual process of conversion, aspects of Persian identity were contested, especially the Persians’ heritage of imperial rule as an elite class and their previous bonds to Zoroastrianism, the Sasanian religion. Persians became possessors of a variant Muslim culture, with common holidays, ritual practices, social conventions, and norms of behavior. This Persian Muslim culture was further characterized by bilingualism among elites, including religious specialists, but the use of dialects of Persian among ordinary members of society, and by a shared reservoir of memories, our point of investigation. A Persian collective sensibility likely varied in the extent and intensity of its hold over different populations, with possibly more consciousness among the elite and literate social strata for which we have evidence. It developed gradually, my period being only the start of the phenomenon, though events occasionally propelled it forward.*? It was neither continuously present nor always at the forefront of groups’ senses of themselves, as they could also identify along other lines, such as in terms of locale, lineage, sect, or dialect. In other words, in putting stress on Persians, I do not wish to substitute a primordial or perennial Iranian identity with a Persian one. Still, whereas other ethnic groups dissolved and fell into near or absolute oblivion, having failed to adapt effectively in the new environment, Persians were successful and indeed absorbed members of other groups. Many factors played a role, but the sense of a shared past, and therefore a future, as Persian Muslims was among the most important. **
The idea of collective memory itself is often traced back to Maurice Halbwachs, whose work remains remarkably prescient and insightful. His Social Frameworks of Memory greatly extends Durkheim’s observation that knowledge is socially constructed — in other words, it cannot be discovered as a simple “given” but resides in and results from groups.** For Halbwachs, memory is knowledge about the past that individuals acquire through social interaction. We remember because we are in dialogue with other members of society, and through this dialogue meaning and significance are assigned to the past and make it memorable. Groups provide “social frameworks for memory” that give an individual the means to recall the past, on the condition, Halbwachs writes, “that I turn toward them and adopt, at least for the moment, their way of thinking.” *° Individuals have their own memories, but these are in large measure part of “group memory” because an event, person, or fact leaves an impression only to the extent that “one has thought it over,” that is, “to the extent that it is connected with the thoughts that come to us from the social milieu.”*” Paul Ricceur summarized Halbwachs’s contribution as showing that “to remember, we need others.”**
Halbwachs believed that the present generation becomes conscious of itself in counterposing its present situation to its own constructed past.” There are as many collective memories as there are groups and institutions in society. Shared memories are necessary for group solidarity, and therefore loss of memory results in loss of place in the social group, as occurs with aphasics.°” Halbwachs illustrated how memory resides in several groups, including the family, religious groups, and social classes. In a family, the expressions and experiences of individuals in relations of kinship are given their form and “a large part of their meaning” by the domestic group, so the idea of the family as an institution is variable across societies and between families.°! Families have their own “customs and modes of thinking” that impose their form on the opinions and feelings of their members; likewise, each family has its own mentality, “its memories which it alone commemorates, and its secrets which are revealed only to its members.” Memories are not individual and disinterested images of the past; rather, they work on a higher plane as models, examples, and elements of teaching. These express the “general attitude of the group” and “reproduce its history,” but they also, importantly, define the group’s very “nature and its qualities and weaknesses.”** Within these memories there are certain “landmarks” that stand out as points of group interest: figures that express an “entire character,” or facts that recapitulate “an entire period in the life of the group.”*?
Among these landmarks would be Assmann’s Moses and the Exodus, or in the case of Persian Muslim historiography, the Taq-i Kisra, Salman al-Farisi, and the Arab conquest of Iran. Such landmarks are labeled “sites of memory” (lieux de mémoire) by Pierre Nora, whose ideas also inform this study. Nora introduced his theory of lieux de mémoire both as a way of understanding what he terms the “consolidation” of a French national heritage and its most spectacular symbols and, it would seem, as a program ultimately concerned with the preservation of a catalog of a fading French national memory. Sites are presented expansively as nostalgic devotional institutions around which French society’s “memory crystallizes and secretes itself,” exemplified by museums, archives, cemeteries, festivals, anniversaries, treaties, depositions, monuments, sanctuaries, and fraternal orders.°* For a study such as mine, Nora’s theory offers several points of interest, first, in his explanation of how history and historical propositions themselves can become objects of collective memory, and, second, in his emphasis on the will of society and its members to remember and create lieux de mémoire. This means, for example, that there is a difference between the archive and the memory, between that which is recorded and preserved and that which is held and maintained by society in itself. Third, sites of memory are hot spots: they have a capacity for metamorphosis, “an endless recycling of their meaning and an unpredictable proliferation of their meaning.” To take an example, a children’s textbook, Tour de la France par deux enfants, published in 1877, portrayed a France that drew its seductive power from a past that no longer existed. The book continued to circulate, and on the eve of World War I, it was a nostalgic institution. The book eventually slipped out of the collective memory, but it returned to public consciousness when reprinted on its centennial. The same book and text now took on new meaning and significance because of the transformations undergone by French society in the interval and the effect that these had on those who now considered it memorable.°°
Forgetting
Common ideas about forgetfulness overwhelmingly stress it as a failure of memory. The Hebrew Bible (Deuteronomy 8:11) warns against this sort of forgetfulness when it states: “Beware lest you forget the Lord your God so that you do not keep His commandments and judgments and ordinances.” This forgetting, in a collective sense, occurs, as Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi has written, when “human groups fail — whether purposely or passively, out of rebellion, indifference, or indolence, or as the result of some disruptive historical catastrophe — to transmit what they know about the past to their posterity.”°° Yerushalmi points to the astounding lack of reliability of both individual and collective memory. As Ricceur has also noted, “forgetting is the challenge par excellence put to memory’s aim of reliability.”°”
Arabic and Persian sources remember remarkably little about Iran’s pre-Islamic and early Islamic past. Consider again the case of Ctesiphon. Despite the importance of Iraq under the Umayyad and ‘Abbasid dynasties — and even though Arabic sources often provide our most convincing literary evidence — by the late third/ninth century many of the details about Ctesiphon’s origins, early history, and topography had been forgotten. Early Arabic sources refer to it in ways that suggest its displacement. It is al-madina al-‘atiqa, that is, “the ancient city.” As for details: when was Ctesiphon founded, and by whom? What monuments were located there, rather than in other cities? Was the White Palace joined to the Taq-i Kisra? Some of the answers were no longer available, whereas others were contested. That the Arabs used the name al-Mada’in (“the cities”) to refer both to the entirety of the Sasanian metropolis, of which Ctesiphon represented one piece, and to Ctesiphon itself only added to the confusion. And which cities were the mada ’in? Were the cities located on both sides of the Tigris, or on the eastern side only?**
Historians have recognized such amnesia as they have labored to construct their narratives, often performing complex recoveries of historical data, such as for the late Sasanian Xwaday-namag, which was transmitted in some form in Arabic-language writings from the second/eighth century onward. Such gaps have generally been viewed as emerging from failures of memory that resulted from the conquests, the settlement and movement of populations, the growth of new urban centers, the emergence of new bases for elite status (even if old elites successfully negotiated their survival), and the exigencies of an empire centered, initially, outside of the former Sasanian territories. All of these factors did play a role. With time, conversion to Islam likewise undermined knowledge about past religious institutions, associations, practices, and beliefs insofar as they fell from use.
As students of memory increasingly realize, however, forgetting is an essential human practice. On a practical level, we simply cannot remember everything, nor is there a need to remember much of what we experience. Forgetting is required for new memories, since when the past is forgotten, memories can be reshaped or recreated to meet present needs. If we remembered absolutely everything, we would find ourselves in the position of Alexandr Romanovitch Luria’s mnemonist, whose memory was so prodigious that he found himself incapable of functioning in society.°” As James E. Young has explained: “Not only does every remembered past moment displace the present lived moment, substituting memory for life itself, but without forgetting there is no space left by which to navigate the meaning of what one has remembered.”°” The need to make room for new memories was well understood in antiquity. Wax tablets were used as writing instruments for everyday purposes because their surface could be smoothed out and reused. In the Platonic heritage, writers therefore referred to smoothing out the wax tablet as an archetypal image of voluntary forgetting.°! Greek mythology knows the river Lethe as a river of forgetting: whoever drinks of its waters forgets his or her earlier existence and is freed for rebirth.°* Medieval Europeans explained the process with agricultural metaphors: one cuts down groves of trees that were once sacred to the gods so that one can create arable land.°? When the forest has been cleared, the land will appear visually quite different from its previous state, and the past of the land will seem discontinuous with its present.
But how does one clear the metaphorical forest? The answer lies only partially in omission and failure. At least as important is the new knowledge that overwrites and often confuses past memory. As Umberto Eco has observed, such “mnemonic additions” foster forgetfulness of the past “not by cancellation but by superimposition, not by producing absence but by multiplying presences.”°* Though not typically focused on memory as such, studies of “invented” traditions illustrate this well. In his iconic essay, Hugh Trevor-Roper, for example, argues that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Highland Scots forgot their Irish, Celtic past in large measure through the artificial creation of new Highland practices that were presented as “ancient, original and distinctive.” Through invented conventions of “traditional” dress, Highlanders came to see themselves as a distinctive people with an antique history separate from that of Ireland, which was forgotten. Highlanders themselves played a role in this, but important contributions were also made by a variety of other groups, including the British government with its formation of the Highland military regiments.°° In times of change, such as with the advent of modernity, groups often find meaning in the image of a stable, antique past. To paraphrase Benedict Anderson, antiquity is often the consequence of novelty, as awareness of significant social, cultural, or political change generates the need for narrative explanation to erase the older historical consciousness.°° Scholars who have studied transformations in identities have highlighted the way in which new identities and their associated heritages have effaced past ones and the role of both a group and its neighbors in fashioning its sense of itself.°”
The Route
The primary purpose of this study is to shed light on the shaping of memory about and among Iran’s first Muslims. The book consists of two symmetrical, chronologically organized parts. In Part 1, I focus on the development of certain ideas, persons, and events as nostalgic sites of memory depicting a natural and easy transition to Islam in which Iranians themselves played a meaningful role. Chapter 1 highlights theories of ethnogenesis that placed Persians within an overarching genealogical system that included many of the world’s known peoples. In this way of thinking, Persians descended from Muhammad’s spiritual ancestors, that is, the prophets who preceded him and whose progeny populated the earth. Such accounts often emphasized the Persians’ deep and enduring connections to Islam and, by extension, the antiquity of Islam in their country. Iranians even came to see ancient monuments such as Persepolis as part of this history.
Chapter 2 considers the transformation of the Prophet’s companion Salman into a paragon of Persian history. In early works on Muhammad and his followers, Salman stands out more as a non-Arab than as a Persian; it is even stressed that with his conversion to Islam, he abandoned his Persian homeland and identity altogether. But by the fourth/tenth century, Salman’s identity as a Persian is embraced in numerous Arabic traditions that nostalgically recall his homeland as well as the Prophet’s affection for it and its people. The chapter includes a discussion of the particular situation of Isfahan and its local histories, which feature legal texts important to Salman’s descendants.
Chapter 3 turns to memory of the Arab conquests of the first/seventh and second/eighth centuries to show how Iranians, and Persians in particular, were assigned meaningful roles in the conquests’ transformative events. I argue that if one compares accounts across the third/ninth century, one can observe a transformation that parallels the transformation of Salman discussed in Chapter 2: Iranians are increasingly given credit for their own roles, as the Iranian origins of institutions such as the military register are recognized. Local histories shared this vision to a great extent, but they also adapted it for their own audiences.
Part 1 therefore explores the role of tradition and memory in the creation of Iranian, and especially Persian, Muslim identities. In Part 2, I turn to a corresponding need to forget some elements of Iran’s past. This involved the development of strategies by which traditionists undermined elements of Persian identity that were viewed in some quarters as incompatible with Islam, especially the Persians’ long history of independent political rule. The pre-Islamic past has posed problems to communities ranging from medieval Egypt and Spain to modern Indonesia for chiefly two related reasons. First, the past can cast a long shadow. The ruling elites of a new and insecure society may wish to erase the traces of their predecessors. For no matter how politically quiescent the previous regime and its descendants may be, their monuments, cultural traditions, and achievements in law and economy can still provoke nostalgia. Second, the contrary values of the past can also pose a threat. Because they provide alternative frames for behavior and action, and thus alternative measures of success, they can prevent the assimilation of new cultural traits, feed the ambitions of the imperfectly assimilated, and tempt the newly converted. Such residual values remind a people of a heritage, now viewed through a different lens, which they would often prefer to forget. They challenge the antiquity and continuity of ethical standards, putting into relief and context what is otherwise presented as a given.°° For both types of reasons, Muslim authors have frequently revised history.
In Chapter 4, I introduce three general ways in which our reporters sought to limit memory: by rewriting Persia’s past within a purely local frame of reference, by replacing a Persian past with a Muslim past, and by promoting unfavorable traditions about Persia’s past. Chapter 5 focuses on the last of the three methods and gives a deeper sense of how reporters filtered memory by developing labels, homologies, and icons, as well as ideas about gender. Chapter 6 explores a central impulse behind all forgetting, namely, the wish to move on, by showing how third/ninthand fourth/tenth-century histories erased the identities of the losing side: Sasanian soldiers, religious communities, and elite families. I consider the specific problems that the past posed for authors, the agendas of elites, and the challenge of past values. The sources also permit us to recapture voices of protest against history and its outcomes.
In many ways, this book is a new attempt to consider a transformative period in knowledge regarding Iran’s past. This period had a profound impact on what was subsequently available to later generations.®’ At the outset, I must make a few caveats. Memory about Iran should be considered both on its own terms and in terms of the broader historiographical tradition to which it belongs. I have tried to be cautious in my reading of the texts and to avoid asserting Iranian interests where narrators may not have intended them. Such a reading of the sources is more art than science, and it is likely some readers will interpret texts differently. Second, focusing on founding moments will bring to light particular dimensions of memory but occlude others. The themes I treat tend to mention Zoroastrians but not Christians, Jews, Manicheans, Buddhists, or Iranians of other religions, some of whom may have also considered themselves to be “Persians.” While this silence may be discouraging as a view onto Iranian religions, it does reveal the way in which the constitutive myths of Persian Muslims developed with an emphasis on a Zoroastrian past and their focus on the Sasanians and their religious allegiances.
Third, when discussing Iran’s new Muslims, modern interpreters since the great Hungarian Orientalist Ignaz Goldziher (1850-1921) have frequently made reference to a movement known as the Shu‘tbiyya to explain the ambitions and conflicts of Iran’s early Muslims.’° Generations of scholars afterward have adopted Shu‘ibism as an interpretive framework as they have sought to identify Shu ‘abi partisans, their motivations, and the movement’s broader stakes, which H. A. R. Gibb wordily summed up as “the whole cultural orientation of the new Islamic society — whether it was to become a re-embodiment of the old Perso-Aramaean culture into which the Arabic and Islamic elements would be absorbed, or a culture in which the Perso-Aramaean contributions would be subordinated to the Arab tradition and the Islamic values.”’' But why — modern interpreters should ask more seriously — have historians turned up virtually no self-professed Shu‘tbis, only their opponents? The central evidence marshaled for the existence of the movement, furthermore, pertains mainly to late second/eighth- and third/ninth-century “Abbasid Baghdad and to its courtly circles, and hardly ever extends beyond that first cited by Goldziher. What about the rest of the empire and centers outside of its orbit in the three centuries that followed? Accordingly, I treat the Shu ‘abiyya lightly in the first and third chapters, but otherwise not at all.
Finally, I am concerned with ways and methods of shaping memory, and I try to strike a balance between analysis of traditions as a whole and up-close readings of particular texts. But it is impossible to provide an exhaustive catalog of memory. Upon such an attempt, one would find oneself, like Luria’s mnemonist, unable to take measure of meaning or significance. What one can do is focus on a set of remembered pasts and examine the strategies employed, learn something of their circumstances, and investigate how they supported or effaced memory. This might open fruitful paths of inquiry not only for historians of Iran and its conversion, but also for historians of other periods and locations interested in how memory can be retrained during times of significant social and cultural change.
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