Islam never fully killed the idea of Persia.
To the contrary: Islam
could not have survived without Persia. I'd wager no one in this thread actually cares about Muzzie history, but you'd be flabbergasted as to how much Persia undergirds the Dar al-Islam. You
cannot find a single spot in the broader Dar al-Islam devoid of Persian influence.
- Persian architecture and engineering were adopted and spread throughout the entire Dar al-Islam
- Farsi (re: post-Islam New Persian) adopted many Arabic loanwords in the process of Islamisation, but the reverse as also true
- Persian regions like Samarqand, Balkh Nishapur, Shiraz, Isfahan, and Tabriz gave rise to countless widely beloved Muslim thinkers and poets like Ibn Sina (Avicenna), Farid ud-Din Attar, Hafiz Shirazi, Mulla Sadra, and of course, Shams Tabrizi and Mawlana Jalal ud-Din Muhammad Balkhi, later Rumi.
- The academic heavyweight regions of the Dar al-Islam were in decidedly Persianised regions like Baghdad, Isfahan, Samarqand, and Transoxiana.
- Farsi became the lingua franca for the various Turco-Mongol Persianate empires like the Timurids, the Delhi Sultanate, and the Mughals.
- Zoroastrianism, under a pure Arab thought paradigm, would've been rendered wholly extinct. Yet post-Islam compositions like the Shahnameh make heavy use of Zoroastrian imagery and iconography, and both Firdowsi and the Shahnameh are upheld as pillars of Iranian literary excellence
- The most ecstatic forms of Muslim devotion emerged within Persia; Mansur al-Hallaj once uttered "I am the Truth" (Ana al-Haqq; al-Haqq being one of God's 99 names) which ultimately led to his execution for blasphemy.
- The Alids, patrilineal descendants of Imam Ali (the fourth Rashidun caliph) and thus the true heirs to the Prophet's mission, took refuge in Persia to escape Abbasid persecution.
- Persian traders were well-acquainted with the Red Sea, Horn of Africa, Indian Ocean, and Indonesian trade routes used by Arabs. Tons of Farsi loanwords exist in Bahasa Malay/Indonesia as these same traders ultimately began conducting da'wah during periods where the seas were too dangerous to traverse.
- Hui Muslims in China, Han Chinese converts to Islam, ultimately descend from Muslim merchants of Iranian descent who ultimately intermarried during the Ming and Qing dynasties
- Not directly related to Islam, but the Arabian Nights (1001 Nights) contain many stories that ain't just Arab, but North African, Syriac, Persian, and Indian in nature too.
- Farsi was the language of the educated, the elite, and courtiers all throughout South Asia, Central Asia, and the Iranian Plateau. Even after the British arrived, Farsi didn't disappear until the death of Allama Iqbal in the 1930s.
Mind you, this is all stuff I'm rattling off the top of my mind. There's
so much more that I could talk about, but it just comes to mind and escapes just as quickly. Each of these points I rattled off could easily be a graduate student's thesis subject.
That's how much stuff there is to talk about. Everyone loves to romanticise pre-Islamic Persian culture, I get the reason why, but focusing so narrowly on stuff that's anywhere between 1400-2500 years removed from the present is so fucking gay.
You can try to artificially separate Islam from Persian culture, but it doesn't work. Mawlana Rumi is an
icon among Iranians, his poetry and ghazals are omnipresent in Persianate cultures (re: not just Iranian but also Afghan and Tajik cultures too), but you
cannot separate Islam from Rumi. People like Coleman Barks tried, but it just becomes secular, new-age platitudes devoid of meaning. Rumi was a devout Muslim, he wrote primarily within a Muslim context, he was in
dialogue with other traditions, he was certainly an ecstatic mystic who cut against the grain, but Rumi was still ostensibly a Muslim.
The same is also true of Rumi's older contemporary in Farid ud-Din Attar who wrote Mantiq al-Tair (The Conference of the Birds). Yes, Mantiq al-Tair
draws upon pre-Islamic imagery of the Simurgh, but it's still ultimately a
Muslim work, that uses allegory and metre to extol the virtues of abandoning the ego and embracing the Divine. Oh, and there's also the intoxicated loverboy himself, Hafiz Shirazi. Hafiz was highly controversial both in his time and in the present day, but Hafiz's entire corpus of poetry is ecstatic and irreverent while still ultimately abiding within Islamic ontology and metaphysics.
Ibn Sina, Latinised as Avicenna, wrote the entire Canon of Medicine which was
the standard medical literary corpus until the 17th-18th century when science caught up and we realised "yeah... the four humors and Galen had some decent ideas, but MAN were they off base). That's
on top of his monumental contributions to Muslim philosophy, the sciences, the arts, and so on. He was a literal polymath among polymaths, and guess what? He too was ultimately Iranian. You had to write in literary Arabic at the time, but the dude was 100% Persian to the core.
I could honestly keep going but I really need to cut myself off.
