Iran: Empire of the Mind (13 page)

Fig. 6. Khosraw II, depicted hunting on a dish of gilded silver. He achieved unprecedented military successes but they proved ephemeral, exhausted the Sassanid realm and prepared the way for the Arab conquest.

But his greatest excess was in war. In 602 Khosraw’s benefactor, the Byzantine emperor Maurice, was murdered and supplanted by a usurper, Phocas (one account says that Maurice was forced to watch the execution of his five sons before he himself was killed), and the Byzantine territories fell into disorder and civil war, made worse by divisions between Christian sects. Phocas sent an army against dissenting Christians in Antioch, which perpetrated a massacre there. At Edessa, a local Byzantine general was resisting Phocas’s forces. Khosraw used the pretext of Maurice’s murder to make war against Phocas in revenge, and relieved Edessa. He was able from there to extend his control over the other Byzantine frontier posts
and then, after some preparation, to unleash his armies on the eastern Byzantine empire. The Byzantines had been concentrating their efforts on their Danube frontier against the Avars, and were relatively weak in the east. By this time (610) Phocas had been deposed by Heraclius, who was to prove one of the most capable of all Byzantine emperors (he was of Armenian descent). Heraclius tried to make peace with the Persians, but Khosraw ignored him. The able Persian generals Shahrvaraz and Shahin led the Sassanid armies through Mesopotamia, Armenia and Syria into Palestine and Asia Minor. They took Antioch in 611, Damascus in 613, and then Jerusalem in 614 (sending a shock through the whole of the Christian world). At Jerusalem the Christian defenders refused to give up the city, and it was taken by assault after three weeks, and given over to sack. According to Byzantine Christian sources, the Jews of the city and the surrounding region (who had been persecuted and excluded from the city for centuries) joined in a massacre in which sixty thousand Christians died.
⁴¹
The Persians carried off the relic of the True Cross to Ctesiphon. Within another four years they had conquered Egypt, and were in control of most of Asia Minor, as far as Chalcedon, opposite Constantinople on the shores of the Bosphorus. No Shah of Persia since Cyrus had achieved such military successes.

But then Fortune switched her allegiance. Heraclius made careful preparations and crystallised the religious dimension of the conflict into a holy war, devoting himself and his army to God. Later Christian chroniclers included his expedition with the descriptions of the Crusades. In a bold move, in 622 (the same year as the Prophet Mohammad’s flight from Mecca to Medina) he took a small band of élite troops by water to the south-eastern corner of the Black Sea, bypassing all the Sassanid forces in Asia Minor, and from there burst into Armenia, deliberately devastating the countryside everywhere he went. Heraclius managed to keep Shahrvaraz inactive by sending him letters that suggested Khosraw intended to kill him. With the support of the Turkish Khazars from north of the Caucasus, the Byzantines marched on into Azerbaijan and destroyed one of the most sacred Persian fire temples, at what is today called Takht-e Soleiman (The Throne of Solomon).

The Persians withdrew from Asia Minor, and suffered a crushing defeat at Nineveh in 627. Early the following year, with Heraclius threatening Ctesiphon, Khosraw was deposed and his son Kavad II became Shah. Kavad sued for peace, offering the restitution of all the previous Persian conquests, and this was agreed in 629. Khosraw was put on trial, and convicted of a lengthy series of crimes including patricide (his complicity in the murder of Hormuzd IV), cruelty towards his subjects (especially soldiers and women), ingratitude toward the Romans, ruinous avarice, and mistreatment of his own children.
⁴²
But Kavad showed himself scarcely more of a just ruler, murdering all his brothers to eliminate rivals. These killings (which repeated some of the worst cruelties of the Arsacid period) meant a shortage of candidates with obvious legitimacy in the years that followed.

The destruction of the wars had ruined some of the richest provinces of both empires, and the taxation to pay for them had impoverished the rest. Turks were on the loose throughout the eastern provinces of Persia, the Khazars were dominant in the north-west, and the Arabs, with a new determination and cohesion derived from the message of Mohammad, were raiding and beginning to establish themselves in Mesopotamia. Civil wars broke out between rival great nobles, and floods broke the irrigation works in Mesopotamia, turning productive land into swamps. Plague appeared, killing many in the western provinces, and carrying off Kavad himself. The internal chaos and infighting brought a succession of short-lived monarchs to the throne (ten in two years), including the former general Shahrvaraz and two queens, Purandokht and Azarmedokht (Purandokht, who was a daughter of Khosrow II, attempted some sensible measures to restore order in the empire, but was removed by another general before she could make much headway). Finally Yazdegerd III (a grandson of Khosraw II) was crowned at the age of eight in 632.

3

ISLAM AND INVASIONS: THE ARABS, TURKS AND
MONGOLS: THE IRANIAN RECONQUEST OF
ISLAM, THE SUFIS, AND THE POETS

Dusham gozar oftad be viraneh-e Tus
Didam joghdi neshaste jaye tavus
Goftam che khabar dari az in viraneh
Gofta khabar inast ke afsus afsus

Last night I passed by the ruins of Tus
And saw that an owl had taken the place of the peacock.
I asked, ‘What news from these ruins?’
It answered, ‘The news is—Alas, Alas.’
^∗

Attributed to Shahid Balkhi (d. 937). The owl is a symbol of death

One of the recurring questions in the history of Iran is the problem of continuity from pre-Islamic Iran to the Islamic period, and to modern times. The great institutions of Persia as the period of Sassanid rule reached its climax were the monarchy and the Zoroastrian religion. Both of these were swept away by the Islamic conquest, and within three centuries there was little apparent remnant of them.

But there are some indisputable facts that point the other way. The first and most important is the language. The Persian language survived,
while many other languages in the lands the Arabs conquered went under, to be replaced by Arabic. Persian changed from the Middle Persian or Pahlavi of the Parthian and Sassanid periods, acquired a large number of loan-words from Arabic, and re-emerged after two obscure centuries as the elegantly simple tongue spoken by Iranians today.
¹
Some would say that it became a new language, much as English was transformed in the Middle Ages after the Norman conquest. Modern Persian is remarkably unchanged since the eleventh century. The poetry in particular that has come down from that time is readily understandable by modern Iranians, is studied in school and often quoted from memory. People continued to speak Persian, and Persian came to be written in Arabic script.

There is another monument to continuity; itself a nexus of language, history, folk-memory and poetry—the
Shahnameh
(Book of Kings) of Ferdowsi. This is the greatest single body of poetry from the period of transition, containing passages and stories familiar to most Iranians even today. Ferdowsi reworked a traditional canon of stories of the kings and heroes of Iran that is known in fragments from other sources. He wrote deliberately to preserve, as if in a time-capsule, as much as he could of the culture of pre-Islamic Iran, for future generations of Iranians. The language of the stories itself avoids all but a very few of the Arabic loan-words that by Ferdowsi’s time had become almost indispensable in everyday usage, especially written usage. Such is the quality of the poetry that it influenced almost all subsequent Iranian poets; and the characters of the stories, Kay Kavus, Rostam, Sohrab, Siavosh, Khosraw, Shirin, are as familiar to Iranians today as in Ferdowsi’s time.

But in discussing Ferdowsi we anticipate events, and to understand him it is necessary to appreciate the significance of Islam and the history of the first three centuries of Muslim rule.

Mohammad

The Arabs of Mohammad’s time were not just simple Bedouin. Mohammad himself was the son of a merchant (born in Mecca some time around the year 570) and later he served a rich widow as a guard and leader of her trading caravans. Eventually he married her and ran the business
himself. This was a period of change, both social and economic. Towns like Medina and Mecca had become an important part of life in the Arabian peninsula, and there was tension between austere nomad values and the more sophisticated urban way of life; between the traditional polytheism of tribes and the monotheism of urban Jews (there were significant Jewish communities in the Arabian peninsula—notably at Medina but also elsewhere). As in Persia, religious ideas travelled through the peninsula and beyond with the merchants’ trade goods. Christian hermits rubbed shoulders with Jews as well as polytheistic Arabs in the Arabian towns. Arabs had served both the Sassanids and the Romans as mercenaries, and the Ghassanid and Lakhmid Arab kingdoms had served as buffer-states between the two empires in the south (as Armenia had in the north). Arabs had settled in the western part of what is now Iraq, and as far north as Syria.

Muslims believe that Mohammad received his first revelations from the Angel Gabriel, which appear in the opening five lines of Sura 96 of the Qor’an, in the hills around Mecca around the year 610. The early revelations gave the pronouncements of a just God, who at the day of judgement would decide on the basis of men’s actions in life whether they should go to paradise or to hell. They condemned false pride, neglect of the poor, and cruelty to the weak. They emphasised the duty of prayer. Around 613 Mohammad began preaching the revelation he had received in Mecca, and his reception there reflected social divisions and tensions. His early converts were mainly among the poor, among members of weak clans and the younger sons of richer families. But his preaching threatened the proprietors of the existing order in Mecca, by creating an alternative pole of social authority, and by condemning the polytheism that among other things gave the ruling families an income from religious visitors.

Eventually the hostility to Mohammad from the ruling families of Mecca made his position there untenable. He fled Mecca, and in 622 was accepted into Medina by a group of prominent citizens. Life in Medina had been marred by feuding between rival clans, and it seems that Mohammad’s welcome in part reflected their need for an arbitrator
to prevent further strife. As it turned out, the arrival of Mohammad in Medina signified the acceptance of a new principle of spiritual leadership, to supersede the previous structure based on patriarchal kinship relations. The move to Medina is remembered by Muslims as the Hijra, which means ‘migration’, and has central importance in the early history of Islam. The migration from Mecca and the establishment of the Muslim community in Medina provides the date at which the Muslim calendar begins.

Initially the group around Mohammad was open to Jews and Christians, but it gradually became clear that the revelation was dictating a new religion in its own right, distinct from either Judaism or Christianity (though building on and surpassing the teaching of the prophets of both). Put simply, Mohammad rejected the Trinity and the divinity of Jesus, and the Jews rejected Mohammad’s presentation of himself as a Prophet after the pattern of the Jewish prophets of the Old Testament. This was important in Medina, because there were three important Jewish tribes there. Early on, Mohammad had given Jerusalem as the direction of prayer and had made other provisions that apparently conciliated Judaism. The earliest, most essential elements of Islam are strikingly congruent with Judaism in content and significance. But the Jews rejected Mohammad’s revelation and relations between them and the Muslims deteriorated. The Jewish tribes were accused of treacherous contacts with the Meccans, and in succession they were ejected from Medina; their property was confiscated and the males of the last tribe were massacred after they attempted to betray the Medinans at the Battle of the Trench.
²
As the remaining inhabitants were converted, Medina became the model of a unified Muslim community—the
umma
.

Islam now took something like its final form, as expressed through the Qor’an. The faith was based on five pillars—the
shahada
—the obligation to acknowledge the existence of one God, and Mohammad as his Prophet, prayer (
salat
), almsgiving (
zakat
), pilgrimage (
hajj
), and the
Ramadan
fast. These five pillars were supplemented by social rulings, regularising and imposing a rational morality on the previous chaos of clan customs and establishing an overarching ethic of commonality and
brotherhood, while reinforcing some traditions of patriarchy and clan loyalty. The institution of the blood feud was discouraged and regulated, as was divorce. Incest was outlawed, and honesty and fairness in business dealings were encouraged.