The Persian Presence in the Islamic World.

• Author: Perry, John R.
• Position: Review

The Persian Presence in the Islamic World. Edited by RICHARD B. HOVANNISIAN and GEORGES SABAGH. Thirteenth Giorgio Levi della Vida Conference. Cambridge: CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1998. Pp. xii + 267, 8 plates.

This volume represents the proceedings of a conference held in 1991 to mark the award of the Giorgio Levi della Vida Medal, given by UCLA's Gustave E. von Grunebaum Center for Near Eastern Studies, to Ehsan Yarshater. To the honorand falls the lion's share of the writing, a greatly expanded version of the lecture he gave on the occasion of the award--a good half of the volume, including the twenty-page bibliography. It is a masterly essay, deftly skirting the quicksands of excessive panegyric while touching significantly on every point of the Persian presence, recognized or mooted, and frequently pointing in a controversial or unexpected direction.

The Iranians' embrace of Islam and their transformation of its civilization in the East is no dry, scholarly given. Its emotional significance still resonates, both in the triumphant cult of the [Shi.sup.[subset]]a in today's Islamic Republic and the angry resignation of exiles such as the poet Nader Naderpour, for whom all Iran's ills of the past thousand years are a merited expiation of the original sin, their desertion of Zoroaster for Muhammad. But here the scholars call the tune, and for the most part soberly celebrate an Islam tinged with wine, painting, and pantheism, a cult that the Persians bought from the Arabs wholesale, extensively remodeled, and sold in turn to the Turks and Indians.

Yarshater's title essay catalogues the expected achievements--Persians as the founders of Arabic grammar, leaveners of Arabic prose and poetry, teachers of historiography and statecraft, ritual and bureaucracy. Then in flashback he recalls in unexpected breadth and detail the contributions of Parthian and Sasanian rule to the prosperity and latent Persianness of the pre-Islamic Near East (pp. 15-30). He then quotes chapter and verse of the Koran on the many Iranian religious ideas (of heaven, hell, the huris and other esehatological imagery) that seem to have had a profound influence on both formal and popular Islam and which crop up most flagrantly in the gnostic and folkloric interstices between eastern Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. Noting that there are very few Semitic loanwords in pre-Islamic Iranian languages, whereas the contemporary Semitic tongues (including Arabic) were generously...