Persianization

"The third important feature which developed in the early formative centuries of Islam relates to the heritage of Persia or cajam as the Arabs called it. Hindu or Buddhist India was not conquered until the thir­teenth century and parts of it remained outside of Muslim control until as late as the sixteenth century. Similarly, the Byzantine state was not fully conquered (by the Turks) before the mid-fifteenth century. But Persia was conquered in its entirety in the seventh century and by the eleventh century had already largely converted to Islam. It is not sur­prising therefore that of the three metropolitan classical traditions of In­dia, Greece and Persia it was Persia that resurfaced with an integral identity within the Islamic context.10 The Persian imperial tradition could not persist anywhere outside Islam and as a result a vigorous Per­sian resurgence occurred within it. From its Arab roots the Islamic con­quest state then shifted to a Persianized foundation."

"The assimilation of the secular categories of Greek philosophy, however, was no aim in itself but part of an obstinate attempt to rid Islam of the germs of the ancient Perso-Aramaic or Manichaean free-thinking, zandaqa, and its manifestations of moral cynicism which the Arabs called mujun.16 This conflict between the Arab and Persian traditions really went much deeper. The anti-Arab polemics of the Persian literati which became designated as the shucubTya movement introduced elements of a Welt­anschauung which never ceased to be disruptive in the eyes of the or­thodox."

"The heritage of Persia, while conflicting with the egalitarian sobriety of the pristine religion, was to become a decisive force in the formation of Islamic society; so much so that when in later centuries the Indians and the Greeks entered Islam it was no longer an Arab Islam but a Persian Islam that they entered."