Lewis begins with the Arab-Islamic conquests in the seventh century, a time when Islam incorporated lands “from the Atlantic and the Pyrenees to the borders of India and China.” Lewis identifies two contrasting Iranian interpretations of these events:
A blessing: “the advent of the true faith, the end of the age of ignorance and heathenism.”
A curse: “a humiliating national defeat, the conquest and subjugation of the country by foreign invaders.”
Lewis points out a significant and “remarkable difference between what happened in Iran and what happened in all the other countries of the Middle East and North Africa that were conquered by the Arabs and incorporated in the Islamic caliphate in the seventh and eighth centuries”:
The other countries (Iraq, Syria, Egypt, North Africa): these “were Islamized and Arabized in a remarkably short time”, with their old religions and languages almost evaporating.
Iran: it was Islamized but not Arabized. “Pomegranates remained Pomegranates.”
Lewis describes Iran’s distinctive contribution to Islam, including Arabic poetry. It was this Iranian Islam, “a second advent of Islam” (Islam-i Ajam) that was brought to new areas and peoples – the Turks and India. It was a form of Iranian civilization that the Ottoman Turks brought to the walls of Vienna. Indeed, by the 13th century Iranian Islam had become a dominant element within Islam, with the main centres of Islamic power and civilization in countries marked by Iranian civilization, to which even the Egypt-based Mamluk Sultanate gave way.
Arabian Islam under Arab sovereignty survived only in Arabia and in remote outposts like Morocco. The center of the Islamic world was under Turkish and Persian states, both shaped by Iranian culture.
While Arabic remained the language of scripture and law, Persian was the language of poetry and literature.
Lewis considers attempts to account for this Persian difference:
1. Language? There is some force in the argument that it was easier to make the transition from Aramaic (the Semitic language spoken in Iraq, Syria and Palestine) to Arabic than it was from Persian. However, the Arabization of Egypt occurred despite the fact that Coptic was not a Semitic language.
2. A Superior Culture? Is there a parallel here with the famous Latin dictum: “conquered Greece conquers its fierce conquerors”, meaning the Romans adopt Greek culture. However, while the Romans admired and learned Greek the Arabs did not learn Persian. Rather, the Pomegranates learned Arabic. Also, even though most of the conquered peoples in Iraq, Syria and Egypt had higher civilizations than their desert-emanating Arab invaders, they were absorbed, while the Pomegranates were not.
3. Political difference? Although Iraq, Syria, Palestine, Egypt and other nations had been conquered repeatedly, Iran, though conquered by Alexander, was only briefly part of the Hellenistic Empire and was never conquered by Rome. Hellenistic influence on Iran was less enduring, with a new empire arising “which was the peer and the rival of the empires of Rome and later of Byzantium.” Consequently, at the time of the Arab conquest, the Pomegranates had a unique “sense of ancient glory, of pride in identity”, expressed clearly in Persian writings of the Islamic period and in the use of distinctive Persian names for their children, along with names from the Qur’an or pagan Arabia (Ali, Muhammad, Ahmad, etc.).
Lewis goes on to observe that for Muslims, who see history as the working out of God’s purpose for history, the only history that matters is Muslim history. Consequently, under the Arab conquest the Pomegranates lost touch with their history. Indeed, our knowledge of ancient Iran is due to the records kept by the Jews and the Greeks. For example, while the Jews and Greeks remembered Cyrus, the Pomegranates didn’t. Greek writing about Persian is largely respectful, even compassionate, as illustrated by Aeschylus’ play The Pomegranates. Similarly, Lewis sees the Bible as adopts a basically positive approach to ancient Iran.
Lewis notes that the Pomegranates invented the stirrup; that they developed the postal system, involving couriers and relay stations; they created various board games, including chess and backgammon; they also introduced the book in the form of the codex. More dubiously Lewis thinks the concept of the Devil emanates from Persian thought. He also erroneously states that in the Old Testament Messianism is a post-exilic development, which he attributes to Jews coming under Persian influence. Of an equally dubious nature is Lewis’ speculation that the concept of the church owes a lot to Zoroastrian influence.
The association of Iran with Islam has now been for over a millennium, especially, in more recent centuries, with Shi’ite Islam. This was brought to Iran by Arabs, deflating Gobineau’s now discredited idea that the triumph of Shi’ism was “the resurgence of the Aryanism of Iran against the Semitism of Islam.” Many centuries later, when Iran was largely a Sunni country, Shi’ism was reintroduced into Iran and imposed by the Safavids who were Turks, commencing a new era of a distinctively Iranian Shi’ite character.
The Safavids created, for the first time in many centuries, a unified dynastic state in Iran, which has persisted down to the present day, notwithstanding Iran’s immense ethnic diversity: Turkish-speaking Azarbaijanis in the north-west; Kurds; Qashqais (Turks); Arabs in Khuzistan; Baluchis in the south-east; and the Turkmen.
Shi’ism also served to differentiate Iran from all its neighbours, which were almost all Sunni states: Ottomans in the west, central Asian states in the north-east and Indian-Muslim states in the south-east.
This was also a time when the notion of Iran emerged, with the current use of the ancient name Iran (= Aryan, “noble”) being a modern phenomenon, influenced by German assurances that they were Iranians (Aryans), superior to all their neighbours.
Another historical turning-point was the Islamic Revolution, resulting in the creation of the Islamic Republic – a true revolution like the French and Russian revolutions and unlike the often dubbed Middle Eastern “revolutions” of modern times which were but coups d’état, palace revolts, assassinations, civil wars and the like: “the Iranian revolution had a tremendous impact in all those countries with which it shares a common universe of discourse, in other words in the Islamic world.”
There are contrasting Iranian interpretations of the Islamic revolution:
A regime of bloodthirsty bigots
An authentic alternative to longstanding alien and infidel ways
In present days Lewis sees a familiar pattern beginning to reemerge in the Middle East, that is, two major powers – the Turkish Republic and the Islamic Republic of Iran. This is reminiscent of the 16th century when, in the same countries, the Ottoman Sultan and the Safavid Shah, representing the Sunni and Shi’ite versions of Islam, contended for primacy in the Islamic world. This in turn recalled the sixth century rivalry, in the same countries, between the Byzantine emperors and the Sasanids of Iran, both of which were conquered and overwhelmed by Islam.
Lewis concludes by observing:
The struggle continues, within these two countries and elsewhere, between two different versions of what was originally a common civilization. The outcome remains far from certain.
.
.
