Iran: A Very Short Introduction by Ali Ansari

Author:Ali Ansari [Ansari, Ali]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780199669349
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2014-09-17T00:00:00+00:00

Iran and Turan

The 14th century North African scholar Ibn Khaldun, commenting on the intellectual life of the Muslim world, noted that:

It is a remarkable fact that, with few exceptions, most Muslim scholars both in the religious and intellectual sciences have been non-Arabs. When the scholar is of Arab origin, he is non-Arab in language and upbringing and has non-Arab teachers. This is so in spite of the fact that Islam is an Arabic religion and its founder was an Arab … thus the founders of grammar were Sibawayh and after him, al-Farisi and Az-Zajjaj. All of them were of non Arab (Persian) descent … they invented rules of (grammar) … Most of the hadith scholars who preserved traditions for the Muslims also were non Arabs (Persians), or Persian in language and upbringing, because the discipline was widely cultivated in Iraq and the regions beyond … all the scholars who worked in the science of principles of jurisprudence were non-Arabs (Persians), as is well known. The same applies to the speculative theologians and to most Quran commentators. Only the non-Arabs (Persians) engaged in the task of preserving knowledge and writing systematic scholarly works. Thus the truth of the statement of the prophet becomes apparent, ‘If scholarship hung suspended at the highest parts of heaven the Persians would (reach it and) take it’ … The intellectual sciences were also the preserve of the Persians, left alone by the Arabs, who did not cultivate them … as was the case with all crafts … This situation continued in the cities as long as the Persians and Persian countries, Iraq, Khorasan and Transoxiana (modern Central Asia), retained their sedentary culture. But when those cities fell into ruins sedentary culture, which God has devised for the attainment of sciences and crafts, disappeared from them. Along with it, scholarship altogether disappeared from the non Arabs (Persians) who were (now) engulfed by the desert attitude. (trans. F. Rosenthal)

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