APersianate society is a society that is based on or strongly influenced by thePersian language,culture,literature,art or identity.[1]: 6
The term "Persianate" is aneologism credited toMarshall Hodgson.[2] In his 1974 book,The Venture of Islam: The expansion of Islam in the Middle Periods, he defined it thus: "The rise of Persian had more than purely literary consequences: it served to carry a new overall cultural orientation within Islamdom.... Most of the more local languages of high culture that later emerged among Muslims... depended upon Persian wholly or in part for their prime literary inspiration. We may call all these cultural traditions, carried in Persian or reflecting Persian inspiration, 'Persianate' by extension."[3]: 293–94 [notes 1]
The term designates ethnic Persians but also societies that may not have been predominantly ethnicallyPersian but whose linguistic, material or artistic cultural activities were influenced by or based on Persianate culture. Examples of pre-19th-century Persianate societies were theSeljuq,[4][5][6]Timurid,[7][8]Mughal,[9][10] andOttoman dynasties.[11][12][13][14]
Persianate culture flourished for nearly fourteen centuries. It was a mixture of Persian andIslamic cultures that eventually underwentPersification and became the dominant culture of the ruling and elite classes ofGreater Iran,Asia Minor, andSouth Asia.[22]
When the peoples of Greater Iran were conquered byIslamic forces in the 7th and 8th centuries, they became part of an empire much larger than any previous one under Persian rule.[22] While the Islamic conquest led to theArabization of language and culture in the former Byzantine territories, this did not happen in Persia. Rather, the new Islamic culture evolving there was largely based on pre-IslamicPersian traditions of the area,[23] as well as on theIslamic customs that were introduced to the region by the Arab conquerors.[24]
Persianate culture, especially among the elite classes, spread across the Muslim territories in western, central, and south Asia, although populations across this vast region had conflicting allegiances (sectarian, local, tribal, and ethnic) and spoke many different languages. It was spread by poets, artists, architects, artisans, jurists, and scholars, who maintained relations among their peers in the far-flung cities of the Persianate world, fromAnatolia toIndia.[3]
Persianate culture involved modes of consciousness, ethos, and religious practices that have persisted in the Iranian world againsthegemonic Arab Muslim (Sunni) cultural constructs. This formed a calcified Persianate structure of thought and experience of the sacred, entrenched for generations, which later informed history, historical memory, and identity amongAlid loyalists andheterodox groups labeled bysharia-minded authorities asghulāt. In a way, along with investing the notion ofheteroglossia, Persianate culture embodies the Iranian past and ways in which this past blended with the Islamic present or became transmuted. The historical change was largely on the basis of a binary model: a struggle between the religious landscapes of late Iranian antiquity and a monotheist paradigm provided by the new religion, Islam.
This duality is symbolically expressed in theShiite tradition thatHusayn ibn Ali, the third Shi'ite Imam, had marriedShahrbanu,[25] daughter ofYazdegerd III, the lastSassanid king ofIran. This genealogy makes the later imams, descended from Husayn and Shahrbanu, the inheritors of both the Islamic Prophet Muhammad and of the pre-IslamicSassanid kings.
After the Arab Muslim conquest of Iran,Pahlavi, the language ofPre-Islamic Iran, continued to be widely used well into the second Islamic century (8th century) as a medium of administration in the eastern lands of theCaliphate.[22] Despite theIslamization of public affairs, the Iranians retained much of their pre-Islamic outlook and way of life, adjusted to fit the demands of Islam. Towards the end of the 7th century, the population began resenting the cost of sustaining the Arabcaliphs, theUmayyads, and in the 8th century, a general Iranian uprising—led byAbu Muslim Khorrasani—brought another Arab family, theAbbasids, to the Caliph's throne.
Under the Abbasids, the capital shifted fromSyria toIraq, which had once been part of theSassanid Empire and was still considered to be part of the Iranian cultural domain. Persian culture, and the customs of the PersianBarmakidviziers, became the style of the ruling elite. Politically, the Abbasids soon started losing their control over Iranians. The governors ofKhurasan, theTahirids, though appointed by the caliph, were effectively independent. When the PersianSaffarids fromSistan freed the eastern lands, theBuyyids, theZiyarids and theSamanids in Western Iran, Mazandaran and the north-east respectively, declared their independence.[22]
The separation of the eastern territories fromBaghdad was expressed in a distinctive Persianate culture that became dominant in west, central, and south Asia, and was the source of innovations elsewhere in the Islamic world. The Persianate culture was marked by the use of theNew Persian language as a medium of administration and intellectual discourse, by the rise ofPersianised-Turks to military control, by the new political importance of non-Arabulama and by the development of an ethnically composite Islamic society.
Pahlavi was thelingua franca of the Sassanian Empire before the Arab invasion, but towards the end of the 7th and the beginning of the 8th centuryArabic became a medium of literary expression. In the 9th century, a New Persian language emerged as the idiom of administration and literature. The Tahirid and Saffarid dynasties continued using Persian as an informal language, although for them Arabic was the "language for recording anything worthwhile, from poetry to science",[26] but the Samanids made Persian a language of learning and formal discourse. The language that appeared in the 9th and 10th centuries was a new form of Persian, derivative of[clarification needed] the Middle-Persian of pre-Islamic times, but enriched by Arabic vocabulary and written in the Arabic script.[27]
The Persian language, according[28] toMarshall Hodgson in hisThe Venture of Islam, was to form the chief model for the rise of still other languages to the literary level. LikeTurkish, most of the more local languages of high culture that later emerged among Muslims were heavily influenced by Persian (Urdu being a prime example). One may call these traditions, carried in Persian or reflecting Persian inspiration, ‘Persianate’ by extension. This seems[29] to be the origin of the termPersianate.
The Iranian dynasty of the Samanids began recording its court affairs in Persian as well as Arabic, and the earliest great poetry in New Persian was written for the Samanid court. The Samanids encouraged translation of religious works from Arabic into Persian. In addition, the learned authorities of Islam, theulama, began using the Persianlingua franca in public. The crowning literary achievement in the early New Persian language was theShahnameh (Book of Kings), presented by its authorFerdowsi to the court ofMahmud of Ghazni (998–1030). This was a kind of Iranian nationalistic resurrection: Ferdowsi galvanized Persian nationalistic sentiment by invoking pre-Islamic Persian heroic imagery and enshrined in literary form the most treasured folk stories.[22]
Ferdowsi'sShahnameh enjoyed a special status in Iranian courtly culture as a historical narrative as well as a mythical one. The powerful effect that this text came to have on the poets of this period is partly due to the value that was attached to it as a legitimizing force, especially for new rulers in the Eastern Islamic world:
In the Persianate tradition theShahnameh was viewed as more than literature. It was also a political treatise, as it addressed deeply rooted conceptions of honor, morality, and legitimacy. Illustrated versions of it were considered desirable as expressions of the aspirations and politics of ruling elites in the Iranian world.[30]
The Persianate culture that emerged under the Samanids inGreater Khorasan, in northeast Persia and the borderlands ofTurkistan exposed the Turks to Persianate culture;[31] The incorporation of the Turks into the main body of the Middle Eastern Islamic civilization, which was followed by theGhaznavids, thus began in Khorasan; "not only did the inhabitants of Khurasan not succumb to the language of the nomadic invaders, but they imposed their own tongue on them. The region could even assimilate the Turkic Ghaznavids andSeljuks (11th and 12th centuries), theTimurids (14th and 15th centuries), and theQajars (19th and 20th centuries).[32]
The Ghaznavids, the rivals and future successors of the Samanids,[clarification needed] ruled over the southeastern extremities of Samanid territories from the city ofGhazni. Persian scholars and artists flocked to their court, and the Ghaznavids became patrons of Persianate culture. The Ghaznavids took with them Persianate culture as they subjugated Western and Southern Asia . Apart from Ferdowsi,Rumi,Abu Ali Sina,Al-Biruni,Unsuri Balkhi,Farrukhi Sistani,Sanayi Ghaznawi and Abu Sahl Testari were among the great Iranian scientists and poets of the period under Ghaznavid patronage.
Persianate culture was carried by successive dynasties into Western and Southern Asia, particularly by the PersianizedSeljuqs (1040–1118) and their successor states, who presided overIran,Syria, andAnatolia until the 13th century, and by the Ghaznavids, who in the same period dominated Greater Khorasan and parts ofIndia. These two dynasties together drew the centers of the Islamic world eastward. The institutions stabilized Islamic society into a form that would persist, at least inWestern Asia, until the 20th century.[22]
The Ghaznavids moved their capital from Ghazni toLahore in modernPakistan, which they turned into another center of Islamic culture. Under their patronage, poets and scholars fromKashgar,Bukhara,Samarkand,Baghdad,Nishapur,Amol and Ghazni congregated in Lahore. Thus, the Persian language and Persianate culture was brought deep into India[33] and carried further in the 13th century. The Seljuqs won a decisive victory over the Ghaznavids and swept into Khorasan; they brought Persianate culture westward into western Persia, Iraq, Anatolia, and Syria. Iran proper along withCentral Asia became the heartland of Persian language and culture.
As the Seljuqs came to dominate western Asia, their courts were Persianized as far west as theMediterranean Sea. Under their rule, many pre-Islamic Iranian traditional arts like Sassanid architecture were resurrected, and great Iranian scholars were patronized.[clarification needed] At the same time, the Islamic religious institutions became more organized andSunni orthodoxy became more codified.[citation needed]
The Persian jurist and theologianAl-Ghazali was among the scholars at the Seljuq court who proposed a synthesis ofSufism andSharia, which became the basis for a richer Islamic theology. Formulating the Sunni concept of division between temporal and religious authorities, he provided a theological basis for the existence of theSultanate, a temporal office alongside theCaliphate, which at that time was merely a religious office. The main institutional means of establishing a consensus of theulama on these dogmatic issues was theNezamiyeh, better known as themadrasas, named after its founderNizam al-Mulk, a Persian vizier of the Seljuqs. These schools became the means of uniting Sunniulama, who legitimized the rule of the Sultans. The bureaucracies were staffed by graduates of the madrasas, so both theulama and the bureaucracies were under the influence of esteemed professors at themadrasas.[22]: 14 [26]: 224–30
As the result of the impacts of Persian literature as well as to further political ambitions, it became a custom for rulers in the Persianate lands to not only commission a copy of theShahnameh, but also to have his own epic, allowing court poets to attempt to reach the level of Ferdowsi:
Thus, as with any piece of historical writing, theShahnameh can be evaluated as a historical source on two levels: firstly, for its contribution to the store of basic factual knowledge of a period, and secondly, for the light it sheds, intentionally or otherwise, on contemporary thought and politics.
— [34]
Iranian and Persianate poets received theShahnameh and modeled themselves after it. Murtazavi formulates three categories of such works too: poets who took up material not covered in the epic, poets who eulogized their patrons and their ancestors inmasnavi form for monetary reward, and poets who wrote poems for rulers who saw themselves as heroes in theShahnameh,[35] echoing the earlierSamanid trend of patronizing the Shahnameh for legitimizing texts.[36]
First, Persian poets attempted to continue the chronology to a later period, such as theZafarnamah of theIlkhanid historianHamdollah Mostowfi (d. 1334 or 1335), which deals with Iranian history from the Arab conquest to the Mongols and is longer than Ferdowsi's work.[37] The literary value of these works must be considered on an individual basis asJan Rypka cautions: "all these numerous epics cannot be assessed very highly, to say nothing of those works that were substantially (or literally) copies of Ferdowsi. There are however exceptions, such as theZafar-Nameh of Hamdu'llah Mustaufi a historically valuable continuation of the Shah-nama"[38] and theShahanshahnamah (orChangiznamah) of Ahmad Tabrizi in 1337–38, which is a history of the Mongols written for Abu Sa'id.
Second, poets versified the history of a contemporary ruler for reward, such as theGhazannameh written in 1361–62 by Nur al-Din ibn Shams al-Din. Third, heroes not treated in theShahnameh and those having minor roles in it became the subjects of their own epics, such as the 11th-centuryGarshāspnāmeh byAsadi Tusi. This tradition, chiefly aTimurid one, resulted in the creation of Islamic epics of conquests as discussed by Marjan Molé.[39] Also see the classification employed by Z. Safa for epics:milli (national, those inspired by Ferdowsi's epic),tarikhi (historical, those written in imitation ofNizami'sIskandarnamah) anddini for religious works.[40] The other source of inspiration for Persianate culture was another Persian poet,Nizami, a most admired, illustrated and imitated writer of romanticmasnavis.[41]
Along with Ferdowsi's and Nizami's works,Amir Khusraw Dehlavi'skhamseh came to enjoy tremendous prestige, and multiple copies of it were produced at Persianized courts. Seyller has a useful catalog of all known copies of this text.[42]
In the 16th century, Persianate culture became sharply distinct from the Arab world to the west, the dividing zone falling along theEuphrates. Socially the Persianate world was marked by a system of ethnologically defined elite statuses: the rulers and their soldiery were non-Iranians in origin, but the administrative cadres and literati were Iranians. Cultural affairs were marked by a characteristic pattern of language use:New Persian was the language of state affairs, scholarship and literature andArabic the language of religion.[33]
TheSafavid dynasty ascended to predominance in Iran in the 16th century—the first native Iranian dynasty since theBuyyids.[43][44][45] The Safavids, who were of mixedKurdish,Turkic,Georgian,Circassian andPontic Greek ancestry, moved to theArdabil region in the 11th century. They re-asserted the Persian identity over many parts of West Asia and Central Asia, establishing an independent Persian state,[46] and patronizing Persian culture[22] They made Iran the spiritual bastion ofShi’ism against the onslaughts of orthodoxSunni Islam, and a repository of Persian cultural traditions and self-awareness of Persian identity.[47]: 228
The founder of the dynasty,Shah Isma'il, adopted the title of Persian EmperorPādišah-ī Īrān, with its implicit notion of an Iranian state stretching from Afghanistan as far as the Euphrates and the North Caucasus, and from the Oxus to the southern territories of the Persian Gulf.[47]: 228 Shah Isma'il's successors went further and adopted the title ofShāhanshāh (king of kings). The Safavid kings considered themselves, like their predecessors the Sassanid Emperors, thekhudāygān (the shadow of God on earth).[47]: 226 They revived Sassanid architecture,[47]: 226 build grand mosques and elegantcharbagh gardens, collected books (one Safavid ruler had a library of 3,000 volumes), and patronized "Men of the Pen"[48]: 105 The Safavids introduced Shiism into Persia to distinguish Persian society from theOttomans, their Sunni archrivals to the west.[3]
At the beginning of the 14th century, theOttomans rose to predominance in Asia Minor. The Ottomans patronized Persian literature for five and a half centuries and attracted great numbers of writers and artists, especially in the 16th century.[49] The Ottoman Empire's undeniable affiliation with the Persianate world during the first few decades of the sixteenth century are illustrated by the works of a scribe from theAq Qoyunlu court, Edris Bedlisi.[50][51] One of the most renowned Persian poets in the Ottoman court wasFethullah Arifi Çelebi, also a painter and historian, and the author of theSüleymanname (orSuleyman-nama), a biography ofSüleyman the Magnificent.[52] At the end of the 17th century, they gave up Persian as the court and administrative language, using Turkish instead; a decision that shocked the highly Persianized Mughals in India.[48]: 159 The Ottoman Sultan Suleyman wrote an entiredivan in Persian language.[53] According to Hodgson:
The rise of Persian (the language) had more than purely literary consequence: it served to carry a new overall cultural orientation within Islamdom. Henceforth while Arabic held its own as the primary language of the religious disciplines and even, largely, of natural science and philosophy, Persian became, in an increasingly part of Islamdom, the language of polite culture; it even invaded the realm of scholarship with increasing effects. It was to form the chief model of the rise of still other languages. Gradually a third "classical" tongue emerged, Turkish, whose literature was based on Persian tradition.
— [28]
Toynbee's assessment of the role of the Persian language is worth quoting in more detail, fromA Study of History:
In the Iranian world, before it began to succumb to the process of Westernization, the New Persian language, which had been fashioned into literary form in mighty works of art...gained a currency as a lingua franca; and at its widest, about the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries of the Christian Era, its range in this role extended, without a break, across the face of South-Eastern Europe and South-Western Asia from the Ottoman pashalyq of Buda, which had been erected out of the wreckage of the Western Christian Kingdom of Hungary after the Ottoman victory at Mohacz in A.D. 1526, to the Muslim "successor-states" which had been carved, after the victory of the Deccanese Muslim princes at Talikota in A.D. 1565, out of the carcass of the slaughtered Hindu Empire of Vijayanagar. For this vast cultural empire the New Persian language was indebted to the arms of Turkish-speaking empire-builders, reared in the Iranian tradition and therefore captivated by the spell of the New Persian literature, whose military and political destiny it had been to provide one universal state for Orthodox Christendom in the shape of the Ottoman Empire and another for the Hindu World in the shape of the Timurid Mughal Raj. These two universal states of Iranian construction on Orthodox Christian and on Hindu ground were duly annexed, in accordance with their builders' own cultural affinities, to the original domain of the New Persian language in the homelands of the Iranian Civilization on the Iranian plateau and in the Basin of the Oxus and the Jaxartes; and in the heyday of the Mughal, Safawi, and Ottoman regimes New Persian was being patronized as the language ofliterae humaniores by the ruling element over the whole of this huge realm, while it was also being employed as the official language of administration in those two-thirds of its realm that lay within the Safawi and the Mughal frontiers.
— [54]
E. J. W. Gibb is the author of the standardA Literary History of Ottoman Poetry in six volumes, whose name has lived on in an important series of publications of Arabic, Persian, and Turkish texts, theGibb Memorial Series.[55] Gibb classifies Ottoman poetry between the "Old School", from the 14th century to about the middle of the 19th century, during which time Persian influence was dominant; and the "Modern School", which came into being as a result of the Western impact. According to Gibb in the introduction (Volume I):
the Turks very early appropriated the entire Persian literary system down to its minute detail, and that in the same unquestioning and wholehearted fashion in which they had already accepted Islam.
The Saljuqs had, in the words of the same author:
attained a very considerable degree of culture, thanks entirely to Persian tutorage. About the middle of the eleventh century they [that is, the Saljuqs] had overrun Persia, when, as so often happened, the Barbarian conquerors adopted the culture of their civilized subjects. Rapidly the Seljuq Turks pushed their conquest westward, ever carrying with them Persian culture...[s]o, when some hundred and fifty years later Sulayman's son [the leader of the Ottomans]... penetrated into Asia Minor, they [the Ottomans] found that although Seljuq Turkish was the everyday speech of the people, Persian was the language of the court, while Persian literature and Persian culture reigned supreme. It is to the Seljuqs with whom they were thus fused, that the Ottomans, strictly so called, owe their literary education; this therefore was of necessity Persian as the Seljuqs knew no other. The Turks were not content with learning from the Persians how to express thought; they went to them to learn what to think and in what way to think. In practical matters, in the affairs of everyday life and in the business of government, they preferred their own ideas; but in the sphere of science and literature they went to school with the Persian, intent not merely on acquiring his method, but on entering into his spirit, thinking his thought and feeling his feelings. And in this school they continued so long as there was a master to teach them; for the step thus taken at the outset developed into a practice; it became the rule with the Turkish poets to look ever Persia-ward for guidance and to follow whatever fashion might prevail there. Thus it comes about that for centuries Ottoman poetry continued to reflect as in a glass the several phases through which that of Persia passed...[s]o the first Ottoman poets, and their successors through many a generation, strove with all their strength to write what is little else than Persian poetry in Turkish words. But such was not consciously their aim; of national feeling in poetry they dreamed not; poetry was to them one and indivisible, the language in which it was written merely an unimportant accident.
In general, from its earliest days, Persian culture was brought into the Subcontinent (or South Asia) by various PersianisedTurkic andAfghan dynasties.[56] South Asian society was enriched by the influx of Persian-speaking and Islamic scholars, historians, architects, musicians, and other specialists of high Persianate culture who fled the Mongol devastation.The sultans of Delhi, who were of Turko-Afghan origin, modeled their lifestyles after the Persian upper classes. They patronized Persian literature and music, but became especially notable for their architecture, because their builders drew from Irano-Islamic architecture, combining it with Indian traditions to produce a profusion ofmosques, palaces, and tombs unmatched in any other Islamic country.[33] The speculative thought of the times at theMughal court, as in other Persianate courts, leaned towards the eclecticgnostic dimension of Sufi Islam, having similarities with HinduVedantism, indigenousBhakti and populartheosophy.[57]
TheMughals, who were ofTurco-Mongol descent, strengthened theIndo-Persian culture, in South Asia. For centuries, Iranian scholar-officials had immigrated to the region where their expertise in Persianate culture and administration secured them honored service within the Mughal Empire.[citation needed][58]: 24–32 Networks of learned masters and madrasas taught generations of young South Asian men Persian language and literature in addition to Islamic values and sciences. Furthermore, educational institutions such asFarangi Mahall andDelhi College developed innovative and integrated curricula for modernizing Persian-speaking South Asians.[58]: 33 They cultivated Persian art, enticing to their courts artists and architects from Bukhara,Tabriz,Herat,Shiraz, and other cities of Greater Iran. TheTaj Mahal and itsCharbagh were commissioned by the Mughal emperorShah Jahan for his Iranian bride.
Iranian poets, such asSa’di,Hafez,Rumi andNizami, who were great masters of Sufi mysticism from the Persianate world, were the favorite poets of the Mughals.[citation needed] Their works were present in Mughal libraries and counted among the emperors’ prized possessions, which they gave to each other;Akbar andJahangir often quoted from them, signifying that they had imbibed them to a great extent. An autographed note of both Jahangir and Shah Jahan on a copy of Sa’di'sGulestān states that it was their most precious possession.[59]: 101, cat. no. 36 a.c A gift of aGulestān was made by Shah Jahan toJahanara Begum, an incident which is recorded by her with her signature.[59]: 332.38, Cat. no. 136a.f Shah Jahan also considered the same work worthy enough to be sent as a gift to the king of England in 1628, which is presently in theChester Beatty Library, Dublin. The emperor often took out auguries from a copy of thediwan ofHafez belonging to his grandfather,Humayun. One such incident is recorded in his own handwriting in the margins of a copy of thediwan, presently in theKhuda Bakhsh Oriental Library, Patna.[60] The court poetsNaziri,'Orfi Shirazi,Faizi,Abdul Rahim Khan-i-Khanan,Muhammad Zuhuri,Sanai,Qodsi Mashhadi,Taleb Amoli andKalim Kashani were all masters imbued with a similar Sufi spirit, thus following the norms of any Persianate court.[notes 2]
The tendency towards Sufi mysticism through Persianate culture in Mughal court circles is also testified by the inventory of books that were kept in Akbar's library, and are especially mentioned by his historian,Abu'l Fazl, in theĀ’in-ī Akbarī. Some of the books that were read out continually to the emperor include themasnavis of Nizami, the works ofAmir Khusrow, Sharaf Manayri and Jami, theMasnavi i-manavi of Rumi, theJām-i Jam ofAwhadi Maraghai, theHakika o Sanā’i, theQabusnameh ofKeikavus, Sa’di'sGulestān andBūstān, and thediwans ofKhaqani andAnvari.[61][62]
This intellectual symmetry continued until the end of the 19th century, when a Persian newspaper,Miftah al-Zafar (1897), campaigned for the formation of Anjuman-i Ma’arif, an academy devoted to the strengthening of Persian language as a scientific language.[57]
From about the 12th century, Persian lyric poetry was enriched with a spirituality and devotional depth not to be found in earlier works. This development was due to the pervasive spread of mystical experience within Islam.Sufism developed in all Muslim lands, including the sphere of Persian cultural influence. As a counterpoise to the rigidity of formal Islamictheology and law, Islamic mysticism sought to approach the divine through acts of devotion and love rather than through mere rituals and observance. Love ofGod being the focus of the Sufis' religious sentiments, it was only natural for them to express it in lyrical terms, and PersianSufis, often of exceptional sensibility and endowed with poetic verve, did not hesitate to do so. The famous 11th-century Sufi,Abu Sa'id of Mehna frequently used his own lovequatrains (as well as others) to express his spiritual yearnings, and with mystic poets such asAttar andIraqi, mysticism became a legitimate, even fashionable subject of lyric poems among the Persianate societies. Furthermore, as Sufi orders and centers (Khaneghah) spread throughout Persian societies, Persian mystic poetic thought gradually became so much a part of common culture that even poets who did not share Sufi experiences ventured to express mystical ideas and imagery in their work.[63]
As the broad cultural region remained politically divided, the sharp antagonisms between empires stimulated the appearance of variations of Persianate culture. After 1500, the Iranian culture developed distinct features of its own, with interposition of strong pre-Islamic and Shiite Islamic culture. Iran's ancient cultural relationship withSouthern Iraq (Sumer/Babylonia) remained strong and endured in spite of the loss ofMesopotamia to the Ottomans. Its ancient cultural and historical relationship with theCaucasus endured until the loss ofAzerbaijan,Armenia, easternGeorgia and parts of theNorth Caucasus to Imperial Russia following theRusso-Persian Wars in the course of the 19th century. The culture of peoples of the eastern Mediterranean in Anatolia, Syria, and Egypt developed somewhat independently; India developed a vibrant and completely distinct South Asian style with little to no remnants of the once patronized Indo-Persian culture by the Mughals.[64][65]
Persianate is a new term, first coined by Marshall Hodgson to offer a different explanation of Islam in the world system than that extrapolated from Wallerstein. While Persianate depicts a cultural force that is linked to Persian language and to self-identifying Persians, Persianate is more than either a language or a people; it highlights elements that Persians share with Indo-Aryan rulers who preceded Muslims to the subcontinent. Two elements are paramount:hierarchy ... (and)deference
Saljuq activity must always be viewed both in terms of the wishes of the sultan and his Khorasanian, Sunni advisors, especiallyNezām-al-molk ...
Because the Turkish Seljuqs had no Islamic tradition or strong literary heritage of their own, they adopted the cultural language of their Persian instructors in Islam. Literary Persian thus spread to the whole of Iran, and the Arabic language disappeared in that country except in works of religious scholarship
His origin, milieu, training, and culture were steeped in Persian culture and so Babor was largely responsible for the fostering of this culture by his descendants, the Mughals of India, and for the expansion of Persian cultural influence in the Indian subcontinent, with brilliant literary, artistic, and historiographical results
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