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The compositeTurko-Persian,Turco-Persian,[1] orTurco-Iranian (Persian:فرهنگ ایرانی-ترکی) is the distinctive culture that arose in the 9th and 10th centuries AD inKhorasan andTransoxiana (present-dayAfghanistan,Iran,Uzbekistan,Turkmenistan,Tajikistan and minor parts ofKyrgyzstan andKazakhstan).[2] According to the modern historian Robert L. Canfield, the Turco-Persian tradition was Persianate in that it was centered on a lettered tradition of Iranian origin; it was Turkic in so far as it was for many generations patronized by Turkic rulers; and it was "Islamicate" in that Islamic notions of virtue, permanence, and excellence infused discourse about public issues as well as the religious affairs of the Muslims, who were the presiding elite."[3]
In subsequent centuries, the Turco-Persian culture was carried on further by conquering peoples to neighbouring regions, eventually becoming the predominant culture of the ruling and elite classes ofSouth Asia (where it evolved intoIndo-Persian tradition),Central Asia and theTarim Basin, as well as large parts ofWest Asia.[4]
Turkic-Persian tradition was a variant ofIslamic culture.[5] Islamic notions of virtue, permanence, and excellence permeated discussions on public issues and the religious affairs of the presiding Muslim elite.[1]
After theMuslim conquest of Persia,Middle Persian, the language ofSassanids, continued in wide use well into the secondIslamic century (eighth century) as a medium of administration in the eastern lands of theCaliphate.[1]
Politically, the Abbasids soon started losing their control, causing two major lasting consequences. First, the Abbasid Caliph al-Mutasim (833-842) greatly increased the presence ofTurkic mercenaries andMamluk slaves in the Caliphate, and they eventually displaced Arabs and Persians from the military, and therefore from the political hegemony, starting an era of Turco-Persian symbiosis.[6]
Second, the governors inKhurasan,Tahirids, were factually independent; then theSaffarids fromSistan freed the eastern lands, but were replaced by independentSamanids, although they showed perfunctory deference to the Caliph.[1]
Middle Persian was alingua franca of the region before the Islamic invasion, but afterwards Arabic became a preferred medium of literary expression.
In the ninth century a new Persian language emerged as the idiom of administration and literature. Tahirids and Saffarids continued using Persian as an informal language, although for them Arabic was the "only proper language for recording anything worthwhile, from poetry to science",[8] but theSamanids made Persian a language of learning and formal discourse. The language that appeared in the ninth and tenth centuries was a new form of Persian, based on the Middle Persian of pre-Islamic times.[9]
The Samanids began recording their court affairs in Persian, and they used it as the main public idiom. The earliest great poetry in New Persian was written for the Samanid court. Samanids encouraged translation of religious works from Persian into Arabic. Even the learned authorities of Islam, theulama, began using the Persian lingua franca in public, although they still used Arabic as a medium of scholarship. The crowning literary achievement in the early New Persian language, theBook of Kings ofFerdowsi, presented to the court ofMahmud of Ghazni (998–1030), was more than a literary achievement; it was a kind ofIranian nationalistic memoir, Ferdowsi galvanized Persian nationalistic sentiments by invoking pre-Islamic Persian heroic imagery. Ferdowsi enshrined in literary form the most treasured stories of popular folk-memory.[1]
Before theGhaznavids broke away, the Samanid rulership was internally falling to its Turkic servants. The Samanids had their own guard of TurkicMamluk mercenaries (theghilman), who were headed by a chamberlain, and a Persian and Arabic speaking bureaucracy, headed by a Persianvizier. The army was largely composed of mostly Turkic Mamluks. By the latter part of the tenth century, Samanid rulers gave the command of their army to Turkic generals.[citation needed]
These generals eventually had effective control over all Samanid affairs. The rise of Turks in Samanid times brought a loss of Samanid southern territories to one of their Mamluks, who were governing on their behalf.Mahmud of Ghazni ruled over southeastern extremities of Samanid territories from the city ofGhazni. Turkic political ascendancy in the Samanid period in the tenth and eleventh centuries resulted in the fall of Samanid ruling institution to its Turkic generals; and in a rise of Turkic pastoralists in the countryside.[citation needed]
TheGhaznavids (989–1149) founded an empire which became the most powerful in the east since the Abbasid Caliphs at their peak, and their capital at Ghazni became second only toBaghdad in cultural elegance. It attracted many scholars and artists of the Islamic world. Turkic ascendance to power in the Samanid court brought Turks as the main patrons of Persianate culture, and as they subjugated Western and Southern Asia, they brought along this culture.[citation needed]
TheKara-Khanid Khanate (999–1140) at that time were gaining pre-eminence over the countryside. The Kara-Khanids were pastoralists of noble Turkic backgrounds, and they cherished their Turkic ways. As they gained strength they fostered development of a new Turkic literature which was entirely based on the Persian literature that had arisen earlier.[citation needed]
Peter B. Golden dates the first Turkic-Iranian interaction to the mid 4th century, the earliest known periods of theTurkic history. The origins of theFirst Turkic Khaganate is associated with Iranian elements. TheSogdian influence on the state was considerable. The Sogdians, international merchants of long standing with numerous trading colonies along thesilk route, needed the military power of the Turks. Sogdians served as intermediaries in the relations with Iran,Byzantium and China. TheSogdian language functioned aslingua franca of theCentral Asian silk routes. TheUyghur Khaganate that succeeded theTurkic Empire was even more closesly associated with Sogdian elements. After the fall of the Uyghur nomadic state, many Turkic peoples moved toTurkestan, then a predominantlyIranian andTokharian region, which became increasinglyTurkicized.[10]
In Samanid times began the growth of the public influence of theulama, the learned scholars of Islam.Ulama grew in prominence as the Samanids gave special support toSunnism, in contrast with theirShiite neighbors, theBuyids. They enjoyed strong position in the city ofBukhara, and it grew under the Samanids' successors Kara-Khanid Khanate.Kara-Khanids established a dominance ofulama in the cities, and the network of recognized Islamic authorities became an alternative social instrument for the maintenance of public order. In the Kara-Khanid Khanate formed an ethnically and dogmatically diverse society. The eastern lands of the Caliphate were ethnically and religiously very diverse.Christians,Jews, andZoroastrians were numerous, and also several minority Islamic sects had considerable following. These diverse peoples found refuge in the cities. Bukhara andSamarkand swelled and formed ethnic and sectarian neighborhoods, most of them surrounded by walls, each with its own markets,caravansaraies, and public squares. The religious authorities of these non-Muslim communities became their spokesmen, just as theulama were for the Muslim community, they also began overseeing internal communal affairs. Thus, alongside the rise of theulama, there was a corresponding rise in the political importance of the religious leaders of other doctrinal communities.[1]
The ruling institution was dominated by Turks from various tribes, some highly urbanized and Persianized, while others remained rural and distinctly Turkic. It was managed by bureaucrats and ulama who used both Persian and Arabic. Its literati participated in the high cultural traditions of both the Arabic and Persian worlds within the broader Islamicate society. This composite culture was the beginning of the Turko-Persian variant of Islamicate culture. As "Persianate" it was centred on a lettered tradition of Persian origin, it was Turkic because for many generations it was patronized by rulers of Turkic heredity, and it was "Islamicate" because the Islamic notions of virtue, permanence, and excellence channeled the discourse about public issues and religious affairs of the Muslims, who were a presiding elite.[5] The combination of these elements in the Islamic society had a strong impact on the religion, because Islam was disengaged from its Arabic background andBedouin traditions and became a far richer, more adaptable, and universal culture.[12] The appearance of New Persian, ascendancy of Turks to power in place of the Persian Samanids, rise of the non-Arabiculama in the cities, and development of ethnically and confessionally complex urban society marked an emergence of a new Turco-Persian Islamic culture. As the Turco-Persian Islamic culture was exported into the wider region of Western and Southern Asia, the transformation became increasingly evident.[citation needed]
The early stages of Turco-Persian cultural synthesis in the Islamic world are marked by cultural, social and political tensions and competition among Turks, Persians, and Arabs, despite the egalitarianism of Islamic doctrine. The complex ideas around non-Arabs in the Muslim world[13][14] lead to debates and changing attitudes that can be seen in numerous Arabic, Persian and Turkic writings before the Mongol expansion.[15]
The Perso-Islamic tradition was a tradition where the Turkic groups played an important role in its military and political success while the culture raised both by and under the influence of Muslims used Persian as its cultural vehicle.[16] In short, the Turco-Persian tradition featuresPersian culture patronized byTurcophone rulers.[17]
The Turco-Persian Islamic culture that emerged under the Persianate Samanids, Ghaznavids, andKara-Khanids was carried by succeeding dynasties into Western and Southern Asia, in particular, by theSeljuks (1040-1118), and their successor states, who presided overPersia,Syria, andAnatolia until the thirteenth century, and by theGhaznavids, who in the same period dominatedGreater Khorasan and most of present-dayPakistan. These two dynasties together drew the center of the Islamic world eastward. The institutions stabilized Islamic society into a form that would persist, at least inWest Asia, until the twentieth century.[1]
The Turco-Persian distinctive Islamic culture flourished for hundreds of years, and then faded under imposed modernEuropean influences.[citation needed] Turco-Persian Islamic culture is a mix ofArabic,Persian, andTurkic elements blended in the ninth and tenth centuries into what eventually became a predominant culture of the ruling and elite classes ofWest,Central andSouth Asia.[1]
The Ghaznavids moved their capital fromGhazni toLahore, which they turned into another center ofIslamic culture. Under Ghaznavids poets and scholars fromKashgar,Bukhara,Samarkand,Baghdad,Nishapur, andGhazni congregated in Lahore. Thus, the Turco-Persian culture was brought deep into India[18] and carried further in the thirteenth century.[citation needed]
TheSeljuq successors of Kara-Khanid Khanate inTransoxiana brought this culture westward into Persia, Iraq, and Syria. Seljuqs won a decisive battle with the Ghaznavids and then swept intoKhorasan, they brought Turco-Persian Islamic culture westward into western Persia and Iraq. Persia and Central Asia became a heartland of Persianate language and culture. As Seljuks came to dominate Iraq, Syria, and Anatolia, they carried this Turco-Persian culture beyond, and made it the culture of their courts in the region to as far west as theMediterranean Sea. The Seljuks subsequently gave rise to theSultanate of Rum in Anatolia, while taking their thoroughly Persianised identity with them, giving it an even more profound and noted history there.[20][21] Under Seljuks and the Ghaznavids the Islamic religious institutions became more organized and Sunni orthodoxy became more codified. The great jurist and theologianal-Ghazali proposed a synthesis ofSufism andsharia that became a basis of a richer Islamic theology. Formulating the Sunni concept of division between temporal and religious authorities, he provided a theological basis for the existence ofSultanate, a temporal office alongside the Caliphate, which by that time was merely a religious office. The main institutional means of establishing a consensus of theulama on these dogmatic issues were themadrasas, formal Islamic schools that granted licensure to teach. First established under Seljuqs, these schools became means of uniting Sunniulama which 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 the madrasas.[1][22]
The period from the eleventh to thirteenth century was a cultural blossom time in Western and Southern Asia. A shared culture spread fromMediterranean to the mouth ofGanges, despite political fragmentation and ethnic diversity.[1]
The culture of the Turco-Persian world in the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries was tested by invading armies of inland Asia. TheMongols underGenghis Khan (1220–58) andTimur (Tamerlane, 1336-1405) stimulated development of Persianate culture of Central and West Asia, because of the new concentrations of specialists of high culture created by the invasions, for many people had to seek refuge in few safe havens, primarily India, where scholars, poets, musicians, and fine artisans intermingled and cross-fertilized, and because the broad peace secured by the huge imperial systems established by theIl-Khans (in the thirteenth century) andTimurids (in the fifteenth century), when travel was safe, and scholars and artists, ideas and skills, and fine books and artifacts circulated freely over a wide area. Il-Khans and Timurids deliberately patronized Persianate high culture. Under their rule developed new styles of architecture, Persian literature was encouraged, and flourished miniature painting and book production, and under Timurids prospered Turkic poetry, based on the vernacular known asChaghatai (today calledUzbek; of TurkicQarluq origin).
The historianPeter Jackson explains inThe New Cambridge History of Islam: "The elite of the early Delhi sultanate comprised overwhelmingly first generation immigrants fromPersia andCentral Asia:Persians ('Tājīks'),Turks, Ghūrīs and alsoKhalaj from the hot regions (garmsīr) of modernAfghanistan.[23] TheAlai era saw the overthrow of the old nobility of early Mamluk rule. The backbone of the Turkic elite was broken as their wealth in Delhi was confiscated byNusrat Khan Jalesari,[24] after which a newheterogeneous Indo-Muslim nobility emerged in the Delhi Sultanate.[25][26] After the sack of Baghdad by the Mongols in 1258, Delhi became the most important cultural center of the Muslim east.[18] The Delhi Sultans modeled their life-styles after the Turkic and Persian upper classes, who now predominated in most of West and Central Asia. They patronized literature and music, but became especially notable for their architecture, because their builders drew from Muslim world architecture to produce a profusion ofmosques, palaces, and tombs unmatched in any other Islamic country.[18] Many dynasties of the Delhi Sultanates were Turko-Afghan in origin.[27][28]
In Mongol and Timurid times the predominant influences on Turco-Persian culture were imposed from Central Asia, and in this period Turco-Persian culture became sharply distinguishable from the Arabic Islamic world to the west, the dividing zone fell alongEuphrates. Socially, the Turco-Persian world was marked by a system of ethnologically defined elite statuses: the rulers and their soldiery were Turkic orTurkic-speaking Mongols; the administrative cadres and literati were Persian. Cultural affairs were marked by characteristic pattern of language use: New Persian was the language of state affairs and literature; New Persian and Arabic the languages of scholarship; Arabic the language of adjudication; and Turkic the language of the military.[18]
In the sixteenth century several Turko-Persian empires arose: theOttomans in Asia Minor and south-eastern Europe,Safavids in Persia, andMughals in India. Thus, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries the territories from south-eastern Europe, the Caucasus, Asia Minor to East Bengal were dominated by Turco-Persian dynasties.
At the beginning of the fourteenth century the Ottomans rose to predominance in Asia Minor, and developed an empire that subjugated most of the Arab Islamic world as well as south-eastern Europe. The Ottomans patronized Persian literature for five and a half centuries and, because Asia Minor was more stable than eastern territories, they attracted great numbers of writers and artists, especially in the sixteenth century.[29] The Ottomans developed distinctive styles of arts and letters. Unlike Persia they gradually shed some of their Persianate qualities. They gave up Persian as the court language, using Turkish instead; a decision that shocked the highly Persianized Mughals in India.[30]
The Safavids of the fifteenth century were leaders of aSufi order, venerated byTurkmen tribesmen in easternAnatolia. They patronized Persian culture in the manner of their predecessors. Safavids erected grand mosques and built elegant gardens, collected books (one Safavid ruler had a library of 3,000 volumes) and patronized whole academies.[31] The Safavids introducedShiism into Persia to distinguish Persian society from the Ottoman, their Sunni rivals to the west.[5]
The Mughals, Persianized Turks who had invaded India from Central Asia and claimed descent from both Timur and Genghis Khan, strengthened thePersianate culture of Muslim India.[32] They cultivated art, enticing to their courts artists and architects fromBukhara,Tabriz,Shiraz, and other cities of Islamic world. TheTaj Mahal was commissioned by the Mughal emperorShah Jahan. The Mughals dominated India from 1526 until the eighteenth century, when Muslim successor states and non-Muslim powers ofSikh,Maratha, andBritish replaced them.
The Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal empires developed variations of a broadly similar Turco-Persian tradition. A remarkable similarity in culture, particularly among the elite classes, spread across territories of West, Central and South Asia. Although populations across this vast region had conflicting allegiances (sectarian, locality, tribal, and ethnic affiliation) and spoke many different languages (mostlyIndo-Iranian languages likePersian,Urdu,Hindi,Punjabi,Pushtu,Baluchi, orKurdish, orTurkic languages likeTurkish,Azerbaijani,Turkmen,Uzbek, orKyrgyz), people shared a number of common institutions, arts, knowledge, customs, and rituals. These cultural similarities were perpetuated by poets, artists, architects, artisans, jurists, and scholars, who maintained relations among their peers in the far-flung cities of the Turco-Persian world, fromIstanbul to Delhi.[5]
As the broad cultural region remained politically divided, the sharp antagonisms between empires stimulated appearance of variations of Turco-Persian culture. The main reason for this was Safavids' introduction of Shiism into Persia, done to distinguish themselves from their Sunni neighbors, especially Ottomans. After 1500, the Persian culture developed distinct features of its own, and interposition of strong Shiite culture hampered exchanges withSunni peoples on Persia's western and eastern frontiers. The Sunni peoples of eastern Mediterranean in Asia Minor, Syria, Iraq, Egypt, and Sunnis of Central Asia and India developed somewhat independently. Ottoman Turkey grew more like its Arab Muslim neighbors in West Asia; India developed a South Asian style of Indo-Persian[33][34] culture; and Central Asia, which gradually grew more isolated, changed relatively little.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the Turco-Persian empires weakened by the Europeans' discovery of a sea route to India, and introduction of hand guns, which gave the horsemen of the pastoral societies greater fighting capability. In India, the Mughal Empire decayed into warring states. The European powers encroached into the Turco-Persian region, contributing to the political fragmentation of the region. By the nineteenth century, the European secular concepts of social obligation and authority, along with superior technology, shook many established institutions of Turco-Persia.[1][clarification needed]
By identifying the cultural regions of Asia as theMiddle East,South Asia,Russian Asia, andEast Asia, theEuropeans in effect dismembered the Turco-Persian Islamic world that had culturally united a vast expanse of Asia for nearly a thousand years.[35] The imposition of European influences on Asia greatly affected political and economic affairs throughout the region where Persianate culture had once been patronized by Turkic rulers. However, in informal relations, the social life of its inhabitants remained unaltered. Popular customs and ideologies of virtue, sublimity, and permanence, ideas that were entailed in Islamic religious teaching, persisted relatively unchanged.
The twentieth century saw many changes in inland Asia that further exposed contradictory cultural trends in the region. Islamic ideals became predominant model for discussions about public affairs. The newrhetoric of public ideals captured interest of peoples throughout Islamic world, including the area where in public affairs Turco-Persian culture once was prominent. The Islamic moral imagery that survived in informal relations emerged as the model of ideology expressed in its most political form in theIslamic revolution of Iran and in the Islamic idealism of the Afghanistanmujahedin resistance movement.[36][37][38]
TheIslamic resurgence has been less a renewal of faith and dedication than a public resurfacing of perspectives and ideals previously relegated to less public, informal relations under the impact ofEuropean secular influences. They are not medieval Islamic ideals, but important ideological traditions that survived an era of great change, and now are used to interpret the problems of contemporary times.[39][40] The Turco-Persian Islamic tradition provided the elements they have used to express their shared concerns.
"The work of Iranians can be seen in every field of cultural endeavor, including Arabic poetry, to which poets of Iranian origin composing their poems in Arabic made a very significant contribution. In a sense, Iranian Islam is a second advent of Islam itself, a new Islam sometimes referred to as Islam-i Ajam. It was this Persian Islam, rather than the original Arab Islam, that was brought to new areas and new peoples: to the Turks, first in Central Asia and then in the Middle East in the country which came to be called Turkey, and of course to India. The Ottoman Turks brought a form of Iranian civilization to the walls of Vienna. [...] By the time of the great Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century, Iranian Islam had become not only an important component; it had become a dominant element in Islam itself, and for several centuries the main centers of the Islamic power and civilization were in countries that were, if not Iranian, at least marked by Iranian civilization. [...] The center of the Islamic world was under Turkish and Persian states, both shaped by Iranian culture. [...] The major centers of Islam in the late medieval and early modern periods, the centers of both political and cultural power, such as India, Central Asia, Iran, Turkey, were all part of this Iranian civilization. Although much of it spoke various forms of Turkish, as well as other local languages, their classical and cultural language was Persian. Arabic was of course the language of scripture and law, but Persian was the language of poetry and literature."
—Bernard Lewis[41]
| Name | Years | Map | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ghaznavids | 977–1186 | .png) |
|
| Seljuk Empire | 1037–1194 | .png) |
|
| Khwarazmian Empire | 1077–1231 |  |
|
| Timurid Empire | 1370–1507 |  |
|
| Qara Qoyunlu | 1374–1468 |  |
|
| Aq Qoyunlu | 1378–1508 |  |
|
| Name | Years | Map | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Qutb Shahi dynasty | 1518–1687 |  |
|
| Mughal Empire | 1526–1857 |  |
| Name | Years | Map | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sultanate of Rûm | 1077–1308 |  |
|
Fig. 181- Prince en trône flanqué de deux courtisans -Iran- vers 1170-1220 Samarcande, Musée National d'histoire (...) Des vaisselles de typologie iranienne (...) ont été mises à jour à Afrasiab. Des coupes lustrées et des fragments à décor polychrome (...) y ont également été découverts (fig. 181)
The Ghaznavids claimed descent from the last Sasanian shah, Yazdagird III...
The disintegration of Timur's empire into a growing number of Timurid principalities ruled by his sons and grandsons allowed the remarkable rebound of the Ottomans and their westward conquest of Byzantium as well as the rise of rival Turko-Mongolian nomadic empires of the Aq Qoyunlu and Qara Qoyunlu in western Iran, Iraq, and eastern Anatolia. In all of these nomadic empires, however, Persian remained the official court language and the Persianate ideal of kingship prevailed.