Routledge Revivals
Classical Persian Literature
First published in 1958, this work by one of Britains most celebrated Orientalist scholars, tells the story of the rebirth of national literature in Persia after the fall of the Sasnian empire in the seventh century. It traces the course of this literatures development to full maturity from the ninth century to the end of the fifteenth century and looks at a number of important writers including the Saljq poets, Rm, Hfiz and Jm.
This work will be of interest to those studying Persian and Middle-Eastern literature and history.
Classical Persian Literature
A. J. Arberry
First published in 1958
by George Allen & Unwin Ltd
This edition first published in 2016 by Routledge
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1958 George Allen & Unwin Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
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A Library of Congress record exists under LC control number: 94134343
ISBN 13: 978-1-138-21155-1 (hbk)
ISBN 13: 978-1-315-45273-9 (ebk)
ISBN 13: 978-1-138-20331-0 (set hbk)
ISBN 13: 978-1-315-44336-2 (set ebk)
A. J. ARBERRY
LittD., F.B.A.
CLASSICAL PERSIAN LITERATURE
FIRST PUBLISHED IN 1958
SECOND IMPRESSION 1967
This book is copyright under the Berne Convention. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act 1956, no portion may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Enquiries should be addressed to the publishers.
George Allen and Unwin Ltd, 1958
Reproduced and printed lithographically in Great Britain by Novello & Co. Ltd, London, W.I.
W HEN the Arabs carrying the Koran in their breasts overran Persia in the middle years of the seventh century and destroyed the once-powerful Ssnian empire they swept out of existence, though not out of memory, almost all vestiges of a literature which had behind it a thousand years of varied and changeful history. With the scanty remnants of that pre-Islamic culture, recovered painstakingly from imperishable rock and tattered leaves of widely scattered codices, this book is not concerned. Here it is proposed to tell the story of the first rebirth of a national literature in the national language, and to trace the course of its development and full maturity from the beginning of the ninth to the end of the fifteenth century. This story has of course been told before, both briefly and at length: briefly, as by Reuben Levy in his Persian Literature (London, 1923); at length, as by Edward Granville Browne in his Literary History of Persia (four volumes, Cambridge, 1928)those are the best-known and most reliable guides to this extensive territory in English, but many other books and monographs in many languages have surveyed the same scene in general or in particular. However, since Browne and Levy wrote, much new material has been published both in Persia and elsewhere which, without affecting seriously the broad picture painted by them, has modified very considerably our perspective of many parts of that picture. It therefore seemed opportune to compile a new history of classical Persian literature, within the compass and following the proportions appropriate to a single volume work, for the assistance of students coming newly to the subject, as well as for the enjoyment of the wider public interested to discover the sum of what the poets and writers of Persia produced during the golden age.
Before setting out on our long journey and tracing the waymarks century by century, it will be helpful to sketch the political history of Persia during the period under review, and to examine in a comprehensive fashion the nature and scope of Persian literature. A knowledge of the political history is essential to an understanding of the characteristics of the literature and its noticeable limitations, for it has almost invariably been associated with kings and princes and has owed nearly everything to patronage. It is necessary also to glance at the main trends of Arabic literature, for in many respects Persian authorship has been derivative, at all events in the primary phases, the principal models having been supplied by Arabic poetry and prose writing. The conquerors imposed their language and literary conventions on the vanquished along with their religion; the subject people proved themselves complacent to conform and quick to learn, and many of the most eminent Arabic scholars and authors during the first centuries of Islam were men of Persian blood and birth. It was only when political control of the Persian provinces loosened, a natural sequel to the weakening of the central administration, that the Persian language re-emerged, with a modified morphology and vocabulary, to serve once more as vehicle for the display of the Persian genius.
The political situation of Persia, writes E. Berthels, whose rulers were trying to cast off the Arab yoke, and the gradual exhaustion of the caliphate demanded not only political opposition to the Arabs but also the ending of the domination of the Arabic language in the field of literature. But the 150 years of the supremacy of Arabic did not pass without leaving a trace. Pahlavi had become a dead language; there was therefore only Persian to oppose to Arabic as a literary language. On the other hand, there prevailed, especially in poetry, Arabic forms (ada, ghazal) and the Arabic quantitative metre (ar), which so firmly established rhyme, probably foreign to Pahlavi, that a return to the poetical technique of the Ssnian period was impossible. These words were published over twenty years ago, when the question of what constituted Pahlavi poetry was being actively discussed. In 1950 Professor H. B. Henning could still record that the formal problems, the problems of rhythm, metre, and rhyme, remain in the dark. It seems doubtful whether the material at hand is capable of leading us to definite conclusions. The result which he reached in his careful investigation was that Pahlavi verse was accentual and not, as some had supposed, syllabic; he added that even the most cautious will not be able to deny the presence of conscious rhyme in a Pahlavi poem that to the present has remained unnoticed. Even so, Henning felt obliged to hesitate, asking whether the verses examined by him belonged in fact to an ancient poem, or merely an imitation of Persian models. Berthels statement therefore stands in need of little if any modification.
