Persianate Society

A Persianate society, or Persified society (Persian: فرهنگ پارسی‌زبانان‎, Farhang-e Pārsi-Zabānān), is a society that is either based on, or strongly influenced by the Persian language, culture, literature, art, and/or identity.

The term does not necessarily designate ethnic Persians, but has also been applied to those societies that may not have been ethnically Persian or Iranic, but whose linguistic, material, or artistic cultural activities were influenced by, or based on Persianate culture. Examples of pre-19th-century Persianate societies were the Seljuq, Timurid, and Ottoman dynasties, as well as the Qarmatians who entertained Persianate notions of cyclical time even though they did not invoke the Iranian genealogies in which these precepts had converged. "Persianate" is a multiracial cultural category, but it appears at times to be a religious category of a racial origin.

Regarding the influence of Persian civilization on Islamic societies, Richard Nelson Frye of Harvard University writes:

Many times I have emphasized that the present peoples of central Asia, whether Iranian or Turkic speaking, have one culture, one religion, one set of social values and traditions with only language separating them Arabs no longer understand the role of Iran and the Persian language in the formation of Islamic culture. Perhaps they wish to forget the past, but in so doing they remove the bases of their own spiritual, moral and cultural being without the heritage of the past and a healthy respect for it there is little chance for stability and proper growth. —