Persianate Society - History

History

Persianate culture flourished for nearly fourteen centuries. It was a mixture of Persian and Islamic cultures that eventually became the dominant culture of the ruling and elite classes of Greater Iran, Asia Minor, and South Asia.

When, in the 7th and 8th centuries, the peoples of Greater Iran were conquered by Islamic forces, they became part of an empire much larger than any previous one under Persian rule. The new Islamic culture was largely based on pre-Islamic Persian traditions of the area, as well as the Islamic rites that were introduced to the region by the Arab conquerors.

Persianate culture, particularly among the elite classes, spread across the territories of western, central, and south Asia, although populations across this vast region had conflicting allegiances (sectarian, local, tribal, and ethnic affiliation) 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, from Anatolia to India.

Persianate culture involved modes of consciousness, ethos, and religious practices that have persisted in the Iranian world against hegemonic 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 among Alid loyalists and heterodox groups labeled by sharia-minded authority as ghulāt. In a way, along with investing the notion of heteroglossia, Persianate culture continuities and disjunction with 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 dualist struggle between the religious landscapes of late Iranian antiquity and a monotheist paradigm provided by the new religion, Islam.