The Historians' History of the World 08

The action of a “client” population of this sort was fraught with far greater consequences when another Koreishite family—the Abbasids, descendants of an uncle of Mohammed—rose up against the Omayyads. One of their great emissaries placed himself at the head of the Moslem natives of eastern Persia (Khorasan) and by the help of these Iranians the Abbasids secured the throne (750). The change must be regarded as in great measure a strong reaction of the Persian element against the Arab. The long succession of great oriental empires had been interrupted by an empire purely Arab, and the sequence was now renewed. The seat of government was once more transferred to Babylonia; Baghdad took the place of Babylon and Ctesiphon. The great offices of state were already largely filled by persons of other than Arab descent. The old Arab pride of birth was outraged by the fact that no weight was now attached to the consideration of whether the mother of the ruler had been a free woman or a slave, and that thus the Arab strain of the reigning dynasty became more and more interfused with foreign blood as time went on. A second Persian reaction is signalised by the victory won, after a protracted struggle, by the caliph Mamun, the son of a Persian woman, over his brother Amin, whose mother was of the stock of the Abbasids (813). Mamun’s troops were nearly all of them Persians. Their leader, the Persian Tahir, founded the first semi-independent sovereignty on Iranian soil. The forms of government remained Arab to a great extent, and Arabic likewise remained the official language, but genuine Arabdom receded more and more into the background. Above all, professional troops recruited from the peoples of the East, or even of the far West, had almost wholly superseded the Arab levies.

The process of Arabisation went on apace, in the north Semitic countries, Egypt, and even in great tracts of the “Occident” (Maghreb),[22] but this Arab-speaking population, with its profession of Islam and its preponderance of non-Arabic elements, differed widely in thought and feeling from the Arabs of pure blood, who from that time forward were represented (much as they were before the days of Islam) almost entirely by the Bedouins and dwellers in the oases of Arabia and a few places in Africa. The great historic rôle of the pure Arab was played out. But this neo-Arabic nationality gave more or less of the same character to all Islamite countries. This holds good in great measure of Iran and the countries that bordered on it to the northeast, south and southeast, in so far as they fell under the influence of the Arab religion.[23] Nevertheless the eastern provinces of the caliphate no more adopted the Arab tongue (which gained the mastery in the principal countries of the western half and even in a great part of the Maghreb) than the eastern half of the Roman Empire had adopted the Latin tongue at the time that the west was almost completely Romanised. The Arab tongue exercised a profound influence none the less upon the Persians and all such nations as drew their culture from Persia. It was not for nothing that even in the last-named country Arabic was long the language of government, religion, erudition, and poetry, and so remained to some extent even after the native language had reasserted itself. Persian (and Hindustani, Kurdish, etc., likewise) had borrowed largely from Arabic, especially in the department of abstract terms—a thing we should not have expected in view of the antiquity of Persian civilisation and the newness of that of Arabia. The influence of Arabic is apparent even in the remotest branches of modern Persian literature, just as all Teutonic languages bear traces of the profound influence of Latin, which formerly occupied a position in Europe analogous in many respects to that of Arabic in Islamite countries.

INFLUENCE OF PERSIA ON THE MOSLEMS