From the Balkans to Bengal: How Persian culture has left an imprint around the globe
In March 1986 Sayyid Ali Khamenei, who would three years later become Iran’s supreme leader, gave a speech at a major conference in Tehran on the Indian poet-philosopher Muhammad Iqbal.
Iqbal lived in British India and engaged in the politics of that land. He died in 1938 and never visited Iran.
But Khamenei told his audience that Iqbal was a “luminous spark that washed out the darkness of the days of suffocation and repression from our hearts (through his impressions, poetry, counsel and teachings) and projected a bright picture of the future before our eyes”.
Describing himself as someone “who for years had been a follower of Iqbal and has lived emotionally in his company”, Khamenei insisted the poet "belongs to this nation".
“Iqbal, whose heart ached to see the Muslim people having lost their human and Islamic personality,” he said, should he have lived to visit Iran after the Islamic Revolution, “could have seen a nation standing on its feet, infused with the rich Islamic spirit.”
The supreme leader, killed earlier this month in the US-Israeli attack on Iran, was able to engage so deeply with Iqbal’s work because much of his oeuvre was in Persian.
This was the case even though Iqbal is remembered in South Asia almost entirely for his Urdu poetry.
Since the start of the current Iran war, in India and Pakistan there has been a renewed interest in Iran’s deep cultural ties with the subcontinent.
Enormous protests have erupted across Pakistan against the US-Israeli war, and not just by Shia Muslims who revered Khamenei as their religious leader.
The Pakistani government was swift to criticise the killing of Khamenei, while India – a longtime ally of Iran – has failed to do so.
Perhaps in response to this, and to the Indian government’s strong ties with Israel, in the past week a flurry of articles have emerged in the Indian national media highlighting the country’s deep shared heritage with Iran.
A shared history
This shared heritage has been largely forgotten in the subcontinent. Most people can’t speak Persian and schools tend not to teach the language, a legacy of reforms during British rule that promoted English as the subcontinent's lingua franca.
In Pakistan in the 1980s, the government of General Zia-ul-Haq embarked on a drive to replace Persian vocabulary in Urdu, a language formed from a fusion of Persian and Hindustani, with some Arabic words – hence "Allah Hafiz" as the term for goodbye becoming more common than the Persian "Khuda Hafiz".
More recently in India, the Hindu nationalist government of Narendra Modi has sought to de-emphasise and in many cases erase the Muslim aspects of India’s heritage.
Many cities have had their Persian and Arabic names changed to Sanskrit ones: Mustafabad became Saraswati Nagar in 2016, Allahabad became Prayagraj in 2018, and Hoshangabad has become Narmadapuram.
But there’s a more profound way of looking at the shared past of these two regions.
Largely absent from the popular consciousness in both places is the memory that Iran and the subcontinent were in fact part of a larger region in which the Persian language played a crucial role.
This was what the late historian Shahab Ahmed called the “Balkans-to-Bengal complex” – a vast expanse stretching from the Balkans in Europe through what is now Turkey, Iran and Central Asia, to Afghanistan and much of the Indian subcontinent.
In the early modern period, this expanse encompassed the Ottoman empire, Mughal India, Timurid Central Asia, as well as Safavid and Qajar Persia. It was home to the demographic majority of the world’s Muslims.
And as Ahmed wrote in his seminal 2015 book What is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic, “from the sixteenth century to the twentieth, what we might call the 'Old World' of Islam – that is, the historically significant societies of Arabic-speaking Muslims of Egypt, Syria, Palestine, Iraq, and the Hijaz – were under Ottoman rule and thus directly under the paradigmatic influence of the norms of the Balkans-to-Bengal complex”.
Within the swathes of the Islamic world dominated by the Persian language, the historian Robert Canfield writes, “there was a remarkable similarity in culture, particularly among elite classes.
"The wealthy and powerful of the empires affected similar manners and customs, wore similar styles of dress, and enjoyed much the same literature and graphic arts.
“In building their palaces, mosques, and mausoleums, rulers competed for the services of the same great artisans, artists and scholars, whose eminence enhanced their reputations.”
And as Ahmed argues, “the norms of this Balkans-to-Bengal elite were not… isolated in high society but, rather, were part of an active economy of circulation of norms that moved through society-at-large by way of active projects of circulation” – particularly poetry and music.
Persian as an Islamic language
By the 14th century, Persian was the most widely used language of governance in South Asia, as Turkic rulers adopted Persian court customs.
The Mughal empire, which began in the 16th century and was in its heyday the world’s richest state, oversaw the peak of a complex fusion of Persian and Indian cultures.
The most obvious physical manifestation of that is the Taj Mahal in Agra, built by the Emperor Shah Jahan in a blend of Persian and local styles.
But that fusion also includes Mughal food dishes like biryani, haleem and nihari, and artwork, in particular the flourishing of miniature paintings under the Emperor Akbar.
Historian Richard M Eaton argues that India’s inclusion in a wider “Persianate world” was facilitated by a cosmopolitan ruling ideology adopted by Muslim, Hindu and other rulers, which “embraced the principle of universal justice and accommodated cultural diversity”.
Akbar sponsored Persian translations of the Hindu epics Mahabharata and Ramayana, which influenced Mughal culture, while Persian-Sanskrit dictionaries saw Persianate philosophy make its way into Hindu thought.
The 17th-century Book of the Gentleman studied by Mughal elites in India firmly asserted that an educated gentleman was one who knew Arabic, Persian, Turkish and Hindi (which would later be known as Urdu).
By this point India, not Iran, was “arguably the world’s main centre for the patronage of Persian literature and scholarship”, according to academic and author Arthur Dudney.
By the 19th century, more Persian dictionaries had been written in India than in Iran itself.
The poetry of Hafiz
Central to “the constitution of a paradigm of identity for Muslims in the world of the Balkans-to-Bengal complex” in the early modern age, Ahmed argues, were the writings of the medieval poet Hafiz, who lived in Shiraz in Iran.
According to the author Leonard Lewisohn, Persianate societies in the Islamic world were “Hafizocentric”. As he writes, “Up to the 1950s, Muslim children in Iran and Afghanistan and India were taught first to memorize the Qur’an, and secondly to commit the poetry of Ḥafiẓ to heart… From Istanbul to Lahore, from the Persian Gulf to thithermost Transoxania, for some five centuries the 'Book' of Islam – the Qur’an – has in this fashion shared pride of place beside Ḥafiẓ’s Divan.”
The popularity of poetry, Ahmed writes, shaped the “larger modes of thinking and the communicative idiom of the Muslims of this space and age”.
Among the defining features of most Persian poetry, like the poetry of Hafiz, were the use of metaphor, ambiguity and double meanings – and the positive valorisation of mystical and sometimes heterodox approaches to Islam.
One of Hafiz’s couplets reads:
Hafiz; drink wine, live in non-conforming-libertinage, be happy, but do not
Like others, make the Qur’an a snare of deception.
And from another of his poems:
If the cruelty and infidelity of the beloved are not taken into the reckoning:
What means the Grace and Mercy of God? What is there?
The ascetic desired drink from the Fountain of Paradise, and Hafiz from the wine-cup;
God’s Will ’twixt the two? We shall see what is there.
The decline of Persian
Persian poetry’s most enduring influence in South Asia has been through the Sufi music genre of qawwali, which remains highly popular today.
Qawwali’s great pioneer was the medieval Turkic-Indian poet Amir Khusraw, who declared in one Persian couplet that music, when refined, could be virtuous and meaningful:
The musician is a Form of Meaning –
if he is not marred by the black mole of vulgarity;
When you remove that dot from his face,
the musician becomes True Meaning.
In modern Pakistan, Khusraw’s Persian poetry is regularly sung at the shrines of saints, in private gatherings and increasingly at wedding parties – although few people understand Persian.
Under British rule in the subcontinent, the use of Persian for official purposes was banned and the language’s prestige and dominance accordingly declined.
Yet it was still used by some of India’s greatest poets well into the 20th century, so that Iqbal – beloved by Khamenei – composed over half of his poetry in Persian.
Ahmed writes that across South Asia, Persian was “finally put paid to by the nationalist state educational policies of Pakistani, Indian, and Bangladeshi governments (in South Asia, Persian is today routinely taught only in madrasahs – and even then, in a relatively restricted literary scope).”
Meanwhile, in Turkey, after the fall of the Ottoman empire, Persian was not taught in schools under Mustafa Kemal Ataturk’s modernisation agenda.
The upshot, Ahmed argues, is the “loss of Persian as a trans-continental language of the vast complex of discourse and meaning-making of educated Muslims from the Balkans to Bengal”.
Today, it’s not just a rich cultural world that’s been lost, but to a significant extent its very memory.
This article was sourced from Middle East Eye.
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