PERSIAN LITERATURE

body of writings in Modern Persian (Farsi), the form of the Persian language written with the Arabic alphabet and with many Arabic loanwords. Modern Persian emerged by the 9th century and became established as the literary form of the Persian language in Iran and northern India. After the Arab conquest of Iran in the 7th century, Islam replaced Zoroastrianism as the dominant religion and also eclipsed the minority religions of Buddhism, Nestorian Christianity, and Manichaeism. Arabic thus became the language of law and culture. In the 9th century, however, the Persian political revival was accompanied by the emergence of a Persian literary medium, expecially in northeast Iran, where the dialect known as Modern, or New, Persian began to be used for literary expression and so became established as the literary form of the Persian language in Iran and in northern India. Mid-20th-century research, by study of an indigenous spoken dialect preserved among the Iranian people and of the learned language of Arabic (with its greater vocabulary), has revealed examples of the early form of this language. The first writings in Modern Persian were in verse, the medium of praise and pleasure, and Arabic elements were few. As prose translations from Arabic began to be made, rhetorical refinements based on Arab literary conventions and more Arabic words and literary devices were introduced. The earliest major genres of Persian poetry were the panegyric and elegy, both written in the form of the qasida (a formal ode), and their first great exponent was Rudaki, who flourished under the Samanid ruler Nasr II (913-943). Another form soon to develop was the shorter lyric, or ghazel (ghazal), used for bacchic odes and later for love poetry. Both the qasida and the ghazel were monorhymed. The introduction of the rhyming couplet, masnavi, effected a release from the limitations of monorhyme and led to the composition of epic and long didactic poems. Like the ruba'i (roba'i), or quatrain, the masnavi was a purely Persian development; and the ruba'i, unlike most other poetic forms, was unknown in Arabic. The foundations of Persian prose, as of poetry, were laid in the time of the Samanid dynasty. In 963 Bal'ami, the vizier of al-Mansur I, published an abridged translation of the famous annals of at-Tabari. About the same time, a band of theologians from Transoxania made a Persian version of at-Tabari's other great work, his commentary on the Qur'an, thus demonstrating that Persian also was suitable for sacred texts. Al-Mansur I also commissioned the first Persian book on medicine, the pharmacopoeia of Abu Mansur Muvaffaq of Herat. The application of Persian to philosophy and science, which involved the coining of an extensive and subtle technical vocabulary, ranks among the outstanding achievements of Avicenna, whose formative years were passed at the Samanid court.