[Mb-civic] FW: Iranica Institute: Outreach Program:PERSIA IN THE HISTORY OF CIVILIZATION

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From: Samii Shahla <shahla at thesamiis.com>
Date: Sat, 28 Jan 2006 17:52:13 -0500
Subject: Fwd: Iranica  Institute: Outreach Program:PERSIA IN THE HISTORY OF
CIVILIZATION



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> Iranica  Institute: Outreach Program
> (Back by popular demand for these series of articles.)
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> PERSIA IN THE HISTORY OF CIVILIZATION
>  By WILL DURANT 
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>  
> [Originally presented as an address before the Iran America Society in Tehran
> on April 21, 1948.]
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>  
>  
> 
> To have known Arthur Upham Pope is one of the ennobling experiences of my
> life; I have not found in any other man so profound a devotion to beauty and
> truth; he was a very saint among scholars; he, more than all others, revealed
> Persia [Iran] to me and one of my dearest ambitions is to bring to a larger
> audience the amazing revelation that he has given the learned world of
> Persia's inexhaustible art.
>     Asked to comment briefly on Persia in the History of Civilization, I have
> very reluctantly consented, for it is incredible that I should be able to
> reveal to so learned an audience any new aspect of Iran's fascinating culture
> and career. Listening to the patient and erudite exposition given by Mehdi
> Bahrami while he guided us through the collections in Iran's beautiful
> Archaeological Museum, I felt more deeply than before the antiquity of this
> culture, and its success in stamping its own exquisite quality upon every
> alien force that has entered this land.
>     For thousands of years Persians have been creating beauty. Sixteen
> centuries before Christ there went from these regions or near it‹from Aryana
> Vaieho, or Old Iran‹the migration that poured new blood into northern India.
> From that new blood came the noble Sanskrit language, so nearly kin to your
> own melodious speech; from that fusion came the Vedas, the Upanishads, and
> Buddha. You have been here a kind of watershed of civilization, pouring your
> blood and thought and art and religion eastward and westward into the world.
> From the Avesta of your ancient faith came not only a hundred influences upon
> Judaism, Christianity, and Muhammadanism, but one of the highest moral
> philosophies of all time‹the conception of life as struggle between light and
> dark-ness, truth and falsehood, good and evil, and the command to men to
> enlist in the fight for light, and help Ahura Mazda win that great battle
> whose cosmic scope and vast duration gave to the individual life a meaning, a
> value, and a nobility that could not be crushed by death.
>     I need not rehearse for you again the achievements of your Achaemenid
> period. Then for the first time in known history an empire almost as extensive
> as the United States received an orderly government, a competence of
> administration, a web of swift communications, a security of movement by men
> and goods on majestic roads, equaled before our time only by the zenith of
> Imperial Rome. The decay of that Achaemenid Empire after Marathon and Salamis
> was a tragedy for civilization; and yet, when Alexander came, 150 years later,
> he was so impressed by the culture and courtesy of the Persians, the
> refinement and grace of then-lives, and not least by the beauty and modesty of
> their women, that he abandoned all notion of conquest, proposed a union of
> Greek and Persian blood and civilization, and set an example to his soldiers
> by marrying Persian wives. I should be happy if the narrow morals of my own
> rearing would permit me to follow his example.
>     In some ways the Seleucid dynasty realized Alexander's dream of uniting
> Greek and Persian cultures into one complex civilization. The entry of Rome
> and its armies into Asia disturbed that fusion; and throughout the Parthian
> period Persia had to spend its forces, as now, on the preservation of its
> national independence against external pressure or aggression. The Sasanian
> kings almost recaptured the glory of Achaemenid days; once again there were
> great rulers, orderly government, artistic creation; every material, from the
> most delicate textiles to the strongest iron or bronze, received the impress
> of skillful workmanship and subtle design; and now took form many of the
> decorative motives that were to influence Byzantine orna-ment, and came to
> fullest flower in Persian Islam.
>     The Arab Conquest disturbed the continuity of your cultural development.
> But hardly a century passed before the Abbasid revolution marked, or allowed,
> the victory of Persia over her conquerors; Persia did to the Arabs what Greece
> had done to Rome. The Shi'a faith rewrote the Muhammadan religion for the
> Persian people. Grammarians, lexicographers, historians, rose as if from the
> dead, and prepared the way for a literary renaissance. In the fourth century
> of your era ten large catalogues were required merely to list the books in the
> public library at Rayy; about 550 H. Merv had ten libraries, one of which
> contained 12,000 volumes. As early as the third century of the Muslim era you
> were producing great historians like al-Tabari; and 900 years ago a Persian
> scholar, Ibn Miskawayh, wrote what I am now trying to write in too brief a
> life‹a universal history from the point of view of philosophy.
>     About 197 H. Khwarazmi, a Persian of Khiva, introduced the Hindu numerals
> into Persia, whence they spread through Islam to the West to become our
> "Arabic" numerals. On the cars that I saw in Baghdad both sets of license
> numbers were Arabic, though few Iraqis or Europeans there realized it. The
> same Khwarazmi practically established the science of algebra, and gave it its
> name‹al-jabr, integration, completion. He formulated the oldest known tables
> of trigonometry. By general consent of even European historians like George
> Sarton or David Smith, Khwarazmi was the greatest of mediaeval mathematicians.
> A still greater scientist, a savant of astounding range, was also born near
> Khiva, about 362 H.‹Muhammad Biruni, the Leonardo and Leibnitz of Islam. He
> was a mathematician, an astronomer, a geographer, a linguist, an historian, a
> poet and a philosopher; and he did original work in all these fields. The
> princes of Khwarazm, Tabaristan, and Ghazni competed for the honor of
> sheltering him at their courts. You know the story of the traveler who told
> Mahmud that he had seen a land on which the sun never set for months at a
> time. Mahmud thought that the traveler was making fun of him, and ordered his
> execution; Biruni saved the traveler's life by explaining to Mahmud the
> midnight sun of the north polar regions in our summer, and of the south polar
> regions in our winter. Al-burins Tank al-Hind‹Inquiry into India‹is the
> greatest work of objective scholarship in all mediaeval literature. He took
> for granted the sphericity of the earth, measured with amazing accuracy the
> inclination of the ecliptic‹the angle between the equator and the orbit of the
> sun's apparent motion around the earth. He expounded gravitation, and remarked
> that all known astronomical phenomena could be explained by supposing that the
> earth revolves daily on its axis, and annually around the sun.
>     As Biruni was the greatest of mediaeval scientists, so Razi (born c, 220
> H.) was the greatest of mediaeval physicians. His picture hangs in the School
> of Medicine at the Uni-versity of Paris, along with that of Ibn Sina. Ibn
> Sina, whom Europe calls Avicenna, was, quite deserving it, more famous than
> Razi as a writer on medicine; but deserved his fame as the greatest of
> mediaeval philosophers. Born near Bukhara about 380 H., he lived at Khiva,
> Gurgan, Hamadan, and Isfahan. His Qanun of medicine, translated into Latin,
> displaced both Razi and Galen, and was used as a text in the universities of
> Montpellier and Louvain till our seventeenth century. The Astor Library in New
> York has a precious copy 300 years old; I was allowed to study it, but could
> hardly carry it from shelf to desk‹ a thousand double-columned pages as large
> as those of your great Qur'ans. Even vaster, running to eighteen volumes, was
> Ibn Sina's Kitab al-shifa‹a one-man encyclopaedia of science, philosophy and
> theology‹the greatest intellectual achievement in all mediaeval history. Here
> and in Aristotle were the sources of Averroes and Maimonides, and even of
> Christian scholastic philosophy. Roger Bacon considered Avicenna the greatest
> philosopher since Aristotle, and Thomas Aquinas quoted him repeatedly, with
> respect equal to that which he gives to Plato.
>     I know of no people in history‹except possibly the Japanese‹that has had
> so many poets as Persia. Harun al-Rashid's favorite poet was the scandalous
> Persian, Abu Nuwas. The ShahnNameh of Ferdowsi is one of the major works of
> the world's literature; and none of its rivals has ever been written, or
> illuminated, or bound, so beautifully as the magnificent Shahnamehs that are
> treasured in the museums and private collections of the world.
> I have spoken so far only of Persia before the Seljuq ascendancy. I say
> nothing of the graceful glory of Persepolis, its mighty architecture and
> massive reliefs; nothing of your rock-cut reliefs, from Darius I to Shapur II;
> nothing of the scant remains that Turkish, Mongol, and Tartar raids have left
> of your art in the Abbasid period; yet Muqaddasi and other travel-ers ranked
> the mosques of Nishapur and Turshiz with the Umayyad mosque of Damascus. To
> your Seljuq conquerors you did as you had done to the Arabs‹you transformed
> them from warriors into artists. "Seljuq architecture," says Arthur Upham
> Pope, "is one of the classic manifestations of the human spirit."
>     The Persian taste for graceful ornament united with the heroic mould of
> the Seljuq Turks to produce at Merv, and Hamadan, and Qazvin, and Isfahan an
> architectural flowering as remarkable as, and contemporary with, the Gothic
> efflorescence in France. In Persia and other lands of the Near and Middle East
> the elements of Gothic architecture in pillar and pointed arch, vault and
> dome, took definite form, and, in the Seljuq masterpieces, achieved perfection
> and unity. And in that Seljuq age ceramics became a major art; architecture
> became at times an appendage to pottery; and the tiles of Rayy and Kashan, the
> lustered decoration, faience, and glass of these and other Persian
> cities‹Tabriz, Sultanabad, Damghan, Nisha-pur‹brightened the face and walls of
> a hundred mosques and a thousand palaces. And on the walls, and under men's
> feet, were Persian rugs such as even Persia cannot make today. "All the
> paintings of the Italian Renaissance," said an American painter, John Singer
> Sargent, "are not worth one Persian rug."
>     Your most famous poet belongs to the Seljuq age. Omar Khayyam, of course,
> was above all a scientist, whose quatrains were the casual amusement of one
> whose greatest pleasures were mathematics and astronomy; do not take too
> seriously his paeans to wine. His proposed reformation of the Persian calendar
> was more accurate than Europe's present Gregorian calendar; this errs by a day
> in 3,330 years, Omar's by a day in 3,770 years. I mourn that I shall not see
> his tomb in Nishapur, nor the artistic wealth of Mashhad; nor shall I see the
> little town near Tiflis where Nizami sang of Layla and Majnun; nor the shop in
> Nishapur where Attar sold perfumes. But I trust that I shall see Shiraz, and
> thank it for Sa'di and Hafez.
>     The Mongols came upon all this glory and laid it waste; ruined the canals
> that watered your soil, and the libraries that nourished your souls; and you
> repaid them by turning them, too, into lovers and creators of art. Tabriz grew
> rich on the trade that flowed between the Mongol lands of the East and the
> cities on the Black Sea; probably along this route the Mongols brought from
> China the art of printing; Tabriz used the art to print paper money in A.D.
> 1294. I need not tell you of the great mosques that rose and fell at Tabriz;
> of the famous observatory at Maragha, near Tabriz, where Hulagu in 1259
> brought together the leading astronomers from the Chinese to the Islamic
> worlds, under the leadership of Nasir al-Din Tusi; of the brief magnificence
> of Uljaitu's Sultaniyeh, and the university city built just south of Tabriz by
> the great prime minister, Rashid al-Din, at the opening of the fourteenth
> century of the Christian era, "There is no greater service," wrote this
> vizier, rivaled in Islam only by Nizam al-Mulk, "than to encourage science and
> scholarship ... to make it possible for scholars to work in peace of mind
> without the harassments of poverty."
>     In your great Archaeological Museum I saw some of the few surviving works
> of Rashid al-Din as historian, and mourned that no book of this century would
> ever be written or illustrated so beautifully. One could almost forgive the
> ravages of the Mongols for the art of illumination that prospered under their
> patronage. In those centuries, patient and subtle fingers made the loveliest
> books that the world has ever known. These men knew printing, but would not
> use it for their books; and the best printed books of today are to an
> illuminated masterpiece of the Mongol age in Persia and Transoxiana what a
> Ford car is to the Parthen-on. "Imagination," said a Persian poet, "cannot
> grasp the joy that reason draws from a fine-drawn line." I do not know which,
> in these great manuscripts, is fairer‹the illumination or the text; only
> Chinese and Japanese can rival the Arabic script as works of calligraphic art.
> To my perhaps untutored taste the inscriptions that label the objects in your
> Archaeological Museum are among the loveliest things in these bright halls.
>     But I must not continue this reckless leaping from peak to peak of your
> cultural history. Forgive me for talking so long. But I have learned to love
> your poetry, your art, your man-ners, your spirit; I wish the years might be
> given me to study your achievements more fully, and to do them justice in my
> history. But I shall do what no Christian author has ever done ‹give to
> Islamic culture almost a third of all the space in my volume on mediaeval
> civilization. My Christian readers will marvel at the length of my survey of
> mediaeval Islam; and Muslim scholars will mourn its criminal brevity.
>     Seldom has any society seen, in an equal period, so many illustrious
> figures in government, education, literature, philology, geography, history,
> mathematics, astronomy, chemistry, medicine, theology, and philosophy as in
> the four centuries of Islam between Harun al-Rashid and Averroes. In a sense
> this brilliant flowering was a recovery of the Near East from Greek
> domination; it reached back not only to the Persia of Darius but to the Judea
> of Solomon, the Assyria of Assurbanipal, the Babylonia of Hammurabi, the Akkad
> of Sargon, the Sumeria of unknown kings. So the continuity of history
> reasserts itself; despite earthquakes, epidemics, eruptive migrations, and
> catastrophic wars, the essential processes of civilization are not lost; some
> younger culture takes them up, snatches them from the conflagration, and
> carries them through imitation to creation, until fresh youth and spirit can
> join the fray.
>     As men are members of one another, and citizens are parts of a united
> state, so civilizations are units in a larger whole that we may only call
> history; they are stages in the life of Man. Therefore the scholar, though he
> belongs to his country through affectionate prejudice, feels himself also a
> citizen of that boundless realm, the international of the Mind; he hardly
> deserves his name if he carries political or racial distinctions into his
> studies; and he accords his grateful homage to any people that has borne the
> torch and enriched his heritage. So I do to you.
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> (c) by Mazda Publishers.
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> Disclaimer
>  
>  
>  
> While every effort has been made to ensure the high quality and accuracy of
> this article, Iranica Institute makes no warranty, express or implied,
> concerning the contents of this article which are provided "as is." Iranica
> Institute expressly disclaims all warranties
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>  
> About the Iranica Institute:
>  
> Iranica Institute was established in 1995 by a former college professor, Mr.
> Ahmad Kamron Jabbari. It has since grown into an international network of
> scholars, educators, artists and everyone who is interested in the issues that
> concern a geographic area, historically know as the Iranicas [Eranshahr]. This
> area includes the following: Iran (Persia), Armenia, Eastern Turkey
> (Anatolia), Georgia, the Republic of Azerbaijan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, parts
> of India, Central Asian countries of Tajikistan,Uzbekistan, Kirghizistan,
> Turkmenistan, and Kazakstan, parts of ancient Mesopotamia, ethnic people such
> as the Jews, the Kurds and the Assyrians, and the countries around the Persian
> Gulf. To join this network, please write to:
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