Middle East
The selections in this chapter are from both Persian and Arabic sources. The center of the Persian Empire was located in what is modern-day Iran, and there was a long history of classical Persian literature before the Islamic invasion in the mid-seventeenth century C.E. After the violent overthrow of the Sassanid Empire by nomadic Arab tribes, the library in Ctesiphon (the capital city) was burned, as were libraries in other major cities. Although many pre-invasion Persian works were lost, some stories are recorded in later works. Abolqasem Ferdowsi, in his Shahnameh, writes the history of Persia from the creation of the world to the Islamic invasion; while Ferdowsi was Muslim, he writes in Persian, and his epic preserves the stories of Persia’s Zoroastrian heroes (Zoroastrianism was the state religion of Persia before the invasion).
Medieval Persian authors often wrote in both Persian and Arabic, and the most prestigious literary form was poetry. In many cases, prose writing was combined with poetry, with lines of poetry appearing at regular intervals in the prose. The emphasis was on works that were educational or enlightening, rather than simply entertaining, so works such as the Rose Garden of Sa’di combined wise sayings and stories with humor and wit, demonstrating Sa’di’s talents in both prose and poetry.
Sa’di often admires Sufi dervishes (similar to Christian mendicant friars in their poverty and austerity) in his works; an offshoot of Islam, Sufism combines Islamic, Christian, and Buddhist beliefs. The focus is on connecting with God; since humans are unable to understand God fully with their rational minds, Sufis attempt an emotional connection. Sa’di admired their willingness to confront rulers fearlessly about their (less-than) moral behavior, since death would only reunite them with God. Jalal al-Din Rumi, one of the finest poets in Persian literature, was also a founder of a Sufi order of dervishes (sometimes called “whirling dervishes” because of the spinning that they do to achieve a trance-like state of meditation). Although seemingly conventional on the surface, his love poetry ultimately is about longing for a spiritual union with God.
The Qur’an is the most important work in Arabic. Believed by Muslims to be the word of God as dictated to Mohammed through the angel Jibreel (Gabriel), its influence on Arabic literature and culture is immeasurable. Only the Qur’an in Arabic is considered to be the true Qur’an; any translation alters the actual words of the text, so followers are expected to read the text in the original language. Therefore, the text presented in this anthology is not the true document, but an approximation in English.
The other major work in Arabic in this chapter is secular: The Thousand and One Nights (also known as The Arabian Nights). Technically, this sort of storytelling would not have been considered “high” literature at the time, since it was not poetry, religious, or a collection of wise sayings. Its impact on literature, however, has been considerable, both in the Middle East and Europe. The stories are drawn from Arabic, Persian, and Indian folktales (among others). Thanks to early translations, many of the individual stories are well known around the world.
- What kind of relationship do the heroes have to their societies, their leaders (rulers), their families, and their religion?
- How is the frame tale found in The Thousand and One Nights similar to the frame tales in Chaucer and Boccaccio?
- What is similar and different about the poetry of Rumi and Dante?
- How is the Shahname similar to and different from the epics from the Ancient World (such as The Iliad, The Mahabharata, and The Aeneid)?
- How has the role of religion changed in the stories, now that there are no pantheons of gods?
Written by Laura J. Getty
