The Religion of the Iranian Peoples, Part I

UC-NRLF m B 3 T3fl bb3 TfTO" RELIGION C. P TIELB {From the Qerman) VvlTl! Da\RMESTETER S SKETCH OF " PhK:5!A AND GOLDZIHER'S " INFLUENCE Of PARSISM ON ISLAM ' (From the French, >^ " ], \;<r . •THE PAKSI" Pl'BLI; BOMBAY. ^ GIFT OF JANE KoSATHER THE REItlGIOfI OF THE iHflfllfln PEOPLES BY C. p. TIELE Part I, {From the German) WITH DARMESTETER'S SKETCH OF " PERSIA '' AND GOLDZIHER'S "INFLUENCE OF PARSISM ON ISLAM (From the French) Translated by Q. K. NARIMAN **THE PARSI" PUBLISHING Co., BOMBAY. 19! Printed by B. Miller, Superintendent, British India Press, Bombay, for the Author. TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE. " I have studied your religion for now forty years and my interest in it has not diminished," So Dr. Tiele wrote to me in 1902 when I had asked his permission to translate into English his history of the Religion of the Iranian Peoples from its German version, the original Dutch being beyond me. There is hardly a line in his writings which the learned author has given us but is supported by the Avesta. It was my intention, therefore, to give a full translation of all the passages relied on by Dr. Tiele and of cource I could not have derived better help from any English source than the Sacred Books 0/ the East, I therefore intimated my project to Professor Tiele, who cour- teously replied : r *' When you draw on the Sacred Books of the East which means the ^,x»# > translation of Darmesteter, when you think to give the quoted passages in full, you will allow my remodelling some, perhaps most of them, as I think D's translation is not to be trusted, though there is not a scholar in the world who knew the Avesta so thoroughly as he did. It was his system that spoilt his translation.'* ^ Professor James Darmesteter to whom our community is indebted for more than a complete rendering of our scriptures in a European language^ erred in holding that the whole of our Avesta writings are not older than the Sasanian period in the form in which they have been transmitted to us and that they betray foreign influences, Brahmanical, Buddhist, Greek and Jewish. This hypothesis has been challenged and refuted by a number of brilliant savants, by none more exhaustively than Tiele, (Revue de VHistoire des Religions, 1894); by West, (Journal of the - Royal Asiatic Society ^ 1893); by Geldner, ( Grundriss der iranischen Philologie) ; twice by Max Miiller (Contemporary ^ Besides the monumental Guimet Zend Avesta in French we owe him two Vols. (IV and XXIII) in the S. B. E. A 2 Geldner 's unsurpassed survey of Avesta Literature has been done into English by Dr. Mackichan of Bombay in %hc Dastur Peshohan Memorial Volume. 11 translator's preface Review, 1893 and Jewish Quarterly Review, 1895), and by the scholarly representative of our community, Shams-ul-Ulma J. J. Modi, whose paper read before the Bombay Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society in 1896 was reproduced in a French rendering by the appreciative conductors of the Revue de VHistoire des Religions. Soon after the receipt of the letter from Professor Tiele. to my great sorrow, I heard of his death.^ The great value of the work of Tiele is centered in sound brevity. Just as he has written no sentence for which there is not ample warrant, so also there is not a superfluous paragraph. But while extreme terseness has been attempted by many of his confreres, in literary merit our author far surpasses the latter whose scientific compilations are so many catalogues of dry data and bald inferences.^ Dr. Tiele was anxious to see his book read by the Parsis and the main portion of the book is in the first instance intended for our community. And it is pro- duced before them with some confidence. It is easy to indulge in cheap sarcasm at the expence of the much-motoring, much-beclubbing, theatre-going, racing, sport- ing section of the latter-day Parsis to whom a book on philo- logical and rehgious antiquities is bound to prove a violent soporific. It is truer to point to the growing number of men whose scholarship has entitled them to rank among Western researchers.^ Indeed the sounder view would appear to prevail that our scholarship has outgrown our material prosperity. And this brings me to the raison d* etre of this translation. * Justi spoke of Tiele's " profound knowledge of the Zarathushtrian religion,*' Grundriss der iran. Philologies iii, 437. In his Zoroaster our Prof. Jackson refers to this " excellent volume" of Tide's, p. XV. ' E. g. Hermann Ethe's otherwise most exhaustive study of Modern Persian Literature in the same Grundriss. 2 The work of the Gatha Society of Bombay, for instance, is inspired by a single-hearted devotion to Zoroastrian learning and the Society,, as a body, has reached a depth of critical study achieved by scarcely half a dozen scholars of Bombay fifteen years ago.. translator's preface iii There has been a great demand for what passes for ''original- ity '' and a corresponding disparagement of translations from languages generally unknown to the Par sis. Nothing would have been easier than to have put together an '* original " work with the help of the wealth of material at the translator's dis- posal. Nevertheless he believes it to be more honest, and hopes it to prove of greater utility, to render accessible to the generality of his people a standard production of genuine original investigation in a foreign tongue than to piece together a farrago of questionable authority in English or Gujarati. This is the first part of Tiele's work. The second part is ready for the press. I have taken the liberty to reserve for the second part most of the author's learned footnotes which together with a brief life of the author, a complete index and bibliography, may be expected to appear shortly. Each chapter is complete in itself and may be read independently of the rest of the book. As a community, the Parsis have never ceased entirely to be interested in Iran. The English^ rendering of the small sketch of Persia, by James Darmesteter is a contribution to that revived regard for the old unhappy country from which the ancestors of some at least among us have immigrated into India. The sketch is a chip from a master's workshop. Twenty-five years ago, Darmesteter had a prevision of what it is apprehended, at least in Persia, is about to come to pass.* While Tiele's book may interest the Parsis and the Hindus to whose common ancestors the author devotes more than one chapter, Professor Goldziher's almost pioneer essay will, it is hoped, appeal to the progressive Musalmans as well, at least to that portion of the virile community with which we are bound by ethnic ties.^ I was struck with the amount of Iranian 1 It appeared first in the Indian Spectator. 5 Besides the bulk of the modern Persians being still Aryan, it is an. article of faith in Persia that Husain the son of Fatima, the daughter of the j Prophet, was married to Shahrbanu the daughter of the last Sasanian \ monarch Yezdegerd ill. * Now see Dr. Albrecht Werth's reflections translated by me in the Parsi, May 14, 1911 from his Weltgeschjchte der Gegenwart, p. 294, ff. — iv translator's perface contribution to Arabic culture long before the sympathetic works of Browne, and Nicholson, and Huart made it common knowledge.^ Adequate treatment, however, of the Pahlavi sources of Arab writers ; of the Shuubiya sect who openly asserted the superiority of all that was connected with ancient Iran, including some times even the religion, as against the newly established institutions of Islam ; of the large amount of incidental information embalmed in pre-Moslem poetry especially the Aghani, depicting the daily life of the Sasanian Persian, this would require a volume by itself.^ ^ « Justi's Iranisches Nanienbuch is a storehouse of interesting information on the subject (e.g,. The Moslem formula of Bismillah introduc- tory to any subject has occupied the place of the Iranian Khshnaothra Ahurahe Mazda, p. vi). 7 There is no doubt that Persia before Islam was rent by internal dissentions and ripe for a fall, still it is scarcely credible as some writers have sought to prove (e.^., Arnold in bis Preaching of Islam, chap, vi.), that force and persecution contributed nothing to the wholesale conversion of Persia to Islam ; though there is strong evidence that the most remorseless enemies of Zoroastrian Persians were not so much the pure Arabs as the Iranians who had embraced the new faith or their hybrid progeny. > Under the Umayyads a special officer was appointed, whose duty it was to annihilate fire-temples throughout Persia (Von Kremer, Culturgeschite ii., 64). \ Van Vloten has ably established that the Arab chroniclers were indifferent to the miseries of the native population of whose sufferings they give us most meagre accounts and that under the Umayyads it was not a question of a religious propaganda at all but only of more or less systematic pillage {La dominion Arabe, ete., p. 1210 For an instance of the revolt and death of a declared Zoroastrian, Sumbadh, so early as A. D. 755, see A. Muller's Islam im Morgen und Abendland i., 49^. Goldziher's masterly Muhammad Stttdien, which has been so copiously drawn upon by all succeeding writers—he did not know that a whole chapter of his on Hadith and New Testament was translated into English till I sent^him a copy of the book—abounds in references to Perso-Arab relations.

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