The Cultural Affirmation of Jews and Christians in Iran
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The Fire, the Star and the Cross The Fire, the Star and the Cross Minority Religions in Medieval and Early Modern Iran Aptin Khanbaghi Published in 2006 by I. B. Tauris & Co Ltd 6 Salem Road 175 Fifth Avenue London W2 4BU New York NY 10010 www.ibtauris.com In the United States of America and Canada distributed by Palgrave Macmillan a division of St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010 Copyright © 2006 Aptin Khanbaghi The right of Aptin Khanbaghi to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. International Library of Iranian Studies 5 ISBN 1 84511 056 0 EAN 978 1 84511 056 7 A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library A full CIP record for this book is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress Catalogue Card Number: available Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall from camera-ready copy edited and supplied by the author To all the wandering minorities of the world. To their adventures and fortitude. Contents Foreword. .x Acknowledgements .................................... xiii A Note on the Transliterations and the Names ............. xv Map. xvi Introduction ............................................. 1 Chapter 1: Religious Minorities under the Sassanians: The Cultural Affirmation of Jews and Christians in Iran .... 6 1) The Oldest Living Diaspora: The Jews of Sassanian Iran . 7 2) From Traitors to Loyal Subjects: Iranian Christians under the Sassanians ..............................10 Conclusion .......................................14 Chapter 2: Iran under Foreign Creed: The Domination of Islam over Zoroastrians, Jews and Christians .............. 15 1) Non-Muslims in Early Islamic Iran: Golden Age or Decline? ................................... 17 2) The Eclipse of Zoroastrianism in Iran: The Iranian uprisings of the 8th and 9th centuries ............. 20 3) The Emergence of Muslim Iranian Dynasties .........27 4) The Cultural Activities of Zoroastrians in Islamic Iran .. 29 5) Active and Influential Minorities: The Jews and Christians in Islamic Iran ..............................33 vii 6) The Cultural Contribution of Non-Muslims to Islamic Civilization .................................45 a) The Jews and their Cultural Contribution to their Islamic Environment ...............................45 b) The Christians and their Share of Cultural Contribution 47 Conclusion .......................................50 Chapter 3: New Hope and Bitter Deception: Iranian non- Muslims under the Mongols (1256-1336) ............. 52 1) The Challengers of Islam .......................... 53 2) New Hopes among Christians: The Beginnings of the Mongol Rule ............. 59 3) Non-Muslims in the Service of the Mongols ..........62 4) The Dusk of Non-Muslim Rule: The Recovery of Islam in Iran .......................................69 5) Christians and Diplomacy ......................... 74 6) The Cultural Renaissance of Non-Muslims under the Mongols ................................... 79 Conclusion .......................................86 Chapter 4: The Post-Mongol and Pre-Safavid Period: A Brief View of Iran under the Timurids and the Aq Qoyunlu . 88 Contacts with Europe and India ......................91 Chapter 5: The Safavid Period ............................93 Section 1: Between Economic Success and Social Challenge: Non-Muslims under the Safavids ...................93 1) The Advent of the Safavids and the Non-Muslims ..... 95 2) The Social Struggle and Economic Activities of the Zoroastrians ................................97 3) The Social Struggle and Economic Activities of the Jews102 viii 4) The Armenians: An Exotic Community or a Native Minority Group? ........................... 111 a) The Earlier Presence of Armenians in Iran and the Deportations of Shah Abbas I ................ 111 b) The Armenians and their Monopoly of Iranian Trade . 114 c) The Role of the Armenians in Iranian Politics and Iranian Diplomacy ................................120 d) Christians versus Christians: The Conflict of Interest between Armenians and Europeans ...........122 e) Expensive Prerogatives: the Armenians’ Paradoxical Position .................................. 127 5) The Georgians and Circassians: The Assimilated Christians .........................................130 6) The Inconspicuous Christians .....................131 Section 2: Minority Cultures in Safavid Iran ............... 134 1) The Armenians and Iranian Culture: A Non-Integrated Minority .................................. 134 2) The Last Glimmers of the Iranian Jewry’s Culture ..... 136 3) An Exported Literature: Zoroastrian Writings under the Safavids .................................. 146 Conclusion ...................................... 155 Conclusion ............................................159 Notes on the Text ...................................... 164 Appendix ............................................. 208 Bibliog raphy. .223 Index. 248 ix Foreword There have been several places where the great religions of the medieval world have not merely co-existed but interacted. Perhaps the best known is al-Andalus, the areas of Spain under Muslim rule. In Umayyad Córdoba and in Zirid Granada, Jews, Christians and Muslims read each other’s scientific and philosophical texts, and indeed the Judaism of Sefarad (Spain) acquired an almost Islamised character, culminating in the work of the great philosopher Maimonides. Not just ideas crossed the religious divide. The Islamic conquest also brought the Arabic language to Iberia, where it left a powerful legacy in the vocabulary of Castilian and Portuguese. But there is a further fascinating and remarkable example of the interaction between Islam and the other Abrahamic religions, Judaism and Christianity, to which, in this particular case, we need to add a fourth and very influential religion, that of the Zoroastrians: this example is Iran. Even before the Islamic conquest, Iran was a land in which religious minorities were well entrenched; for the Zoroastrian Sassanid rulers had many Jewish and Christian subjects; and one of the tasks of this absorbing book is to see how far we can identify continuity in the treatment of the religious minorities from the Sassanid through to the early Islamic period. Yet, after the conquest, the Zoroastrians, like the Christians in Spain, found themselves not merely deprived of political power; they also experienced slow erosion of numbers as the old faith declined in town and country, while the ambiguous attitude of Islam towards this non-Abrahamic faith could, at times, make conditions difficult for its adherents. And yet the ancient Persian imprint on the cultural life of Iran was deep: deeper, certainly, than the imprint left by the Mozarab Christians of Spain in the same centuries. Iran’s new rulers learned much from the Middle Pahlavi texts which Zoroastrian scholars translated into Arabic. In particular, the survival and Renaissance of the Persian language is testimony to the distinctive sense of identity that persisted in medieval and early modern Iran; and yet, as Dr Khanbaghi shows, the revival of Persian owed a great deal to the new Mongol conquerors of Iran in the late Middle Ages.. x This book provided a marvellous overview of the relationship between the different faiths in Iran. As Aptin Khanbaghi very effectively argues, this set of relationships had many ups and downs. Thus we can observe the decline of Nestorian Christianity in Iran and the even steeper decline of Zoroastrianism, which now has its main centres in the Parsee communities of India (whose collections Dr Khanbaghi has very profitably utilised). As in other parts of the Muslim world, the status of the dhimmi, the protected non-Muslim, could be interpreted in a variety of ways, so that some rulers imposed the full rigour of the law, while others adopted a more lenient and pragmatic approach, in line with the practice of many other Muslim rulers in the Mediterranean world or in India. Some dynasties, such as the Safavids, understood the economic value of the non-Muslim population, and encouraged newcomers to arrive, just as their Ottoman rivals in the Mediterranean brought tens of thousands of Jews and Christians to Istanbul and lesser cities. There were periods, such as the dark days of the conquests of Timur Leng (Tamerlane), when conditions were more difficult. But there were also fruitful periods of exchange; communities such as the Armenians had links to the world beyond Iran. Yet some of the minorities, as Dr Khanbaghi aptly indicates, were far from being in any sense alien: the Jews had been in Persia since the days of Cyrus the Great, and the Zoroastrians, like the Copts in Egypt, could claim to be the heirs to even older cultural and political traditions in Iran. This is an important reminder that easily imposed categories of ‘native’ and ‘foreigner’ are often based on a deep misunderstanding of history. Pope Benedict XVI reminded his audience of a similar point in Cologne in August 2005, when he emphasized that the Jews had been in the city since the days of the Roman Empire. Thus Dr Khanbaghi’s book