Tajikam Portal

Persian influence on Arabic

In the early days of the Prophet’s mission, there were only seventeen men in the tribe of Quraysh, who could read or write. (Professor Edward Browne, A Literary History of Persia, Vol. I, p. 261)

It is said that Mo’allaqat, the seven Arabic poems written in pre-Mohammedan times and inscribed in gold on rolls of coptic cloth and hung up on the curtains covering the Ka’aba were selected by the Iranian Hammad who seeing how little the Arabs cared for poetry urged them to study the poems.

In this period, Hammad knew more than any one else about the Arabic poetry. Before the advent of Islam, the Arabs had a negligible literature and scant poetry. It was the Iranians who after their conversion to Islam, feeling the need to learn the language of the Qur’an, began to use that language for other purposes.

The knowledge of Arabic was essential and indispensable for religious worship, and the correct reading of the Qur’an was impossible without it. In the first century of Islamic ascendancy, the Arabs did not produce anything of literary value. If any poetry was composed, it was on the old pagan models and celebrated the poets’ amatory adventures, in stereotyped fashion, rather than the victories of Islam.

They adopted the pattern of the Sassanians for the administration of their state. They took the postal system of the Sassanids, and with these adoptions went many Farsi (Persian) terms into the day-to-day vernacular of the Arabs and they were arabicized. In time, they were unrecognizable. Farsi (Persian) words abounded everywhere. Inside the houses as outside they had to make use of "Persian means of comfort" and with them went the Persian terms for them. (The Legacy of Persia)

"The Event of Our Era" Former Soviet Muslim Republics Change the Middle East

by Daniel Pipes
Central Asia and the World: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan 1994

INTRODUCTION
The emergence of six mostly Muslim republics from the former Soviet Union has prompted much concern about their falling under Middle Eastern influence. But Middle Eastern states have attained little power over those republics; ironically, the impact goes the other way. The independence of republics in the Transcaucasus (Azerbaijan) and Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan), has profound implications for the Middle East, and especially for their four immediate neighbors-Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Turkey's former prime minister Süleyman Demirel exaggerated only slightly when he called the independence of these states (called henceforth the ex-Soviet Muslim republics or the Southern Tier) "the event of our era." Indeed, the Southern Tier's resumption of history may well have enormous consequences for the Middle East.

Middle Eastern Impact on the Southern Tier

Reporting from Central Asia and Azerbaijan since late 1991 has concentrated on the competition for influence over them among Middle Eastern states. The rivals include primarily Turkey and Iran, as well as Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Ankara sees success at wooing the Southern Tier as a means of advancing Turkish secularism as a model, while Iran's success would win support for that country's anti-Western Islamic model.